Considering Collectives: Roles, Members and Goals

There is a growing need across many disciplines to be able to model and reason about groups of individuals (i.e., collectives) resulting in an increased interest within the field of ontology. In previous work a taxonomy of collectives was presented that allowed a user to distinguish the different types of collectives. The taxonomy classified each collective according to five criteria: membership, coherence, location, differentiation of role and depth. However the taxonomy is found to be lacking in terms of: addressing how changes in membership affect the identity of the collective, recognising the importance of role, and its sensitivity to temporal scope. Drawing from existing research this paper discusses how a collective can only be sufficiently characterised by considering the relationship between a collective, its members, the roles that they play and the coherence criteria (i.e., the reason that we consider a phenomenon to be a collective). Preliminary updates are suggested for the taxonomy that will allow collectives to be sufficiently characterised.