General Social. Ontology (GSO) From the point of view of the GSO, every social context can be modelled in the same way. This assumption is based on the observation that there are two major models that can be used to model social context, “social relations” and “institutional rules” [KAO05] “Social relations” model the agents of a social structure as nodes of a graph and the interpersonal relationships as vertices. Larger structures (e.g. teams or departments) are not modelled explicitely but implicitely. For example: all the members of a team have a relationship with the team lead that puts him into a position of authority. “Institutional rules” model team and department directly by assigning roles to participants in a social context. For example: in a team, someone is labelled “team lead”, someone is labelled “developer” and so on. This approach is very common in organisational ontologies. For example, the W3C working draft “An organization ontology” [W3C12] follows much of the same reasoning as the GSO and some structures are strikingly parallel even though they were developed independently [EPI12]. In a paper [GRA12] we could show that social relations and institutional rules can model the same constructs as the other, but institutional rules are easier to implement. Therefore the GSO utilises this approach to model social constructs. as role Role Membership Agent is inhabited by as part of is a SocialConstruct Figure 2: Representation of social constructs in the GSO The illustration above gives a rough overview of how institutional rules are implemented. An agent is an “acting entity” meaning it can be a person (more importantly: a user), a software program or any other entity that is able to cause activities within the system. A social construct is a special agent that consists of other agents. Agents can be associated to social construct by instances of the class Membership that also assigns a role to this participation. For example: to express that Xxxxx is team lead of a team called Example Team, a membership instance would be created that is associated to Xxxxx via the “isInhabitedBy” property, to Example Team via the “asPartOf” property and to the role “team lead” via the “asRole” property. The Membership class is a way to reify the relationship between the participating agent and the social construct to annotate it – especially with the role. This mechanism has its drawbacks, most importantly that it is hard to express further constraints of the social construc...
