SUO: Organization
Hi All,
I wanted to summarize the various criteria that people have proposed for any
adequate formalization of the concept of organization and then sketch a
formalization that satisfies these criteria.
Here, then, are the various criteria that an organization satisfies.
1. An organization has agency, e.g. it exhibits intentionality, and
it has rights, responsibilities, and obligations.
2. An organization may have members, but it is not required to have
members. There are many examples of organizations, e.g. corporations and
churches, that have assets are liable for certain claims etc, even though
they have no members.
3. An organization has temporal extent. It comes into being at a
certain point in time, and it goes out of existence at another
point.
4. An organization can have various sorts of members. Owners are
members of organizations, and employees, directors, and other
stakeholders may also be members of organizations (although perhaps in
different senses). An organization may also have other organizations as
members.
All of these criteria have been extracted from Pat Cassidy's and Chris
Partridge's emails on the subject. The current SUMO formalization of
'Organization' as a subclass of 'Collection' satisfies points 1 and 3,
because 'Organization' is a subclass of 'Group' and 'Group' is a subclass of
'Agent' (point 1) and because 'Organization' is indirectly a subclass of
'Physical' (point 3). However, since 'Organization' is a subclass of
'Collection', it is required to have members, so point 2 is not satisfied
completely. Furthermore, there is no provision for the different sorts of
members that may make up an 'Organization', so point 4 is also apparently
not satisfied.
My new proposal is to cleanly separate the notions of agency and group.
Rather than make 'Organization' a subclass of 'Group', I think we should
make it a direct subclass of 'Agent', where it will be understood as a class
of legal entities with certain rights, responsibilities, intentionality,
etc. We should also, I think, remove the subclass link between 'Group' and
'Agent', because there are groups of animals and humans that do not exhibit
agency of any sort, e.g. a group of cows grazing. We can then use a new
function, defined as follows, to relate 'Groups' to 'Agents'.
(instance GroupAgentFn UnaryFunction)
(domain GroupAgentFn 1 Group)
(range GroupAgentFn Agent)
(documentation GroupAgentFn "Assigns an instance of 'Agent' to an instance
of 'Group'. In some cases, the 'Agent' assigned will be identical to the
group, e.g. a flock of geese flying northward. In some cases, the 'Agent'
will be different from the 'Group', e.g. the 'GroupOfPeople' making up an
'Organization' is distinct from the legal entity that is the 'Agent'. Note
that this is a partial function. There are many cases of 'Groups' which do
not exhibit agency.")
I think this proposal addresses points 1, 2, and 3 above, and I think it has
the advantage of making the overall structure of the ontology cleaner and
clearer. It is important to note, however, that this proposal does nothing
in the way of answering point 4. We are still stuck with the problem of
defining various sorts of relations between organizations and the different
classes of members that make them up. However, this problem seems to me to
be separable from the problem of figuring out what an "organization" is. In
fact, as I see it, we can take it as the problem of defining subrelations of
'member', since 'member' encompasses all of the relations that we would ever
want to define between an organization and a person who belongs to the
organization. The only exception to this, as I see it, is the
'subOrganizations' relation. In this case, the relation could be redefined
so that it is no longer a subrelation of 'subCollection'.
I hope this proposal makes sense. Let me know if and where you disagree
with it.
-Ian