Accountability as a Foundation for Requirements in Sociotechnical Systems

Chopra, Amit K. and Singh, Munindar P. (2021) Accountability as a Foundation for Requirements in Sociotechnical Systems. IEEE Internet Computing, 25 (6). pp. 33-41. ISSN 1089-7801

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Abstract

We understand sociotechnical systems (STSs) as uniting social and technical tiers to provide abstractions for capturing how autonomous principals interact with each other. Accountability is a foundational concept in STSs and an essential component of achieving ethical outcomes. In simple terms, accountability involves identifying who can call whom to account and who must provide an accounting of what and when. Although accountability is essential in any application involving autonomous parties, established methods do not support it. We formulate an accountability requirement as one where one principal is accountable to another regarding some conditional expectation. Our metamodel for STSs captures accountability requirements as relational constructs inspired from legal concepts, such as commitments, authorization, and prohibition. We apply our metamodel to a healthcare process and show how it helps address the problems of ineffective interaction identified in the original case study.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
IEEE Internet Computing
Additional Information:
©2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1700/1705
Subjects:
?? computer networks and communicationscomputer networks and communications ??
ID Code:
167367
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
14 Mar 2022 09:45
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
12 Feb 2024 00:45