SUO: Organizations/Positions
Hi All,
I've been trying to formalize part of the exchange that we've had
recently on the concepts of organization, postion within an organization,
etc. The formal definitions for the new concepts and revised SUMO concepts
is presented at the end of this message, but these definitions give
essentially the following structure, which I think both Martin King and
Chris Partridge accept:
CognitiveAgent
|
|
OrganizationUnit
/ \
/ \
/ \
Organization Position
Together with this structure is a set of predicates (also formally defined
at the end of this message): 'occupiesPosition' (relates a person to the
position they occupy within an organization), 'subOrganizations' (relates
one organization to another of which it is a part), and 'employs' (relates a
person to the organization of which he/she is a member).
As you might recall, I tried in a previous email to extract various
criteria for organizations from some of the traffic on this subject. These
criteria are as follows:
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.
I think that the structure and predicates presented informally above and
formally below make significant headway in satisfying all of these criteria.
Let's consider them in turn. As for 1 and 3, these are satisfied for the
same reason that they were before. In the SUMO, 'Organization' is a
subclass of 'Agent' (more specifically, 'CognitiveAgent' in the new
proposal) and 'Agent' is a subclass of 'Object', so organizations are agents
and they have a position in space-time.
As for criteria 2 and 4, these were not completely satisfied by my earlier
proposed function 'GroupAgentFn', but I think the concepts outlined above do
satisfy them. Consider criterion 2. The sticking point here is the
stipulation that organizations are not required to have members. In the
structure above, we distinguish two senses of organization, viz.
'OrganizationUnit' and 'Organization'. The latter is required to have
members (in fact, more than one member), because it is a subclass of
'Collection' (the details about this are presented in the formal section
below). However, 'OrganizationUnit' is not a subclass of 'Collection',
because it is meant to cover both organizations and positions, so there is
no requirement that an 'OrganizationUnit' have any members. Accordingly, we
now have a notion of organization that covers "empty" organizations. As for
the fourth criterion, the new predicate 'occupiesPosition' allows us
distinguish, via 'Position', all of the various member types of an
organization. Another advantage of this predicate is that we can account
for the important fact that the person who occupies a position may have
different rights, responsibilities, etc. from the position itself. This is
because, on the current proposal, the agent who fills the first slot of
'occupiesPosition' is potentially a different agent from the agent who fills
the second slot of this predicate. In some cases, the two agents would be
the same, but establishing this would require axioms specific to the
position in question.
=======================
Formal SUMO Definitions
=======================
(subclass OrganizationUnit CognitiveAgent)
(documentation OrganizationUnit "An &%Organization or a functional unit
within an &%Organization, e.g. positions, divisions, and departments. For
example, the Shell Corporation, the accounting department at Shell, the
positions of CEO and mail room supervisor at Shell, etc. would all be
instances of &%OrganizationUnit.")
(subclass Organization OrganizationUnit)
(subclass Organization GroupOfPeople)
(documentation Organization "An &%Organization is a corporate or
similar institution, distinguished from other &%Agents. The &%members
of an &%Organization typically have a common purpose or function.
The continued existence of an &%Organization is not dependent on any of
its members, its location, or its particular facility. Note that parts
of &%Organizations should not be included here, unless they are
&%subOrganizations of an &%Organization.")
(subclass Position OrganizationUnit)
(relatedInternalConcept Position occupies)
(documentation Position "A formal position of reponsibility within an
&%Organization. Examples of &%Positions include president, laboratory
director, senior researcher, sales representative, etc.")
(instance occupiesPosition TernaryPredicate)
(domain occupiesPosition 1 Human)
(domain occupiesPosition 2 Position)
(domain occupiesPosition 3 Organization)
(documentation occupiesPosition "(&%occupiesPosition ?PERSON ?POSITION ?ORG)
means that ?PERSON holds the &%Position ?POSITION at &%Organization ?ORG.
For example, (&%occupiesPosition &%TomSmith &%ResearchDirector
&%AcmeLaboratory) means that &%TomSmith is a research director at Acme
Labs.")
(=>
(and
(occupiesPosition ?PERSON1 ?POSITION ?ORG)
(occupiesPosition ?PERSON2 ?POSITION ?ORG))
(equal ?PERSON1 ?PERSON2))
;; The axiom above stipulates that no more than one person can occupy a
given
;; position. Note that it follows from axioms already in the SUMO that an
;; Organization consists of more than one person, because 'Organization' is
a
;; subclass of 'GroupOfPeople', which is a subclass of 'Group', which is a
;; subclass of 'Collection', and we have the following axiom:
(=>
(instance ?COLL Collection)
(exists (?OBJ1 ?OBJ2)
(and
(member ?OBJ1 ?COLL)
(member ?OBJ2 ?COLL)
(not
(equal ?OBJ1 ?OBJ2)))))
(=>
(occupiesPosition ?PERSON ?POSITION ?ORG)
(employs ?ORG ?PERSON))
(subrelation employs member)
(domain employs 1 Organization)
(domain employs 2 Human)
(documentation employs "(&%employs ?ORG ?PERSON) means that ?ORG has
hired ?PERSON and currently retains ?PERSON, on a salaried or
contractual basis, to provide services in exchange for monetary
compensation.")
(subrelation subOrganizations subCollection)
(domain subOrganizations 1 Organization)
(domain subOrganizations 2 Organization)
(documentation subOrganizations "(&%subOrganizations ?ORG1 ?ORG2) means
that ?ORG1 is an &%Organization which is a proper part of the
&%Organization ?ORG2.")