[Use case]: Representation of people as legal entities

[jakubklimek]

Use case name

Representation of people as legal entities

Please insert the status of the use case

Under Development

Use case creator

Jakub Klímek

Stakeholders

EU citizens, EU businesses

Problem statement

What is a Legal Entity differs in individual EU countries, as the term is often based on national legislation. In some countries (e.g. Czechia), an individual human person can be registered in a business registry, assigned a registration number, tax ID, etc., and perform business activities. There seem to be two categories - sole traders (have legal responsibilities and properties similar to a regular business company) and self-employed people (they do not have an employer, they issue invoices for their services, but usually do not have employees themselves, etc.).

The Legal Entity definition says "A self-employed person, company, or organization that has legal rights and obligations.", indicating that a self-employed person could be considered an instance of legal:LegalEntity.
Moreover, in the usage note, there is a statement "This makes Legal Entities distinct from the concept of organizations, groups or sole traders".
Is this correct? Shouldn't the definition rather include "sole traders" as those are the ones more similar to companies? They seem to fit Legal entities more than self-employed people.

Either way, there is another issue. legal:LegalEntity is a subclassof http://www.w3.org/ns/org#FormalOrganization, which in turn is subclassof http://www.w3.org/ns/org#organization (there is a typo in the link in the document, it should be http://www.w3.org/ns/org#Organization defined as "Represents a collection of people organized together into a community or other social, commercial or political structure." - this seems to exclude individuals, as individuals do not seem like collections of people, unless you count 1 as a collection. Therefore, this seems like an inconsistency.

Existing approaches

Existing approaches

Links

org:Organization
legal:LegalEntity

Requirements

1. Decide whether legal:LegalEntity really should be subclassof org:Organization, as it allows individuals, while org:Organization seems not to
2. Define sole trader and decide whether they should be instances of legal:LegalEntity
3. Define self-employed people and decide whether they should be instances of legal:LegalEntity

Related use cases

Related use cases

Comments

Comments

[EmidioStani]

Thank you @jakubklimek for reporting this, the typo has been immediately fixed. The use case will be looked within the SEMIC team

[EmidioStani]

During the webinar of 21/02/2023 there was no agreement on this issue.

The proposition is to remove the "sole trader" from the usage note of Legal Entity and on the summary so than it can be included or give the possibility to create a subclass.