SUO: RE: Organizations/Positions
Chris,
See my comments below.
Thanks,
Ian
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Partridge [mailto:chris_partridge@csi.com]
> Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2001 4:57 AM
> To: 'Ian Niles'; Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)
> Subject: RE: Organizations/Positions
>
>
> Ian,
>
> Sorry for the late reply - I have been out of the Office.
>
> A couple of points.
>
> You wrote:
> 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.
>
> I do not understand this.
> Both positions and organisations (in its normal sense) can be
> (at some
> point in time) memberless. This seems to suggest that only
> positions can be
> memberless.
That's right. If you want to refer to an "organization" that lacks members,
you would use the more general concept of 'OrganizationUnit' that I defined
in my formalization (on the basis of the TOVE stuff).
> Furthermore your comment about having to have more than one
> member seems
> empirically dubious - some sole proprietors only have one
> member - the
> owner - even though there is no necessity to this.
I agree. In general, 'Collections' often have members added and subtracted,
and there's no defensible theoretical ground I can think of for claiming
that collectionhood evaporates when the penultimate member is subtracted.
> It might help if you gave some of the reasoning behind your
> claims (such as
> more than one member). As discussed in Seattle, it might help
> if you say
> what distinctions you are using to drive the sub-classification.
>
> You do not seem to point out the occupying is a kind of membership -
> membership of a position.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. We have the following axiom in my
proposal:
(=>
(occupiesPosition ?PERSON ?POSITION ?ORG)
(employs ?ORG ?PERSON))
Furthermore, 'employs' is defined to be a subrelation of 'member', which
means that 'occupiesPosition' entails that there is a 'member' relation
between its first and third arguments. However, the relation between a
person and the position he occupies was not modelled in my formalization
with the 'member' predicate, because 'Positions' are not 'Collections'. If
'Positions' were 'Collections', then every 'Position' would necessarily be
occupied, which is of course false.
>
> Also it is not quite correct to restrict positions to one
> person - as EO
> and Martin King have pointed out, e.g. joint managing director.
Right. I've corrected this.
>
> Chris
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Niles [SMTP:iniles@teknowledge.com]
> Sent: Friday, August 31, 2001 11:52 PM
> To: Standard-Upper-Ontology (E-mail)
> 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.")
>
>