An Agent Oriented Ontology of Social Reality

In this paper we introduce an ontology based on the notion of agent to represent and reason about social reality. We model social constructions as agents, for example, groups, organizations, normative systems, and roles, and we attribute mental attitudes to them. Roughly, we define obligations or regulative norms as goals of the normative system, constitutive norms as beliefs of the normative system, joint, shared, mutual and social beliefs, desires and goal as beliefs, desires and goals of group, responsibilities of an agent as goals of the role he plays, and the required expertise of an agent as beliefs and actions of the role he plays. In this way, we achieve a uniform framework for a large variety of concepts using a small vocabulary, and, in particular, basing it on notions, like mental attitudes, which are commonly used in agent theories. The proposed ontology is modelled using a description logic.