MOCA: An ORM model for computational accountability

Accountability is often seen as a key notion in distributed systems, both in the human world and in software, on top of which interaction is built, together with the sibling notion of responsibility. However, there is limited support for the specification and use of such concepts in computational settings. This paper proposes an information model for computational accountability, which describes what data have to be available to allow, in any situation of interest arising from a group of interacting parties, the investigation and identification of accountability. The characterization of accountability provided by the model is grounded in the notions of just expectation and control. The information model is expressed in Object-Role Modeling (ORM), since it is well-suited to capture the relational nature of the accountability concept. An advantage of our model is that a designer can verify the consistency of a domain w.r.t. a set of accountability requirements. The paper exemplifies this checking by means of an Answer Set Program (ASP).