SUO: RE: Organization
Chris,
See my comments below.
Thanks,
Ian
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Partridge [mailto:chris_partridge@csi.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2001 8:05 AM
> To: Ian Niles
> Cc: Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)
> Subject: RE: Organization
>
>
> Ian,
>
> It certainly helps to summarise the position.
>
> A couple of points:
>
> I suspect that one needs to distinguish between agent and
> person, though I
> am not sure of the exact distinction. The telling example for
> me is computer
> trading. The computer definitely is an agent (CYC says - An agent is
> something which can show independent action, whether
> conscious or not.) but
> it is not a person. We do not think it has rights or hold it
> responsible for
> its activities (such as unprofitable deals). Maybe
> intentionality and the
> ability to have rights and obligations are linked - I am not
> sure. But if
> they are then person could be identified with intentional
> agent. At the
> least we need both agent and person.
I agree with everything you say here, and I think the current structure of
the SUMO reflects your intuitions. In the SUMO, 'Agent' is the general
class of agents (including the automated trader). Under 'Agent' is
'CognitiveAgent', which is the subclass of agents that have rights,
responsibilities, and intentionality. This accords with your notion of
"Person". Finally, below 'CognitiveAgent' is 'Human', since all humans are
(or at least are assumed to be) loci of rights and responsibilities, but it
is possible that we could discover other beings that should be accorded
similar rights and responsibilities.
>
> You are absolutely right to note that CYC sub-organisation is
> a different
> kind of composition membership for organization than member
> (something I am
> actually researching now).
>
> I presume, though you do not mention it, that you are making
> Position a
> sub-class of Organisation and things like Managing Director
> sub-classes of
> Position - as we discussed earlier. Where Position is typically a
> sub-organisation of Organisation.
You're losing me here. I agreed (on the basis of your example of monarch)
that positions need to be distinguished from the people who (temporarily)
occupy them. We then disagreed about whether positions should be regarded
as attributes (as I suggested) or as something with a position in space/time
(as you and Matthew West suggested). I guess I don't see how positions
could be regarded as organizations - on the face of it, it sounds very
counterintuitive. Could you fill out your idea?
>
> I am less happy about the ad hoc-ness of using groups to link
> organizations
> to people. What happens when you have the 'same group of
> people' belonging
> to several different organizations? Is there one group or
> several? If there
> are several, is each group specifically dependent upon its
> organization? If
> there is one group how do you differentiate their types of
> membership? It
> seems to me much easier to just say persons can be members of
> organisations.
You raise a serious problem with my proposed 'AgentGroupFn'. It simply is
not workable (at least as a function) if there are cases where the same
group of people comprises more than one organization. However, I don't see
how the stipulation that people can be members of organizations solves any
problems. On the one hand, we want a notion of organization that is above
and beyond the people who belong to it, because as you and Pat have pointed
out there are cases of organizations of which no one is a member. On the
other hand, if organizations are regarded as mereological collections, then,
as I understand it, there is no room for organizations with no members.
It's a tough problem, and I'd welcome any concrete suggestions about how to
avoid this apparent impasse.
>
> The suggestion that:
> "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."
> will not work. As I seem to recall having explained in a
> couple of other
> emails - legal entity is a relation between organization and legal
> jurisdiction not a concept. Furthermore, this excludes all
> the kinds of
> organization that HR departments wrk with, such as division,
> department and
> section - as these are not legal entities in most (maybe even all)
> jurisdictions.
I agree. The categories of legal entity and organization overlap, but there
are many cases of organization which are not a legal entity. Again, I'm
just not sure where we go from here, so I'd encourage any specific
proposals.
>
> Regards,
> Chris
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
> [mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org]On
> Behalf Of Ian
> Niles
> Sent: 27 August 2001 22:19
> To: Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)
> Subject: 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
>
>