Making norms concrete

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 practice. A solution for this problem is the use of counts-as statements, which, by defining the social reality, provide the concrete concepts their institutional and organisational meaning. Continuing work on the implementation of counts-as to relate abstract and concrete concepts in agent-based systems, this paper investigates the implementation of counts-as statements in Drools to relate abstract organisational specifications and its norms to concrete situations.