Re: SUO: Organizations/Positions
Ian, and Working Group --
This is a nice summary of the discussion that has been underway for the
last couple of weeks. It may be an appropriate point to make a few
comments that about the subject matter, the methods of ontology
development, and the enterprise of standardizing upper-level ontological
content in general.
First of all, it is encouraging for me to see good discussion on actual
categories, which is something I was pushing for several months ago, when I
had more free time to participate in this group. This specific area of
content (organizations) is one where I have a lot of interest, and might
have been expected weigh in with commentary at many points in the
discussion that has led up to this. I haven't done so, because in the
background I have been pondering the question of what we are trying to do
here.
In my mind the subject at hand (organizations) is huge and far-ranging, and
has the potential for many complex modules, and years of work for many
dedicated ontological thinkers. As an indication of the scope, let me say
first that the word "organization" here maps somewhere into the domain of
what I like to call "human social systems (HSS)". This implies that an HSS
is a kind of social system, and a social system is a kind of system. There
is a school of thought, which I subscribe to, that an HSS is a *living*
system, and I have spent a bit of time advancing the argument that this is
true in the very specific sense of an *autopoietic* system. I won't get
into that argument here. However, I will mention that I have previously
brought this group's attention to a reference list of some 80 categories of
systems ( http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg03464.html ) From that list, I
would say that an HSS is probably an Adaptive, Anticipatory, Complex,
Composite, Conscious, Cybernetic, Decomposable, Dissipative, Dynamic,
Far-from-equilibrium, Hierarchic, Homeostatic, Ideal-seeking, Man-machine,
Nondeterministic, Nonlinear, Purpose seeking, Self-energizing,
Self-modifying, Self-organizing, Self-referential, Self-reproducing,
State-maintaining, Teleogenic, and Viable system. I'm thinking that it is
not an Allopoietic, Closed, Deterministic, Formal, Isolated, Near
equilibrium, Oscillating, Quasi-periodic, State-determined, Static,
Stationary, Steady state, or Symbolic system.
A lot of these points can be argued, and actually point toward some
interesting ontological distinctions within the domain of human social
systems. For instance, the very last point, symbolic system, has already
come up on this thread, where there has been discussion about organizations
as legally constituted. The legal aspect of an organization could be
argued to constitute a symbolic system.
Now, it seems that you (Ian) are reaching a point of personal comfort,
where you are wanting to introduce a small set of axioms into the uppermost
realm of human knowledge and concern (a standard, upper-level ontology).
From my point of view, what you are proposing is a thin, brittle set of
concepts from a subdomain of what I have been talking about here. The
subdomain is the domain of commercial enterprises, or at most the domain of
legally constituted enterprises. In another part of the list you have been
involved in a discussion about two or three kinds of "mob". We could also
bring up a whole variety of ways that humans organize themselves socially.
A starter set off the top of my head would include families, teams, tribes,
gangs, cliques, parties (as in birthday), parties (as in political),
audiences, posses, bands (as in garage), bands (as in hunting/gathering),
classes (as in school), classes (as in castes), task forces, departments,
couples, passengers, clubs, etc., etc.
On the basis of this, I'd like to raise the following questions for
discussion:
1. What is the method by which we assign certain concerns to the SUO level
and others to the level of subtending domain ontologies?
2. How do we propose, over time, to address whole sets of concerns such as
the ones I have raised here?
3. Is it part of our methodology to reduce very large domains to a
minimalist set of concepts and axioms?
4. Do we want to subject each accepted set of terms and axioms to an
evaluation against the terms of the PAR? For instance should we expect to
be able to articulate how the set of terms below provides for:
a) a framework for domain ontologies,
b) interoperability of various applications,
c) mapping of data elements,
d) educational systems, and
e) disambiguation of natural language statements?
I'm not asserting that these proposed additions to SUMO do not address the
various goals of the PAR. I am just starting to think through for myself
how this should all work, and particularly in the context of the IFF
architecture that has now come under the control of the WG.
(By the way, within the context of the little axiom set below, I don't
think you want to stipulate no more than one person for a position. This
even conflicts with your comment, which talks about " *a* research
director" (rather than *the* research director). Clearly for postions like
customer service representative there can be many incumbents.)
Doug McDavid
Certified Executive Consultant
Member of IBM Academy of Technology
mcdavid@us.ibm.com -- 916-549-4600
Ian Niles <iniles@teknowledge.com>@majordomo.ieee.org on 08/31/2001
03:52:16 PM
Please respond to Ian Niles <iniles@teknowledge.com>
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Subject: 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.")