A Proposal for an Organization and Group Schema

This describes Organizations (legal entities that have been formed for business or social purposes) and Groups (groups of people formed together for a specific purpose) are used throughout GRC and SecOps software. Therefore, elementId, @id, coreMetaData, and context will always be present in Things.

The only difference in the schema between an organization and a group is that Organizations have Legal Names whereas Groups have Official Names. That and Groups don’t have Organizational Categories.

Property	Expected Type	Description
email	Email	Primary Electronic Mail address.
parentId	String	ID of the associated parent for this record.
description	String	This describes a Thing or Property.
legalName	String	Legally registered name of Organization.
primaryDomain	URL	The legally registered primary Internet domain name of the organization.
elementId	String	A unique and persistent identifier for the record within the system's data set.
url	String	The Uniform Resource Locator of an internet address.
names	Array	A collection of names.
@id	URL	The full unique link to the item so it's traversable by that property.
topLevelDomains	Array	A collection of TopLevel Domain (TLD's).
emailAddresses	Array	A collection of Email objects.
socialAddresses	Array	The various Internet locations that help disambiguate a person or organization, such as their FaceBook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter Address.
phoneNumbers	Array	A collection of PhoneNumber. Which foreign key is used will be determined by the object the phone number is in.
organizationalCharacter	Object	The Organizational Character of an Organization, Group, or Initiative.
affiliations	Array	A collection of Affiliation.
organizationalCategories	Object	An array of Organizational Category.
context	Context	The JSON-LD context for the item in question.
postalAddresses	Array	An array of the object Postal Address.

Common Elements

Organization and Group both have multiple common elements, such as description, URL, postalAddresses, socialAddresses, and phoneNumbers. These have all been approved for quite some time and can be found online at their respective URLs.

Parent ID

Many organizations have parents and are either wholly owned, partially owned, or even DBAs of other organizations. In other words, there’s a hierarchy here. Groups have much of the same structure, with ISO committees having subcommittees as a popular reference. Within This is the ID of the direct parent of the organization or group in question.

Names

Names are broken down into Legal Name (for organizations) and Official Name (for groups), as well as a listing of all other names the organization or group has been found to be known by.

Primary Domain and Top Level Domains

When you use a couple of the organizational disambiguation APIs, you’ll get a domain list for the organization as well as the organization’s primary domain. This provides a great clue to disambiguate organizations – especially if the standard is only tracking a name.

Organizational Character

The Organizational Character Index (OCI) is a self-scoring assessment tool developed by William Bridges, Ph.D. that helps organizations clarify their preferences. The OCI is based on the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. How that relates to GRC and SecOps is covered in the GRC Playbook online HERE.

Affiliations

Affiliations is a simple list of GRC and SecOps industry organizations (CSA, ISACA, ISC2, ISSA, etc.) that an organization or group might belong to.

Organizational Category

Groups do not have Organizational Categories. Organizational Categories is a great way to disambiguate organizations (other than their domain information). Organizational Category is a Thing as it can change over time, and those changes need to be tracked. Each response is also tracked to a Disambiguation Record so that the source of the Category can be represented.

Property	Expected Type	Description
clearbitIndustry	String	This is the industry an Organization belongs to according to Clearbit.
sic2DigitCode	String	This is the two digit Standard Industrial Classification code assigned to an Organization.
naics6DigitCode	String	A North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code is a six-digit code that classifies businesses by their economic activity into a specific sector.
clearbitSector	String	A distinct area of business as reported by Clearbit.
clearbitSubIndustry	String	A subset of Organization industries as reported by Clearbit.
unspscCode	String	The United Nations Standard Products and Services code of an Organization.
elementId	String	A unique and persistent identifier for the record within the system's data set.
@id	URL	The full unique link to the item so it's traversable by that property.
tags	Array	A collection of keywords that describes an item.
coreMetaData	Object	The object representation of the Thing CoreMetaData.
disambiguationRecordId	Object	Represents a record of an object from an AuthoritySource.
context	Context	The JSON-LD context for the item in question.
sic4DigitCode	String	This is the four digit Standard Industrial Classification code assigned to an Organization.
naics20226DigitCode	String	A North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code is a six-digit code that classifies businesses by their economic activity into a specific sector as updated in 2022.
linkedinIndustryCodeV2	String	LinkedIn's Industry Codes v2 is a list of industry codes for company and people searches.