Dear all,
As a historian, I'm carefully following this discussion. As some of you
know we are working on an evolution of our symogy.org project's ontology
<http://symogih.org/?q=type-of-knowledge-unit-classes-tree> towards an
extension of the CRM for historical data <http://dataforhistory.org>.
And this question about ownership, and similar social phenomena, is a
very relevant one for us.
I'd like to add some considerations and questions to the ongoing
discussion but let me first provide two more or less complete examples.
A. Ownership of a painting
A1. A person P1 buys a painting in a gallery and receives an official
document proving the legal purchase
A2. Since then (or since the price was paid) the painting belongs to
person P1 (in the perspective of the owned object) and/or since then,
person P1 has the ownership of the painting (in the perspective of the
owner).
A3. The painting is delivered at the house of P1.
A4. Since then, the painting is in effective possession of P1
(perspective of the owner). Or the painting is located in P1's house
(perspective of the painting).
A5. The painting is stolen by person P2 and sold to person P3.
A6. The painting is in effective possession of person P3 but the legal
ownership by person P1.
A7. P3 brings the painting to restoration
A8. Police finds the painting and brings it back to person P1.
A9. Person P1 has again effective possession of the painting.
A10. The painting is again restored because P1 thinks the first
restoration was not a good one.
A11. Person P1 sells the painting to another collector P4, with all the
needed documents
A12. Person P1 has no ownership nor effective possession more of the
painting but the fact that P1 was former owner —his ownership— remains
in historical records and memories.
B. Ownership of a house (simplified)
B1. Person P1 inherits a house.
B2. Person P1 owns a house, this house is in his ownership.
B3. Person P1 moves to the house.
B4. Person P1 lives in it.
B5. There is a political revolution, personal property is abolished
B6. P1 looses therefore the ownership of the house but still lives in it.
B7. P1 is prosecuted as former owner of a house and must leave the house
B8. The house is attributed for living to person P2 but remains property
of the state.
B9. There's a new political revolution, personal property is restored
B10. Both P1 and P2 try to obtain ownership of the house
B11. A court gives the ownership back to P1.
B12. P2 must leave the house and P1 moves in again.
Here some points / issues present in the discussion, which I think one
should carefully consider.
a. Our aim is to model states of affairs but insofar as we use
propositions to describe them, these propositions have always slightly
different approaches of reality (see A2, A4, etc.), they express
slightly different points of view. The stress is on the phenomenal
aspect but the epistemological aspect can never be totally eluded.
This is particularly true for states of affairs belonging to social
life. And ownership is typically a phenomenon in social life, defined by
social rules and social agreement (cf. B5/B9-11). Absolute states of
affairs as they exist in experimental physics are not always given in
social life, especially in the domain of law. It is not just a matter of
disagreement on some aspects of the state of affair, it is a different
way of thinking states of affairs, or being interested in different
aspects of states of affairs (legal ownership versus effective
possession). Furthermore, in historical research some aspects of social
life are often not knowable because of the lack of historical sources,
e.g. B1, but one knows B2.
b. What is the aim of our modelling: providing interoperability among
different datasets (b1) or detailed reconstruction of states of affairs
in the domain of social, economic, cultural life (b2) ? What do we need
to provide a coherent, sufficiently explicit and reusable dataset in
this second case (b2) ?
In some cases (b1) the CRM core classes and properties are exclusively
to be used, but in some other cases (b2) we need extensions dedicated to
specific domains, making explicit some important states of affairs.
The state of affairs we are discussing about is ownership. The examples
show that ownership in social life and history involves many different
things: events that lead to ownership (A1/B1, B1 being possibly more
'passive'), different aspects of the actual ownership (legal ownership,
effective possession, location of the object), concepts of particular
ownership which remain even after the end of the actual ownership
(A12.), general conceptions about ownership which are valid only in
specific political/social contexts (B5/B9) and which are the social
foundation of particular rights (B2).
It seems difficult to me to use the CRM as such to produce clear and
generally understandable propositions about such kind of complex issues.
The 'concept' E30 Right has a very concise scope note:
"This class comprises legal privileges concerning material and
immaterial things or their derivatives. These include reproduction and
property rights.
Examples:
copyright held by ISO on ISO/CD 21127
ownership of the “Mona Lisa” by the Louvre "
It is useful for merging different datasets on a higher level of
abstraction but probably not for modelling complex social phenomena.
The classical solution proposed in the discussion using time-restricted
properties and starting/ending events seems to be very well-suited and
established for the sake of interoperability on a more abstract level
(b1) but not for modelling such detailed descriptions of specific state
of affairs in a way that makes these propositions about social states of
affairs sufficiently explicit and reusable (b2).
A1, A3, A5, etc., B1, B3, B5, etc. are events and can be modelled as
such. But what is in between (A2, A4, etc.): conceptual objects that
have a time-span on some properties? or 'place holders' for durations of
social phenomena that have no ontological consistency and therefore
exist only in information systems but not in the ontology ?
Again, in my opinion the answer to this question depends on the aim of
the project. If I get it right Robert is interested in shared ownerships
(with different values for the share) and events that happen during
ownership (A9.). Which seems to me to belong more to the aim b2:
modelling of more complex social-economic-legal phenomena. This would
mean that one should use an extension of the CRM. And I would like to
share this extension because we have identical issues in the domain of
historical research.
But at the same time the discussion about 'passive activities' could
express the need, probably present in different minds, to have some
modelling of 'static social phenomena' present in the core ontology
itself. The issue about ownership is clearly stated in the official
definition of the CRM, chapter 'Modelling principles', section about
Monotonicity :
"Properties, such as having a part, an *owner* or a location, may change
many times for a single item during its existence. Stating instances of
such properties for an item in terms of the CRM only means that these
properties existed during some particular time-span. Therefore, one item
may have multiple instances of the same property reflecting an
aggregation of these instances over the time-span of its existence. If
more temporal details are required, the CRM recommends explicitly
describing the events of acquiring or losing such property instances,
such as by E9 Move etc. By virtue of this principle, the CRM achieves
monotonicity with respect to an increase of knowledge about the*/states
of an item at different times/*, regardless of their temporal order."
It seems to me that the discussion is not so much (or not only) about a
'Right' as a conceptual object, therefore a persistent item, but about
ownership, or about effective possession, which are as such social
phenomena, therefore temporal entities, not just concepts. Their
identity comes from a relationship between the owner and the owned
object which is situated in time and space, and which is socially
relevant and can be observed, or even tested, experimented (I can try to
steal the Mona Lisa and see if it belongs to someone...),
not necessarily physically but socially.
In my opinion, this kind of phenomena could be expressed with some kind
of class similar to E3 Condition State (Scope Note: "This class
comprises the states of objects characterised by a certain condition
over a time-span") which is of course restricted at the moment to
"prevailing physical condition of any material object or feature" and
therefore hardly usable in this case. As Martin said at the recent
workshop in Plakias, "ownership" (like some other —ships) is a good
candidate for the notion of 'state'. And if we understand 'state' as a
certain condition of a persistent item over a time-span, it seems to me
that this cannot be a 'passive activity' nor an event (E5) because this
class is precisely defined as "change of states in cultural, social or
physical systems". Wouldn't it be quite confusing, and difficult to
explain, to apply the notion of 'change' to an ownership (be it
understood as legal or effective possession) which does not change
during many years?
Of course, at the moment this issue has to be treated in extensions,
outside the CRM as such, and we will certainly have such kinds of
'states' in the extension for historical data. But in my opinion the
current discussion shows that there's probably a more general need of
deeper study concerning this kind of social-legal-economic phenomena
which exists, and last in time, independently from the point of view of
the observer.
Best
Francesco
-----
Francesco Beretta
Chargé de recherche au CNRS,
Responsable du Pôle histoire numérique,
Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes
CNRS UMR 5190 LARHRA,
I.S.H.,
14, Avenue Berthelot
69363 LYON CEDEX 07
+ 33 (0)6 51 84 48 84
Le Pôle histoire numérique
<http://larhra.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/pole-histoire-numerique> du LARHRA
Le projet SyMoGIH <http://symogih.org/>
SPARQL endpoint <http://symogih.org/?q=rdf-publication>
Portail de ressources géo-historiques GEO-LARHRA
<http://geo-larhra.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/>
Portail de ressources textuelles
<http://xml-portal.symogih.org/index.html> au format XML
Cours Outils numériques
<http://phn-wiki.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/doku.php?id=td_histoire_numerique:accueil>pour
les historiens
<http://phn-wiki.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/doku.php?id=td_histoire_numerique:accueil>
Publications
<https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/search/index/?qa[auth_t][]=Francesco+Beretta&sort=producedDate_tdate+desc>
Le 21.08.17 à 21:16, Robert Sanderson a écrit :
Extracting the passive activity question from the Rights thread…
In order to relate activities that take place during the ownership of an object
by an organization, such as conservation or even just checking that it’s still
where it is thought to be (inventorying), it would be nice to have either a
passive activity to represent the ownership of the object that these activities
are part of.
The issue with the ontology at the moment is that these sorts of things fall
between E5 Event and E7 Activity – the ownership is of the object (and hence
the use of P16 used specific object, which has E7 as domain) but there are no
“actions intentionally carried out … that result in changes”.
For example, the ownership of an heirloom spoon by a family over 4 generations.
The family (as a group, with different members of time) carries out the
ownership, which uses the specific object of the E22 spoon. But if it is simply
sitting on a shelf, there is no intention towards change.
Or the ownership of a painting by an art dealer, where most of the time it
simply hangs on the wall, but every year there is an inventory activity as part
of that ownership which asserts it is still owned. If the sale of the painting
is not recorded, this inventory gives us a begin of the begin for the timespan
in which the sale occurred.
If this sort of inactive activity is okay, it would be nice to add a
clarification :)
Rob
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