Abstract
In systems based on organisational specifications a reoccurring problem remains to be solved in the disparity between the level of abstractness of the organisational concepts and the concepts used in the implementation. Organisational specifications (deliberately) abstract from general practice, which creates a need to relate the abstract concepts used in the specification to concrete ones used in the practice. The prevailing solution for this problem is the use of counts-as statements. However, current implementations of counts-as view the relations expressed in this notion as static ontological classifications, which presents problems in dynamic environments where the meaning of abstract concepts can change over time. This limitation has already been solved in complex formal theoretical investigations, but the results of that study are far too complex to make a practical implementation. This paper investigates the limitations of current implementations of counts-as, and proposes a more flexible implementation based on the use of inheritance relations.
This work has been performed in the framework of the FP7 project ALIVE IST-215890, which is funded by the European Community. The author(s) would like to acknowledge the contributions of his (their) colleagues from ALIVE Consortium (http://www.ist-alive.eu)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aldewereld, H.: Autonomy vs. Conformity: an Institutional Perspective on Norms and Protocols. PhD thesis, Universiteit Utrecht (June 2007)
Aldewereld, H., Dignum, F., Penserini, L., Dignum, V.: Norm dynamics in adaptive organisations. In: Boella, G., et al. (eds.) Proc. of the 3rd Int. Workshop on Normative Multiagent Systems, NorMAS 2008 (2008)
Austin, J.L.: How to Do Things With Words. Harvard University Press (1962)
Bouquet, P., Giunchiglia, F., van Harmelen, F., Serafini, L., Stuckenschmidt, H.: Contextualizing ontologies. Journal of Web Semantics 1(4), 325–343 (2004)
Decker, K.S.: TÆMS: A framework for environment centered analysis & design of coordination mechanisms. In: Foundations of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, ch. 16, pp. 429–448. Wiley, Chichester (1996)
Dignum, V.: A Model for Organizational Interaction: based on Agents, founded in Logic. PhD thesis, Universiteit Utrecht (2004)
European FP-7 Project. Coordination, organisation and model driven approaches for dynamic, flexible, robust software and services engineering (alive), http://www.ist-alive.eu/
Forgy, C.L.: Rete: A fast algorithm for the many pattern/many object pattern match problem. Artificial Intelligence 19(1), 17–37 (1982)
Grossi, D.: Designing Invisible Handcuffs: Formal Investigations in Institutions and Organizations for Multi-agent Systems. PhD thesis, Universiteit Utrecht (2007)
Grossi, D., Aldewereld, H., Vázquez-Salceda, J., Dignum, F.: Ontological aspects of the implementation of norms in agent-based electronic institutions. In: Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, pp. 104–116. AISB (2005)
Jones, A., Sergot, M.: A formal characterization of institutionalised power. Journal of the IGPL 3, 427–443 (1996)
Lesser, V., Decker, K., Wagner, T.: Evolution of the GPGP/TÆMS domain-independent coordination framework. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 9(1), 87–143 (2004)
Searle, J.: Speech acts. An essay in the philosphy of language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1969)
JBoss Community. JBoss drools business rules, http://www.jboss.org/drools
Vasconcelos, W.W., Sabater, J., Sierra, C., Querol, J.: Skeleton-based agent development for electronic institutions. In: Proc. AAMAS 2002, pp. 696–703. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Vázquez-Salceda, J., Dignum, V., Dignum, F.: Organising multiagent systems. JAAMAS 11(3), 307–360 (2005)
Wieringa, R.: Requirements Engineering: Frameworks for Understanding. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Chichester (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Aldewereld, H., Alvarez-Napagao, S., Dignum, F., Vázquez-Salceda, J. (2009). Engineering Social Reality with Inheritance Relations. In: Aldewereld, H., Dignum, V., Picard, G. (eds) Engineering Societies in the Agents World X. ESAW 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5881. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10203-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10203-5_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10202-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10203-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)