Needs as mental attitudes. An ontological study for PA's service design.

The area of Information Science recently got interested in understanding needs and using this notion as a guiding conceptual device to represent and manage PA’s services, where the citizen-focused approach requires the individuation of different types of needs. The purpose of this dissertation is to take some steps forward in this direction, trying to distinguish different notions of ‘need’ able to provide a focus around which PA’s services design system can be structured and made accessible. Studying needs-driven services implies taking into consideration cognitive aspects (e.g. citizens’needs, expectations, desires) as well as social aspects (e.g. services, rules, laws, institutions), for the purpose of understanding and communicating relevant knowledge about what we aim to design; ontologies are considered powerful tools in this respect. In this dissertation, we will assume an interdisciplinary research methodology that ranges from philosophical ontology to ontology engineering, as well as cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and knowledge representation. In particular, we will ground this work on DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering). The choice of DOLCE is motivated by its ontological commitment to its being tailored to commonsense representations of cognitive agents, rather than on the constitution of the ‘reality’ as prescribed by science. This feature brings to the core of DOLCE the importance of modeling mental and social realms and thus makes it particularly suitable for structuring needs-driven services systems. Our analysis will start with reviewing and discussing the contemporary philosophical debate about theories of needs. Then we will attempt to single out different ontological notions of needs and, more specifically, characterize them as a kind of mental attitude. This will bring us to face classic philosophical issues related to intentionality, proposing our theory about intentional objects. Interpreting needs as types of mental attitudes is consistent with most approaches on BDI (belief-desireintention) models that have been developed for reasoning and planning with mental states. In this respect, we will try to complement the BDI perspective with our theory of needs and intentionality, by providing a formalized ontology of mental states. Finally, the philosophical background will be used to develop an ontology for needs-driven services in Protégé-OWL.