American Association for Artificial Intelligence): Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective

Abstract The notion of roles is common to sociology, organizational management and computer science. Although these disciplines partially converge in the field of computersupported cooperative work, their different perspectives on roles remain largely unconnected. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of roles from different angles and propose an integrative approach to the conceptualization of roles in computer systems supporting cooperation

Organisations and Variable Embodiments

How can organisations survive not only the substitution of members, but also other dramatic changes, like that of the norms regulating their activities, the goals they plan to achieve, or the system of roles that compose them? This paper is as first step towards a well-founded ontological analysis of the persistence of organisations through changes. Our analysis leverages Kit Fine’s notions of rigid and variable embodiment and proposes to view the (history of the) decisions made by the members of the organisation as the criterion to re-identify the organisation through change

Roles '07 – Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Roles and Relationships in Object Oriented Programming, Multiagent Systems, and Ontologies : workshop co-located with ECOOP 2007 Berlin, July 30 and 31, 2007

Roles are a truly ubiquitous notion: like classes, objects, and relationships, they pervade the vocabulary of all disciplines that deal with the nature of things and how these things relate to each other. In fact, it seems that roles are so fundamental a notion that they must be granted the status of an ontological primitive. The definition of roles depends on the definition of relationships. With the advent of Object Technology, however, relationships have moved out of the focus of attention, giving way to the more restricted concept of attributes or, more technically, references to other ob- jects. A reference is tied to the object holding it and as such is asymmetric – at most the target of the reference can be associated with a role. This is counter to the intuition that every role should have at least one counter-role, namely the one it interacts with. It seems that the natural role of roles in object-oriented designs can only be restored by installing relationships (collaborations, teams, etc.) as first-class programming concepts. By contrast, the relational nature of roles is already acknowl- edged in the area of Multiagent Systems, since roles are related to the interaction among agents and to communication protocols. However, in this area there is no convergence on a single definition of roles yet, and different points of view, such as agent software en- gineering, specification languages, agent communication, or agent programming languages, make different use of roles. Like its pre- decessor “Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective” (Roles’05) held at the AAAI 2005 Fall Symposium (see the website of the Symposium http://www.aaai.org/Press/Reports/Symposia/Fall/fs-05-08.php), this workshop aimed at gathering researchers from different dis- ciplines to foster interchange of knowledge and ideas concerning roles and relationships, and in particular to converge on ontolog- ically founded proposals which can be applied to programming and agent languages

Roles as modular units of composition

Object oriented decomposition is the most successful decomposition strategy used nowadays. But a single decomposition strategy cannot capture all aspects of a concept. Roles have been successfully used to model the different views a concept may provide but, despite this, roles have not been used as building blocks. Roles are mostly used to extend objects at runtime. In this paper we propose roles as a way to compose classes that provides a modular way of capturing and reusing those aspects that fall outside a concept’s main purpose, while being close to the OO approach. We present how roles can be made modular and reusable. We also show how we can use roles to compose classes using JavaStage, a java extension that support roles To validate our approach we developed generic and reusable roles for the Gang of Four patterns. We were able to develop reusable roles for 10 out of 23 patterns, which is a good outcome

Families of Roles: A new theory of occurrent-dependent roles

PublishedRoles are important both theoretically and practically for modelling the world around us. Although many theories of roles have been proposed, there remain aspects which are little understood. In this paper we investigate roles and their contexts from a temporal point of view.We introduce the idea of a family of occurrent-dependent roles as a means to organise prospective and retrospective derived roles around an original role from which they are derived. By this means we account for the existence of groups of similar roles which are difficult to distinguish without a careful analysis of the temporal aspects. Following detailed informal discussion, we present a preliminary formalisation of the key concepts and relations.Air Force Research Laborator

Aplicabilidad de B-CUBE al sector servicios

Ponencia presentada en el XII Congreso Internacional de Ingeniería de Proyectos celebrado en Zaragoza en el año 2008With the concept of globalization and the delegation of the tasks that major manpower need, the core of the economy of the capitals of the major world powers has derived to the tertiary sector (services sector). In this field to support the competitiveness is not enough, it is necessary continue improvement in order to not be displaced of the market by others. Functional design, widely used successfully in all the engineering fields, has been revealed as a useful tool in the tertiary sector, when it comes to design the companies and establish relations between departments based on functions that they play inside the company. B-Cube is a new approach to functional design through FBS framework. The above mentioned approach purposes a three dimensional scheme that uses definitions as Behaviours concepts. The key of this approach is that a Behaviour is not defined with a word or a taxon, which could cause ambiguity and misinterpretation, but rather defined as a three dimensional vector (X, Y, Z), set by its characteristics and qualities. In this work we present the process to elaborate a functional design of a company of the services sector through the B-Cube model, defended with a practical application.Con el concepto de globalización y la delegación de las tareas que mayor mano de obra requieren, el motor de la economía de las capitales de las mayores potencias mundiales ha derivado al sector terciario, los servicios. En este campo mantener la competitividad no es suficiente sino que es necesario mejorarla para no ser desplazado en el mercado por otros. El diseño funcional, ampliamente utilizado con éxito en todos los campos de la ingeniería, se ha revelado como una herramienta útil en el sector terciario, a la hora de diseñar las empresas y establecer relaciones entre los departamentos en base a las funciones que éstos desempeñan dentro de una empresa. B-Cube es un nuevo enfoque para el diseño funcional a través del marco FBS. Dicho enfoque propone un planteamiento tridimensional que utiliza definiciones a modo de conceptos de los Behaviours. La clave de este planteamiento es que un comportamiento no queda definido por una palabra o taxón, sino que el comportamiento viene definido como un vector tridimensional (X, Y, Z), determinado por sus características y cualidades. En este trabajo se presenta el proceso para elaborar un diseño funcional de una empresa del sector servicios a través del modelo B-Cube, defendido con una aplicación práctica

An Approach to Operationalize Regulative Norms in Multiagent Systems

International audienc

Modeling and programming with roles: introducing JavaStage

Roles are not a new concept, but they have been used in two different ways: as modeling concepts in a static view and as instance extensions in a dynamic view. For these views only the dynamic offers supporting languages. The static view, although proving the utility of roles in modeling, does not offer a programming language that allows developers to use roles all the way from modeling to programming. We try to overcome this by presenting our role language JavaStage, based on the Java language. We do this by designing and implementing a simple framework and then compare the results with its OO equivalent. Our results show that static roles are in fact useful when used in code and that JavaStage features expand role reuse

FRaMED: Full-Fledge Role Modeling Editor (Tool Demo)

Since the year 1977, role modeling has been continuously investigated as promising paradigm to model complex, dynamic systems. However, this research had almost no influence on the design of todays increasingly complex and context-sensitive software systems. The reason for that is twofold. First, most modeling languages focused either on the behavioral, relational or context-dependent nature of roles rather than combining them. Second, there is a lack of tool support for the design, validation, and generation of role-based software systems. In particular, there exists no graphical role modeling editor supporting the three natures as well as the various proposed constraints. To overcome this deficiency, we introduce the Full-fledged Role Modeling Editor (FRaMED), a graphical modeling editor embracing all natures of roles and modeling constraints featuring generators for a formal representation and source code of a rolebased programming language. To show its applicability for the development of role-based software systems, an example from the banking domain is employed