Obligations and Delegation in the ODP Enterprise Language

The ODP Enterprise Language is used to describe the organizational objectives and policies that apply to the system to be specified. It also captures constraints associated with the environment in which the system is to be used. Because the enterprise specification is concerned more with organizational issues than technical details of the system, there is considerable emphasis in the language design on obligations and norms, rather than on the declaration of some single rigidly required behaviour. This leads to a requirement for specification techniques that encompass a wide range of behaviour and then identify which behaviour should occur and how exceptions are to be handled, this is more challenging than computational specification, where the specification is essentially a recognizer for correct behaviour and does not define what is to happen if there are violations. This paper describes work currently in progress within the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to extend the Enterprise Language so that it is able to express more directly the necessary obligations and other deontic concepts, such as permissions and prohibitions. The approach being taken is to introduce a new kind of object that reifies the deontic constraints and thereby simplifies the description of the behaviour expected. Once the basic concepts are in place, they can be used to define a wide range of organizational matters, such as delegation rules and the way communities respond dynamically to changes in their structure.