A Path to an Ontology of Organizations

This paper presents a preliminary proposal of an ontology of organizations based on DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering). An ontological analysis of organizations is the first, fundamental and ineliminable pillar on which to build a precise and rigourous enterprise modelling. An ontological analysis makes explicit the social structure that underlies every organizational settings. In particular, the paper tries to explain what are organizations, roles and norms, how they are interrelated, what it means for a norm to be valid in an organiza- tion and what it means for an agent to be affiliated to an organization.