Engineering social reality with inheritance relations

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.