Interesting question, for which I'm also interesting in the answer.

As Darren pointed out in the subject title, it's not specific to companies nor languages. Within a given language, different organizations and geo-political entities call equivalent roles (e.g. chief executive, head of state) differently.

A general solution to this problem is typically to reify roles to enable random properties on the roles themselves. How does that fit with Wikidata's data model, which has qualifiers, but they are restricted to provenance and quality metadata.

-N.

On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 4:13 AM Darren Cook darren@dcook.org wrote:

I'm wondering how to relate key people to companies, when the exact names of their roles have to be maintained.

Some examples are below. To pick out one motivating example, the Japanese term "代表取締役社長" is called "Representative Director and President" by T&D Holdings, but "President and Chief Executive Officer" by NTT Docomo.

(Ebara use the very slightly different "代表執行役社長" for what is basically the same role, calling them "President [and] Representative Executive Officer".)

NOTE: this is not something that we can normalize. So, just using a P169 (CEO) property for both of them would not work. And it isn't a "also known as".

In other words, calling the boss of NTT the "Representative Director and President" would be incorrect, as would calling the boss of T&D the "President and Chief Executive Officer".

I'm wondering if I should still relate them with P169, but then also use two P1448 (official name) relations (attached to that P169 relation, as qualifiers?), one each for Japanese and English?

The idea of adding lots of new property children, descended from P169, for each possible combination of the Japanese and English name for the title, feels very wrong. Even if there are only 5 to 10 possible combinations.

Any other approaches?

(If anyone has an example in a language other than Japanese, I'd love to hear them.)

Thanks, Darren

代表取締役会長 Representative Director and Chairman T&D Tetsuhiro Kida 喜田 哲弘 代表取締役社長 Representative Director and President T&D Hirohisa Uehara 上原 弘久 取締役（社外役員・非常勤） Director (outside officer, part-time) T&D Haruka Matsuyama 松山 遙

代表取締役社長 President and Chief Executive Officer NTT Kazuhiro Yoshizawa 吉澤 和弘 取締役 Member of the Board of Directors NTT Teruyasu Murakami 村上 輝康 (outside director:社外取締役)(independent director:独立役員)

取締役会長 Chairman of the Board Ebara Natsunosuke Yago 矢 後 夏之助 代表執行役社長 President Representative Executive Officer Ebara Toichi Maeda 前田 東一

Director 取締役 Ebara Toichi Maeda 前田 東一 Independent Director 取締役（社外） Ebara Sakon Uda 宇田 左近

https://www.td-holdings.co.jp/en/company/management/ https://www.td-holdings.co.jp/company/management/index.html

https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/corporate/about/outline/index.html https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/corporate/about/outline/index.html

https://www.ebara.co.jp/en/about/corporate/about/executive/index.html https://www.ebara.co.jp/about/corporate/about/executive/index.html

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Thank you for this interesting question.

Darren Cook, 14/02/19 14:13:

The idea of adding lots of new property children, descended from P169, for each possible combination of the Japanese and English name for the title, feels very wrong.

What about the opposite? We could have a super-property, à la "key person" (term used in some infoboxes), and add a qualifier for each of the areas or roles they have responsibility for.

For instance, in Italy the law defines a rather clear role of "legal representative", held normally by the "president". Entities can arrange it differently, but there's only one way to describe it: a person is, or is not. If you use such a legal concept for each country, there can be dozens or hundreds of them, but not an unlimited amount.

Federico