Published

Population Group

vr.wm-per-005 · wm-per-005-population-group

Describe an addressable human collective or defined human population with qualified membership, cohort evidence and optional representation.

World Models Society, people and institutions SOC.PER.GRP

Bundle → Layer → Finding → Questions Classifiers What it is Why it exists Distinguishing features What robots and AI may and may not do Moral aspects Owners Links to other meta-models Identity and identifiers Direct properties Recognition Capabilities and actions Hazards and failure modes Standards and interfaces Context of use Sources

Bundle → Layer → Finding → Questions Filled

6 bundles · 12 layers · 12 findings · 36 questions

Identity and population scope Identify the collective and the population boundary independently of its roster.

Collective identity

Retain a namespace-qualified group identity across names and observations. Declare whether the group is self-described, externally described or statistical; do not infer common agency from a shared label.

Persistent identity and profile

Which master identifier and profile distinguish this group from a label, person roster or statistical snapshot? identity
Who supplies the description and what shared basis is asserted without presuming unanimous agreement? definition
Which versioned classification concepts apply and which labels or mappings remain disputed? classification

Population boundaries

State the population unit, base, geographic scope and reference period. Preserve overlapping groups and uncertain boundaries. Subgroup links are qualified assertions and do not establish disjointness.

Unit and boundary definition

What is the counting unit and base population, and how are household units distinguished from persons? composition
Which geographic definition and reference period bound this population, including mobile or non-territorial groups? spatial
Which subgroup, overlap or successor links are evidenced and may their counts safely be combined? relationship

Belonging and continuity Qualify membership assertions and changes without assuming universal voluntary affiliation.

Membership assertions

Keep voluntary affiliation, administrative inclusion and self-identification distinct. A statistical profile need not enumerate members. Multiple, disputed, ended and undisclosed affiliations remain representable without inferred sensitive traits.

Qualified belonging and visibility

What evidence and assertion type support a membership tie, or why is no individual roster maintained? relationship
When was the membership asserted and when did it apply, end or become disputed? temporal
What purpose, applicable authority and disclosure preference govern each membership view? privacy

Group change and contestation

Record formation, renaming, division, merger, cessation and corrections as supported assertions. Record retirement differs from group dissolution. Maintain conflicting accounts and lawful redress without indefinite retention of personal payloads.

Continuity and correction evidence

Which event evidence establishes formation, cessation or continuing identity after a group change? lifecycle
How do occurrence time, observation time and uncertain or conflicting accounts qualify the event? event
How can an affected party challenge a description or membership claim and how is the resolution recorded? exception

Cohort definition and snapshots Separate a versioned predicate from the evidence of a materialization.

Cohort definition

Define a cohort predicate against a stated base with reference time, variables and missing-data semantics. A classification change requires a new definition revision. This is a description, not an executable query or permission to process personal data.

Versioned inclusion and exclusion rules

Which inclusion and exclusion predicates, unit type and variable definitions identify the cohort revision? requirement
How are missing, withheld, multiple or conflicting answers treated without fabricating sensitive membership? constraint
Who approved this cohort purpose and definition, with what review of affected groups and sensitive characteristics? authority

Cohort materialization evidence

Reference a materialization produced by an authorized external processor. Keep immutable snapshot identity separate from its generation time; revised inputs or methods create a new revision. No microdata is required in this model.

Reproducible snapshot references

Which definition revision, source dataset revisions and processing record generated this snapshot? provenance
What reference period, extraction cutoff and generation time apply, and which earlier snapshot is superseded? temporal
What completeness, duplicate-unit and unit-consistency checks were reported, and can authorized reviewers reproduce the result? validation

Measures and disclosure Interpret statistical observations and separately assess their release.

Counts and distributions

Distinguish enumerated counts, estimates, weighted totals, proportions and disclosure-adjusted outputs. Zero, missing, suppressed and not applicable are different states. Do not infer any individual characteristic from an aggregate.

Qualified population measures

Which measure, unit, denominator and dimensions give each reported figure its meaning? measurement
What method, uncertainty, coverage limitations and adjustment status qualify the measure? quality
Which changes in definition, geography, multiple-response treatment or method limit comparison and additivity? interoperability

Disclosure assessment

Aggregation and a minimum cell count do not by themselves establish safety. A separate accountable assessment must consider recipients, other releases, linkage and group harms. This model stores the decision evidence, not a disclosure-control engine.

Purpose-specific release decision

Which re-identification, linkage, repeated-release and group-harm risks were assessed for the intended recipient? security
Which accountable reviewer accepted, restricted or refused release under which policy and validity period? decision
Which fields, cells and metadata are authorized for this view and which restrictions must travel with it? access

Representation and addressability Record optional mandate and channel evidence without manufacturing agency.

Representation and mandate

A data steward, organization member or channel administrator is not automatically empowered to speak for a collective. Record the grant basis, constituency, limits and disputes of each representation claim; a cohort can have none.

Optional scoped spokesperson assertion

What evidence identifies the constituency and basis for a representative to speak on a specified matter? authority
Is the representation claim active, disputed, expired or revoked for the relevant time and audience? state
Which duties belong to the record steward and which require a separate representative mandate? ownership

Collective addressability

A collective may have a declared channel without every member receiving or endorsing its messages. Carry external contact references and usage restrictions. Addressability is optional and never grants permission to send.

Optional controlled contact reference

Which external contact-point reference is declared for the group and by whose evidence? relationship
Which purpose, language, accessibility and authorization conditions govern use of the declared channel? requirement
What happens when a channel is stale, contested, unavailable or reaches only part of the group? exception

Stewardship and interoperability Govern local records and document the limits of projections.

Record stewardship

Bind group records to accountable roles and adopting-Dimension policies. Keep sensitive membership payloads restricted; public descriptive views require approval. Retain only what the applicable purpose, retention rules and holds justify.

Governed access and disposal

Which accountable roles maintain identity, definitions, evidence and disclosure decisions for this profile? ownership
Which retention schedule, hold and disposal authority apply to each local payload and referenced artifact? retention
How are restricted membership, representative evidence and approved aggregate views separated and their use audited? access

Mappings and acceptance

Pin conceptual alignments and disclose mapping losses. ORG applies only where its organization semantics fit; SKOS categories and Data Cube observations cannot replace collective identity. Mappings and instance validation remain unimplemented proposals.

Bounded interoperable projections

Which target vocabulary and version can carry group identity, predicate revisions and statistical qualifiers without conflation? interoperability
Which profile fixtures test empty cohorts, overlapping groups, disputed mandates and suppressed values before use? validation
What authorized revision and refusal report accompany an export that cannot preserve required provenance or restrictions? process

Classifiers Filled

Family: World Models
Category: Society, people and institutions
Entry kind: entity
Navigation path: NAV.SOC.PER.GRP
Domain: SOC.PER.GRP
Industry: Cross-industry
Tags: populationgroupsoc.per.grp
Also called: H3

What it is Filled

One persistent population-group description with an explicit community, membership-group or statistical-cohort profile. Its identifier remains distinct from a classification concept, definition revision, person roster and statistical snapshot. A cohort can have no spokesperson, channel or enumerated member list. Statistical inclusion is not voluntary affiliation, consent or collective agency.

In scope

Qualified collective identity, descriptions, classifications, temporal and geographic population boundaries
Membership assertions or cohort criteria and independently identified snapshot references with counts and quality metadata
Optional representation and channel references, stewardship, release assessment and local record continuity

Out of scope

Person, household, organization, contact-point and social-norm master records and their lifecycles
Biological species populations, arbitrary object populations, general statistical production pipelines and individual health or identity profiling
Executing queries over personal data, inferring sensitive traits, appointing representatives, contacting groups or publishing member lists
Determining legal personality, universal consent rules, an implemented disclosure-control algorithm or formal standards conformance

Why it exists Filled

Describe an addressable human collective or defined human population with qualified membership, cohort evidence and optional representation.

Distinguishing features Derived, awaiting review

Unlike WM-PER-001 Person and WM-PER-004 Household / Family: References resolve externally. A household may be a statistical unit or contextual reference but its count is not a person count. Group membership never establishes family ties or person attributes.
Unlike WM-ORG-001 Organization: An organized community can overlap an ORG organization even without formal legal status. This model owns its population description; organization structure and legal status stay external. Formalization is a qualified continuity link, not automatic identity replacement.
Unlike WM-PER-010 Contact Point / Party Profile and WM-CIV-005 Social Norm: Carry optional qualified channel and norm references. No contact endpoint maintenance, delivery action, universal community norm, or representation authority is imported by a reference.
Unlike Classification concept, cohort definition and observation dataset: The persistent group, defining predicate revision, materialized snapshot and category concept have separate identifiers. An empty or unknown population is valid. Snapshot counts cannot be projected into a roster or member attributes.

Note: Derived from boundary notes against neighbouring models.

What robots and AI may and may not do Derived, awaiting review

Must not

Default-deny restricted membership and mandate evidence.
Preserve contested evidence and supersession links subject to data minimization; never silently update a referenced master.
Provenance history does not require indefinite storage of personal data; reference retirement cannot delete external masters.
Deny access unless role, purpose, profile, recipient and field scope are authorized.
Any exceptional disclosure requires documented applicable authority, narrow scope, reviewer and expiry; a spokesperson cannot authorize access to all members by default.

Only with a human decision

Statistical inclusion is not affiliation, membership is not consent, stewardship is not representation and aggregation is not anonymization.
No universal consent basis or minimum safe cell size is asserted.

May

Resolve a group reference: Proposed operation, not implemented. Resolve exact namespace and master ID; return ambiguous or unresolved status instead of merging on shared labels.
Record an evidenced membership assertion: Proposed operation, not implemented. Append an authorized assertion with type and valid time. Never infer sensitive affiliation from cohort statistics or overwrite the person master.
Record a reviewed cohort definition revision: Proposed operation, not implemented. Record a reviewed predicate and missing-data rules. A definition is not permission to run a query; preserve prior snapshot bindings.
Link an externally produced snapshot: Proposed operation, not implemented. Link authorized processing evidence, definition and data revisions with quality qualifiers. Do not execute personal-data extraction or certify correctness.
Record a representation claim assessment: Proposed operation, not implemented. Record existing grant, expiry, revocation or dispute evidence. Do not appoint a representative or infer collective consent.
Prepare an authorized local projection: Proposed operation, not implemented. Check a recorded disclosure decision against recipient, revision and mapping. Refuse stale approval, missing qualifiers or a lossy sensitive projection. No transmission occurs.

Note: Derived from functions, policies, CRUD and access rules; prohibitions were not authored for agents as such.

Moral aspects Derived, awaiting review

Applicable purpose, jurisdiction, privacy and disclosure-review profile
Loss of required authority, unit, time or privacy qualifiers makes an export incompatible.
A digest proves byte consistency only; it does not prove membership, consent, truth or release safety.
No sensitive individual membership inference, discrimination or targeting.
Statistical inclusion is not affiliation, membership is not consent, stewardship is not representation and aggregation is not anonymization.
No universal consent basis or minimum safe cell size is asserted.
Provenance history does not require indefinite storage of personal data; reference retirement cannot delete external masters.
Executable nested field schemas, predicate language, privacy algorithms and statistical estimators are not implemented.

Note: Sentences mentioning harm, privacy, consent or similar, collected from the specification.

Owners Filled

Steward

Group steward or statistical-definition custodian role with explicit namespace authority

Roles

Group steward: Maintain group description and correction routing; this role grants no representative mandate.
Statistical-definition custodian: Review population units, definitions and comparability of snapshots.
Evidence curator: Maintain source references, revision bindings and uncertainty without certifying unsupported assertions.
Disclosure reviewer: Assess recipient-specific release evidence and approve, restrict or refuse projections.
Retention and access custodian: Apply purpose-limited access, retention, holds and authorized disposal.

Links to other meta-models Filled

references

WM-PER-001 - Optional restricted person master reference; no roster required and no person lifecycle copied.
WM-PER-004 - Household context or unit reference; household counts never silently become person counts.
WM-ORG-001 - Organization continuity or stewardship reference; organizational structure and legal personality remain externally mastered.
WM-PER-010 - Optional channel master reference; no delivery or endpoint management is performed here.
WM-CIV-005 - Optional attributed norm reference, with dissent and applicability qualifiers; no assumption that all members share it.

aligned

https://unece.github.io/GSIM-2.0/ - Population and unit concepts only; human-population profile is narrower than GSIM.
https://www.w3.org/ns/org# - Membership and roles only when organization semantics apply; statistical cohorts are not automatically organizations.
https://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core# - Classification scheme and label references only; category identity is distinct from a collective.
https://purl.org/linked-data/cube# - Candidate statistical observation projection; full mapping and conformance tests remain deferred.
https://www.w3.org/ns/prov# - Candidate lineage vocabulary for definitions, assertions and snapshots; not proof of authority or truth.

neighbor

WM-PER-001 Person and WM-PER-004 Household / Family - References resolve externally. A household may be a statistical unit or contextual reference but its count is not a person count. Group membership never establishes family ties or person attributes.
WM-ORG-001 Organization - An organized community can overlap an ORG organization even without formal legal status. This model owns its population description; organization structure and legal status stay external. Formalization is a qualified continuity link, not automatic identity replacement.
WM-PER-010 Contact Point / Party Profile and WM-CIV-005 Social Norm - Carry optional qualified channel and norm references. No contact endpoint maintenance, delivery action, universal community norm, or representation authority is imported by a reference.
Classification concept, cohort definition and observation dataset - The persistent group, defining predicate revision, materialized snapshot and category concept have separate identifiers. An empty or unknown population is valid. Snapshot counts cannot be projected into a roster or member attributes.

What else AI and robots need to interact with it Incomplete

Sources Filled

Generic Statistical Information Model version 2.0 - United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
The Organization Ontology - World Wide Web Consortium
2030 Census Recommendations, Chapter 21: Ethnocultural characteristics - United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary - World Wide Web Consortium
De-Identifying Government Datasets: Techniques and Governance - National Institute of Standards and Technology
PROV-O: The PROV Ontology - World Wide Web Consortium
SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference - World Wide Web Consortium
Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps - Internet Engineering Task Force

Open questions

Verify source byte identity, current editions, licenses and source-to-claim support externally, and restore independent provider review before canonical promotion.
Develop profile-specific nested schemas and fixtures for empty populations, overlapping membership, household units, changing definitions, suppressed values, contested mandates and lawful erasure.
Review local legal and community-governance applicability and test statistical comparability, disclosure assessments and target mappings with qualified accountable reviewers.
Executable nested field schemas, predicate language, privacy algorithms and statistical estimators are not implemented.
Profile-specific law, consent or other authority, indigenous/community governance and detailed representation processes need qualified local review.
Independent external review, pinned source versions, licenses and tested target mappings remain incomplete.

Machine files

Card as JSON Specification AGENTS.md Source Card backlog vercy.card/1

Provenance

world-models research · reviewable-draft

Built from: models/wm-per-005-population-group/spec.yaml