About ALL/CCSOM

The research group CCSOM (Center for Computer Science in Organization and Management) was founded with an NWO Pionier subsidy in 1990. It is is part of the ``Faculteit der Politieke en Sociaal-Culturele Wetenschappen'' of the ``Universiteit van Amsterdam''. Its research focusses on developing and applying logical methods in the social sciences, especially in organization and management (O&M) theory. Issues under investigation include the development of logical languages suitable for the representation of social domains, the formalization of informal (discursive) theories in these languages, and the computational reasoning over the acquired knowledge bases. CCSOM's research staff consists of mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists and social scientists with interdisciplinary orientation. The group works on several projects with members of the ILLC (UvA), Euridis (EUR), CS (VU) and others; internationally, we work closely together with (among others) researchers of the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Stanford University, and Carnegie Mellon. CCSOM is a member of the OzsL. Relevant projects of CCSOM are:

• Formalization

  The formalization of informal theories in logical languages, in order to evaluate and improve them, leads to several interesting research questions in the field of logic. First there is the rational reconstruction of the theory, the formal conceptualization of the domain and processes, which can be evaluated in terms of explanatory power, referentiality and coherence. At the same time, the formal tools and their respective merits are put to the test in their actual utilization. The fundamental algebraic framework provides a common ground to investigate the methodological properties of the representation languages.

• Non-standard logics

  It is necessary to develop specific languages which can accommodate the demands of the domain. For this reason, we have developed an multi-agent action logic (ALX) which allows us to represent actions, beliefs and preferences. The logic is based on Simon's conceptualization of rational actions, Kripke's possible world semantics, and Von Wright's preference logic. This does not only give us a full-fledged representational system for social processes; we also believe that it is possible to avoid the deontic paradoxes by incorporating a deontic system in ALX. Another important issue is the reasoning with incomplete and changing information. SITUP brings together partiality and dynamics, incorporating Barwise and Perry's situation semantics and Veltman's update logic. SITUP and ALX are both used for the formalization of organizational theories, but SITUP can also be used in the rational reconstruction of theories. By applying the update mechanism in a sequence of approximations, we expect the SITUP machinery to do a part of the reconstruction job for us.

• Automated Reasoning

  The formalizations serve as knowledge bases over which we can reason by means of computational tools. Metafor is the theorem prover for first order predicate logic with equality developed at CCSOM. It uses model generation to effect partial deduction on Horn clauses as a pre-processing step to provide information for heuristics to be applied. Also, it allows the user to furnish certain meta-information by giving type constraints on predicate slots or certain properties of binary relations. A new area of research is theorem finding, a general method to extend and refine the knowledge base, by using general resolution and by applying heuristics to search in an abstract representation of the core theory.