Roberta Ferrario

Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science

Most of the efforts conducted on services nowadays are focusing on aspects related to data and control flow, often disregarding the main goal of the future Internet of services , namely to allow the smooth interaction of people and computers with services in the actual world. Our main claim is that it is crucial, to achieve such goal, to build a global service framework able to account for complex processes involving people and computers, which however have always people at their ends. Thats why in this paper we mostly emphasize the role of social and business-oriented services, whose consideration is needed to evaluate the global quality of e-services in relation to their ultimate social benefits, taking the overall impact on the organizational structure into account. Along these lines, the contribution of this proposal is a first concrete step towards a unified, rigorous and principled ontology centred on the notion of service availability, which results in useful distinctions betweenservice, service content, service delivery andservice process. Services are modelled by means of a layered set of interrelated events, with their own participants as well as temporal and spatial locations.

Preliminaries to a DOLCE ontology of organisations

This paper presents a preliminary proposal of an ontology of organisations based on descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engineering (DOLCE). An ontological analysis of organisations is the first, fundamental and ineliminable pillar on which to build a precise and rigorous enterprise modelling. An ontological analysis makes explicit the social structure that underlies every organisational settings. In particular, the paper tries to explain what are organisations, roles and norms, how they are interrelated, what it means for a norm to be valid in an organisation and what it means for an agent to be affiliated to an organisation.

Multi-scale f-formation discovery for group detection

We present an unsupervised approach for the automatic detection of static interactive groups. The approach builds upon a novel multi-scale Hough voting policy, which incorporates in a flexible way the sociological notion of group as F-formation; the goal is to model at the same time small arrangements of close friends and aggregations of many individuals spread over a large area. Our technique is based on a competition of different voting sessions, each one specialized for a particular group cardinality; all the votes are then evaluated using information theoretic criteria, producing the final set of groups. The proposed technique has been applied on public benchmark sequences and a novel cocktail party dataset, evaluating new group detection metrics and obtaining state-of-the-art performances.

Commitment-Based Modeling of Service Systems

This contribution presents an ontological model of services that describes them as complex temporal entities, constituted by interrelations of states, actions and processes, occurring in a wider service system. Our aim is to establish rigorous ontological foundations for the various basic notions of service science, including service, service system, service process, service system life-cycle, and service value co-creation. A crucial role in our approach is played by the notion of commitment, which allows us to provide a definition of service as generic commitment to guarantee the execution of value co-creation actions.

Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science: The Legal Perspective

As a growing number of economic transactions tend to happen in the Web, their legal implications and assumptions need to be made explicit in the proper way, in order to facilitate interoperability across different normative systems, encourage transparency towards the end users and ultimately promote trust in automated services. In particular, potentially ambiguous terms (and often apparently unproblematic ones) mentioned in these transactions need to be carefully analyzed in order to clarify the distinctions between slightly different meanings, describing hidden relationships and implicit constraints. One of these terms, highly overloaded nowadays, is “service”. Indeed, the very fact that services are now offered through the Web, and that the notion of service is at the core of a wholly new organizational paradigm—service-oriented systems—suggests the need to carefully (re)consider this notion. In this paper we shall attempt this analysis under the perspective of formal ontology, with a special attention to the legal aspects. The approach we take is that services are complex temporal entities (events) based on the central notion of commitment. Analyzing services as complex events allows us to clarify the relationships between the various agents that participate to these events playing specific roles, with specific responsibilities; moreover, this analysis explains a classic economic (and legal) distinction between services and goods, based on the fact that goods are both transactable and transferable, while services are transactable but not transferable. Assuming that transferability is intended as transferability of ownership, we argue that the ontological reason why services are not transferable is exactly because they are events: you cannot own an event, since if owning implies being in control of temporal behaviour, then, strictly speaking (at the token level), the temporal behaviour of an event is already determined, and changing it would result in a different event. So events are not transferable simply because they are not “ownable”. Since services are events, they are not transferable as well. Of course, this implies a shared understanding of what ownership, responsibility, duty, right etc. mean, and the paper is a first effort in this direction.

Evaluating procedural alternatives: a case study in e-voting

This paper describes part of the work within the ProVotE project, whose goal is the introduction of e-voting systems for local elections. The approach is aimed at providing both precise models of the electoral processes and mechanisms for documenting and reasoning on the possible alternative implementations of the procedures. It is based on defining an alternating sequence of models, written using UML and Tropos. The UML is used to represent electoral processes (both existing and future), while Tropos provides a mean to reason and document the decisions taken about how to change the existing procedures to support an electronic election.

Open Ontology-Driven Sociotechnical Systems: Transparency as a Key for Business Resiliency

Most business and social organisations can be seen nowadays as complex sociotechnical systems (STSs), including three components: technical artifacts, social artifacts, and humans. Within social artifacts, a special role have norms, which largely influence the overall systems behavior. However, norms need to be understood, interpreted, negotiated, and actuated by humans, who may of course deviate from them, or even decide to change them. STSs are therefore essentially prone to failure: critical situations are part of STS’s life, and may sometimes lead to tragic outcomes. That’s why resilience to failure must be built into such systems, and is a crucial parameter to determine their quality. We argue in this paper that, to achieve a high level of resilience, transparency is the key: actors within the system need to take a reflective stance toward the system itself. In other words, an STS must be open to its actors, which by observing and understanding its dynamics can take the appropriate initiatives in presence of unforeseen problems, possibly modifying the system at run time. Ontological models can play a crucial role in this context. However, we need to make a radical change in our modelling approach, shifting the focus of analysis from ontology-driven information systems to ontology-driven sociotechnical systems.

Statistical Analysis of Personality and Identity in Chats Using a Keylogging Platform

Interacting via text chats can be considered as a hybrid type of communication, in which textual information delivery follows turn-taking dynamics, resembling spoken interactions. An interesting research question is whether personality can be observed in chats, similarly as happening in face-to-face exchanges. After an encouraging preliminary work on Skype, in this study we have set up our own chat service in which key-logging functionalities have been activated, so that the timings of each key pressing can be measured. Using this framework, we organized semi-structured chats between 50 subjects, whose personality traits have been analyzed through psychometric tests, and a single operator, for a total of 16 hours of conversation. On this data, we have observed that some personality traits are linked with the way we are chatting (measured by stylometric cues), by means of statistically significant correlations and regression studies. Finally, we have assessed that some of the stylometric cues are very discriminative for the recognition of a user in a identification scenario. These facts taken together could underlie that some personality traits drive us in chatting in a particular fashion, which turns out to be very recognizable.

Rationality, autonomy and coordination: the sunk costs perspective

Our thesis is that an agents is autonomous only if he is capable, within a non predictable environment, to balance two forms of rationality: one that, given goals and preferences, enables him to select the best course of action (means-ends), the other, given current achievements and capabilities, enables him to adapt preferences and future goals. We will propose the basic elements of an economic model that should explain how and why this balance is achieved: in particular we underline that an agents capabilities can often be considered as partially sunk investments. This leads an agent, while choosing, to consider not just the value generated by the achievement of a goal, but also the lost value generated by the non use of existing capabilities. We will propose that, under particular conditions, an agent, in order to be rational, could be led to perform a rationalization process of justification that changes preferences and goals according to his current state and available capabilities. Moreover, we propose that such a behaviour could offer a new perspective on the notion of autonomy and on the social process of coordination.

Service System Approaches

Over the last several years, services science has emerged as an effective means to understand services and the socio-technical systems in which they are deployed. This systemic view requires a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to the study of services. In this chapter, we review a number of significant approaches to analyze, understand and model service systems, with an emphasis on showing similarities and differences that highlight the many aspects of a rich service ecosystem. The goal of this chapter is to provide developers with an overall perspective on such rich service system models, as a basis for choosing those which mostly fit their own needs.