Remove three specific invalid restrictions on gist:Person

[rjyounes]

Has a name: not always, e.g., newborn before they are named.

Identified by some id: not always.

has birthdate: not necessarily (this gets us into the middle of a huge religious-social-political debate).

[uscholdm]

When life begins is debated. What the date of birth is, is legally unambiguous and well accepted: when the baby comes out of the womb.

[uscholdm]

While not untrue, the definition is circular. It would hold for every thing from toads to toadstools and thus sheds no light at all on what a person is.

[rjyounes]

That's exactly what I mean. For those who believe human life begins before birth, there are humans with no birthdate (I.e., before they are born). Apparently fetuses can be the beneficiaries in a will, so have at least some legal rights reserved for humans.

There is already circularity in the definition, since part of it includes offspring of some gist:Person.

Granted the definition is less rich than it would otherwise be, but we can't just make stuff up that's not true to avoid vacuous definitions. If it comes down to it, there must be some identifying genetic or anatomical structure that would uniquely identify humans. Even though we don't know it in all cases - just as we may not know weight or volume even though they clearly exist -- it would still be identifying data.

[rjyounes]

Jamie: hard to reference something that doesn't have any identifying attributes.

Rebecca: if in some business contexts (e.g., HR) there is always a name, birthdate, and ID, then that should be expressed in SHACL.

Mark: birthdate comes from LivingThing, so the restriction would have to be removed from LivingThing.

Boris: hasBirthdDate would still have LivingThing as domain.

Mark: Currently hasBirthDate is a subproperty of actualStart. If we push it up to be a direct subproperty of start, then we don't have to remove thehasBirthDate restriction from Person.

DECISION:

• Make hasBirthDate a direct subproperty of start
• Remove restriction on name and identifiedBy for Person

[rjyounes]

The gist:identifiedBy restriction has already been removed from gist:Person in prior work.