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0112 People, their personal network and their roles

This model describes the metadata elements that describe a person and their roles and contribution in the organization.

UML

Person

Person extends ActorProfile to capture more information about a person. Many of the properties are inspired by the LDAP inetOrgPerson attributes (see RFC 2798).

Typically the name is set to a person's preferred name. The qualifiedName may be the identifier from an external system or the employeeNumber and/or some combination of names to ensure it is unique. Then the properties are as follows:

  • title takes the courtesy title of the person.
  • givenNames is set to a space separated list of names that are not the person's surname (or family name).
  • initials takes the first letter of each of a person's given names. The format may include spaces, periods or both to separate the initials.
  • surname holds the person's family name.
  • fullName allows the storage of the full legal name, leaving the displayName for the person's preferred name and the qualifiedName as the employee serial/personnel number plus .
  • jobTitle is for the person's job title if that is in use in the organization.
  • employeeNumber is the unique identifier in use in the organization to identify the person - often related to an employment or partnership contract.
  • employeeType code used by the organization, typically to identify the type of contract they have with the organization.
  • preferredLanguage is on or more spoken or written language identifiers preferred by the person.
  • isPublic indicates whether the information in the profile can be shared with colleagues or is only visible to the user(s) that connect with one of the linked user identities or systems that are part of the open metadata ecosystem.

Peer

The Peer relationship links two people together as peers in an organization. Peers represents a list of a person's close/important colleagues. The perspective on who is a close/important colleague is a personal perspective. Therefore the Peer relationship separates the concept of who has linked to a person (myFollowers) from who they have specifically linked to (myPeers).

Contribution Record

The ContributionRecord accumulates achievements of an individual. Specifically Egeria supports Karma Points. These are awarded for participation in open metadata and governance. The number of karma points awarded to the individual is recorded in their ContributionRecord entity.

  • isPublic indicates whether the values in the contribution record can be shared with colleagues or is only visible to user(s) that connect with one of the linked user identities or systems that are part of the open metadata ecosystem.
  • karmaPoints captures the total number of points that the individual has earned from their activity.

PersonRole

Open metadata separates the person from the roles they perform. This is because people often perform many roles and these change over time. Also roles may be put in place before the person is appointed to it and the person appointed can change from time to time.

The PersonRole entity is extended in multiple places to show different types of roles. For example:

PersonRoleAppointment

The PersonRole entity is linked to a Person entity with the PersonRoleAppointment relationship to show that the person has been appointed. It is common for effectivity dates to be set on this relationship.

Further information

People, Roles and Organizations describes how metadata about people is populated and used.

The Community Profile OMAS provides support for managing a person's profile. It also supports the ability to query a person's roles and their peer network.

The Organization Integrator OMIS supports the synchronization of information about people between open metadata and external systems.


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