Group Conflict as Social Contradiction - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 50

fine-grained ontological representation of aggregation procedures that would enable
modeling the dynamics of group formation and change, possibly motivated by
conflicts, besides allowing us to distinguish between types of groups in terms of
the properties of the aggregation procedure that is endorsed. A close examination of
the norms that specifically apply to groups is then compelling (Aldewereld et al.
2014 ). The next step is to integrate our analysis within the general framework
of a foundational ontology such as DOLCE . Complex aggregation procedures
can be applied to treat the rich internal structure of organizations (Boella et al.
2004 ; Bottazzi and Ferrario 2009 ), for example by defining the notion of sub-
organization and by formalizing the relationship between the different modules.
To that extent, we have started developing a module for ascribing agency to groups
and organization in Porello et al. ( 2014 ). This leads towards a generalization of
our model to provide an understanding of the ascription of agency to complex
social systems and socio-technical systems and to apply our treatment of conflicts in
such complex social constructions. In particular, modeling socio-technical systems
requires to integrate information coming from heterogeneous agents, human and
artificial, and it is important to deploy conceptual tools, such as those that we
have discussed, that provide a precise description of the concept of aggregate
information. We have presented a number of applications of the methodology of
SCT to model systemic information in socio-technical systems in Porello et al.
( 2014 ), we plan to integrate that analysis with the present investigation of conflict
and social contradictions in order to grasp situation of crisis in socio-technical
systems.

Acknowledgements D. Porello and R. Ferrario are supported by the VisCoSo project, financed by
the Autonomous Province of Trento, “Team 2011” funding programme. E. Bottazzi is supported
by the STACCO project, financed by the Autonomous Province of Trento, “Postdoc 2011” funding
programme.

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