Item talk:Q50862

For the GeoKB, we need some representation of USGS organizational units to link to from associated information. There are no fully comprehensive or absolutely correct representations of the USGS organizational structure online, but the USGS Web does provide how the organization is portrayed to the rest of the world. In keeping with the constraint of only processing and organizing publicly available information, the GeoKB organizes the Web-based representation of USGS organizational units with a little bit of liberty taken on classification in order for the structure to make the most sense within the knowledgebase context.

The following query starts at the classification of "USGS organization" (this item) and shows the subclasses built to provide instance of claims on specific organizational units.

PREFIX wd: <https://geokb.wikibase.cloud/entity/>
PREFIX wdt: <https://geokb.wikibase.cloud/prop/direct/>

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?itemDescription ?subclass_of ?subclass_ofLabel
WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P2* wd:Q50862 . # subclass of "USGS organization"
  ?item wdt:P2 ?subclass_of .
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" }
}

Try it!

The liberties taken here in classification attempt to provide some slightly deeper sense of what the different kinds of organizational units are, building a bit on the USGS Web attempt to show things like "laboratories" and "observatories" beyond the basic designation of "Science Center," which has more to do with budgetary organizational dynamics. We'll work with this over time in practice as we discover the best ways of linking everything together in the graph.

Temporality of Organizations

The organizational structure in USGS changes through time, from the organization of Programs (appropriated funding line items) to Regions and Science Centers. The Wikibase structure offers an opportunity to organize this changing structure with respect to time-based qualifiers that indicate when specific organizational dynamics are or were current. Things like the Mission Areas under which Programs are organized or the Regions in which Science Centers are defined change through time. Currently, we are employing "point in time" qualifiers to indicate the year that a claim is/was considered to be true. We are not attempting to "recreate history" with this approach but will use it as a point-forward way of keeping some track of organizational change.

Identifier Challenges

There is no comprehensive identifier for USGS organizational units. There are internal identifiers used in several circumstances, but these apply to business logic such as budget or IT management and are not very useful as persistent identifiers and are certainly not resolvable technically or publicly. Some USGS organizational units such as Science Centers who put out funding opportunities have DUNS numbers, which provide a certain type of identification for funding agents. Some of these also have CrossRef organizational identifiers (DOIs used to provide tracking from scientific publications back to funding sources). A handful of USGS organizations have a newer Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifier, which is perhaps the most promising external identifier system for the future.

At the current time, however, we have only label-based identification mechanisms in place with different information systems using their own unique source for identifying organizational units. What we can do from the GeoKB perspective is record the different labels used as aliases and build up aggregate records for organizational units over time as we represent the records from source systems in the knowledgebase. This is fraught with some challenges, of course, but it's the best we can do until we move toward some type of comprehensive mechanism for persistent, resolvable identifiers that respect and record organizational changes through time.