[Data-modeling] Community Associations

[Kirrily Robert]

On May 4, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Shawn Simister wrote:

> I've been thinking about modeling community associations and their
> relationships to neighborhoods and I was wondering which approach  
> would
> be best. As far as I know, a voluntary association is sort of like an
> organization except that it doesn't need to be incorporated or have  
> any
> sort of legal status. Its basically just a bunch of people getting
> together. Because of the semantic differences, I'm hesitant to use the
> Organization type to model associations.
>
> If I create a new set of types to model associations, should I mimic  
> the
> layout of the Organization domain with a generalized Association type
> and complementary Association Member and Association Scope types? Or
> should I just create a Community Association type with a list of  
> members
> and a neighborhood property?


I dunno.  We've modelled http://www.freebase.com/view/en/order_of_saint_benedict 
  and http://www.freebase.com/view/en/levellers as organizations, so  
why not neighbourhood associations?  There's nothing in the type docs  
that says it has to be a legal entity, and legal entities vary from  
country to country and time to time in any case.

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert
Freebase Community Director
kirrily at metaweb.com
http://freebase.com/