[FEATURE] Support legal name in ROR records

[yaffol]

Describe the problem you would like to solve
We are building out an affiliation lookup widget for our Grants Registration form, to help people registering Grants with Crossref to include affiliation metadata. As part of this, we are creating a ROR typeahead widget, so that organisations can be looked up and matched to ROR records wherever possible. When applying for grants, organisations are often required to use their formal legal name, or title, which is often not the same name by which they are generally known.

For example, the legal name of Harvard University is The President And Fellows Of Harvard College.

If the only information available to a Funder is the legal name of the organisation applying for funding, this may prevent a ROR match being found via a typeahead/API query.

Describe the solution you'd like
We would like the organisation's legal name to be included in the ROR record.
Ideally, this legal name would be included in a query parameter search. If it was in the aliases that would serve this purpose.

Potentially, this legal name would be retrievable from the ROR API - for example, the response for https://ror.org/03vek6s52 should include the legal name The President And Fellows Of Harvard College under a unique key.

Also, it might be interesting to consider including the organisation's Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and/or OpenCorporates ID as external_ids would help to disambiguate legal entities.

Who would benefit from this feature?
Funders, Researchers, Developers, Data Analysts

Additional information

[cthoyt]

This rolls in to another comment from Paul Millar with respect to synonym types- it would be valuable to have a controlled vocabulary of synonym types used across ROR, ideally aligned to an external controlled vocabulary such as the OBO Metadata Ontology (https://github.com/information-artifact-ontology/ontology-metadata; see also discussion at information-artifact-ontology/ontology-metadata#122)

[cthoyt]

Regarding my last comment, I am happy to liaise between ROR and the IAO/OMO ontologies to get the right synonym types into those ontologies.

[amandafrench]

@cthoyt Sorry for late reply! I think we aren't addressing legal names or synonym ontologies just yet, but I'd be interested to learn more if you're willing to introduce me to someone involved with OBO/IAO I could talk with. That might help us scope out the work. I'm at Amanda at ROR dot org if you want to email, or if you're in the ROR Slack you can DM me.

[amandafrench]

Or of course to just meet with you! I can do some research on my own as well but it helps to hear from involved people.

[cthoyt]

In information-artifact-ontology/ontology-metadata#142, OMO:0003009 was minted for "legal name" synonyms

[adambuttrick]

Additional request from https://ror.org/05pyq8e17 to support this in the context of grants and funding. The d/b/a (Doing Business As) name is important to applicants and to grantors as it is the name to which funds are distributed and is often used by companies when applying for grants.

[adambuttrick]

The European Comission - https://ror.org/00k4n6c32 has also requested we add this as part of funding workflows.