Unable to specify or represent an organisation part/department since ePO 4.0-rc.2

[andreea-pasare]

Discussed in #558

^{Originally posted by schivmeister February 12, 2024}

Issue

The property epo:hasOrganisationUnit that was present in ePO 3.1.0 for mapping an organisation part name changed in 4.0-rc.1 to epo:hasOrganisationUnitName, and then in 4.0-rc.2, it was apparently removed, as evidenced by the changelogs:

- :hasOrganisationUnitName a owl:DatatypeProperty ;
-    rdfs:isDefinedBy :core ;
-    skos:definition """The name of a subpart of an organisation.
- Additional Information:
- E.g. the relevant department of a large organisation.
- We added this attribute in case of eProcurement notices where the Buyer is actually a part of an Organization and the rest of the properties apply to the rest of the Organisation as well. (org:Organization) """@en ;
-     skos:prefLabel "Has organisation unit name"@en .

However, the reason for this removal is not made clear in the commits or the logs.

This is required to map for e.g. the field BT-16-Organization-TouchPoint or BT-16-Organization-Company in the eForms SDK, which can identify a department in an organisation contact point or company address, with one of the following typical XML structures:

Organisation Contact Point Address

<Organization>
  <TouchPoint>
    <PostalAddress>
      <Department>

Company Address

<Company>
  <PostalAddress>
    <Department>

Since 4.0.0 ePO has introduced the notion of a sub-organisation with the org:subOrganizationOf relationship (object property).

If this was meant as a replacement, then it is not a very appropriate one to represent the semantics, i.e. that of only a line in the address specifying the department. We would not typically think of a department as a sub-organisation; it would not have the same basic characteristics of an organisation to qualify as a valid subsumption.