Organisation¶

Status¶

Normative

Definition¶

An Organisation represents an organisational entity that may perform one or more roles in the planning, provision, management, operation, ownership, regulation, or publication of public transport services and data.

Organisation is a role-neutral semantic class.

An Organisation SHALL NOT be assumed to be a transport operator merely because it appears in a source dataset such as GTFS agency.txt.

Identity¶

The semantic identity of an Organisation is established by the organisational entity itself within the applicable identifier and source-authority scope.

An Organisation remains the same semantic instance when:

it performs different transport roles;
it operates different ServiceJourneys;
it manages or operates different PhysicalVehicles;
it acts as an authority, owner, publisher, or operator in different contexts;
source records or identifiers are revised without changing the underlying organisation.

Where source identifiers are only locally unique, the applicable mapping profile SHALL preserve the source or authority scope needed to avoid identity collisions.

Motivation¶

Public transport data frequently represents organisations through source concepts such as agencies, operators, authorities, publishers, owners, or service providers.

These terms describe roles and responsibilities, not necessarily different semantic entity classes.

SCRA therefore models Organisation as the role-neutral organisational entity and represents specific responsibilities through relationships or properties.

Characteristics¶

An Organisation:

may operate one or more ServiceJourneys;
may operate, manage, or own one or more PhysicalVehicles;
may act as a transport authority;
may publish transport data;
may maintain planning or service-calendar information;
may perform several of these roles simultaneously; and
shall not be inferred to perform every possible role merely because one organisational source record exists.

Relationships¶

operator¶

Where an Organisation performs the operator role for a ServiceJourney or PhysicalVehicle, that role is represented by the normative operator relationship from the operated entity to the Organisation.

The role is contextual. The same Organisation may be the operator in one relationship while acting as an authority, publisher, or owner in another context.

Typical Properties¶

Typical semantic properties may include:

identifier;
name;
short name;
legal name;
contact information;
website;
timezone;
source identifier; and
provenance.

These property names are informative unless separately declared normative in the SCRA Vocabulary.

Conformance Requirements¶

A conforming Organisation representation shall:

identify an organisational entity rather than an organisational role;
preserve identifier scope where source identifiers are not globally unique;
avoid inferring operator, authority, publisher, or ownership roles unless the source data or applicable profile supports that interpretation; and
permit the same Organisation to participate in multiple role relationships.

Mapping Guidance¶

GTFS Static¶

A GTFS agency.txt record SHOULD map to an Organisation instance.

The mapping SHALL preserve the fact that a GTFS agency may represent a service operator, transport authority, data publisher, owner, manager, or another organisational role depending on the source dataset.

A mapping SHALL NOT infer that one agency.txt record is simultaneously all of those roles.

agency_id is a source identifier for the Organisation and SHALL be interpreted within the applicable source or authority namespace.

Where routes.txt.agency_id identifies the organisation responsible for a route, the mapping profile may use that evidence to establish an operator or authority relationship only when the source semantics justify the specific role.

GTFS-Realtime¶

GTFS-Realtime does not generally publish a first-class organisation record.

Where the source feed or deployment context identifies an operator, organisation, or authority, that identity may be linked to an existing Organisation instance, but the realtime feed SHALL NOT silently create operator semantics that are absent from the source context.