SUO: RE: Organization
Dear Ian,
Just to repeat, organisations can have assets as well as people
as parts/members.
Matthew West
Principal Consultant
Shell Information Technology International Limited
Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Other Tel: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.r.west@is.shell.com
Internet: http://www.shell.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Niles [mailto:iniles@teknowledge.com]
> Sent: 27 August 2001 21:19
> 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
>
>
>