=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3249/paper1-OSS
|storemode=property
|title=Compass Needs Ontology: A Design Pattern for Representing Needs in Social
Work
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3249/paper1-OSS.pdf
|volume=Vol-3249
|authors=Daniela Rosu,Bart Gajderowicz,Mark Fox
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/jowo/0002GF22
}}
==Compass Needs Ontology: A Design Pattern for Representing Needs in Social
Work==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3249/paper1-OSS.pdf
Compass Needs Ontology: A Design Pattern for
Representing Needs in Social Work
Daniela Rosu1 , Mark S. Fox1 and Bart Gajderowicz1
1
Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, 5 King’s College Road, Toronto, Ontario,
M5S 3G8, Canada
Abstract
We present a design pattern aimed at supporting the formal representation of information about needs
collected in Social Work settings. The framework is designed to integrate with existing information repre-
sentation frameworks and allow extensions for documenting client progress during social interventions,
as well as extensions to support representing information pertinent to activities such as referring clients
to services, scheduling appointments, designing individual support plans and evaluating community
level needs and service gaps.
Keywords
ontology, knowledge representation, needs, social services, knowledge engineering
1. Motivation
Information that can be machine processed effectively is key to amplifying the success of Social
Work interventions. However, existing representational frameworks struggle to fully address
the challenge presented by this domain. Many of the terminologies developed and used by
the various communities of practice are informal and often incompatible, which hinders the
effectiveness of the collection, processing and sharing of information.
Formal information representation frameworks (e.g., ontologies) enable us to represent,
organize and store information within a domain of knowledge in ways that allow for automated
reasoning and can assist in the decision making processes of the domain practitioners. To our
knowledge, the client and community needs have been insufficiently formalized in the context
of Social Work, and we are proposing a framework whose key purpose is to address this.
Our framework aims to provide a common terminology that can be used for data storage and
access, as well as a methodology for operationalizing client and community information in a way
that allows for needs discovery and monitoring. The framework is designed to integrate with
existing ones and allow extensions to support representing information pertinent to activities
such as scheduling appointments, designing individual service plans, evaluating community
level needs and service gaps and documenting client and community progress during social
interventions.
The Eighth Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO’22), August 15-19, 2022, Jönköping University, Sweden
$ drosu@mie.utoronto.ca (D. Rosu); msf@mie.utoronto.ca (M. S. Fox); bartg@mie.utoronto.ca (B. Gajderowicz)
http://eil.utoronto.ca (M. S. Fox); http://bartg.org (B. Gajderowicz)
0000-0002-5877-9681 (D. Rosu); 0000-0001-7444-6310 (M. S. Fox); 0000-0001-6201-8781 (B. Gajderowicz)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
Our proposal provides formal definitions, in the form of an ontology, for the concepts that
capture core knowledge about needs in the Social Work domain. Besides its application as the
data infrastructure in Social Work information systems, this proposal can also help resolve
ambiguities and disagreements between the existing terminologies developed by various sub-
fields and communities of practice.
2. Background
To date, human needs have been the subject of scholarly investigation in a number of disciplines,
including anthropology, economics, psychology, philosophy, sociology and social work, e.g.,
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]. A rigorous conceptual analysis is thus warranted, that would
enable us to compare the notions of need promoted by the existing theories and select the
approaches that are amenable to operationalization in the context of Social Work.
Needs can be defined from many different perspectives, such as absolute vs relative, objective
vs subjective, normative (externally attributed) vs expressed (self-attributed), etc. There is,
for the moment, no consensus across fields on what the exact definition of a need should be.
We are taking in this work steps towards formulating a notion of need that can constitute the
foundation on which to build a principled operationalization of the provision of social services.
Current and past discussions on human needs contain several related, but distinct threads. A
substantial portion of the conversation is centered around identifying and defining the “basic
human needs”, their relations to other types of needs and their satisfaction, which is predicated
on moral desiderata such as respecting the universal human rights (that those needs induce)
and ensuring an equitable access to wealth.
Another, considerable, part of the discourse is focused on whether human needs are contingent
on (human) goals. This specific strand of contention is of particular interest to our work, which
seeks to support the movement towards grounding social work practice in measurable and
actionable evidence, and linking the provision of social services to expressed intentions (and
desired outcomes). It has been previously pointed out, e.g., [3], that despite their different
opinions, the so-called instrumentalists (for whom needs are dependent on goals) and absolutists
(who consider some needs as instrumental and others as absolute, existing independently from
goals) do seem to agree that needs, as ontological entities, do exist (and are of different types)
and that they are fulfilled by other, distinct, ontological entities, the need satisfiers. (A need can
be fulfilled by many satisfiers, and a satisfier can meet several different needs. We will come
back to this point later in this work.)
An often cited typology of needs is Maslow’s hierarchy, e.g., [3]. This hierarchal organization
of needs ranks them according to the order in which it is assumed they must be satisified, with
the ones at the bottom needing to be fulfilled before a person can progress to meeting the needs
at the higher levels. The well-known pyramid consists of, from base to the top: physiological,
security, social, esteem, and self-actualization needs. In a later classification [9], Max-Neef
categorizes needs as: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness,
creation, identity and freedom, and introduces the idea that human needs form a network
rather than a hierarchy. (He is also one of the first to discusses the role of need satisfiers in the
fulfillment of needs.)
More recently, Doyal and Gough advanced a grouping of needs into basic (i.e, physical health
and autonomy) and intermediate (akin to satisfiers that contribute to the fulfillment of the basic
needs). They also explicitly differentiate between needs (assumed to be objective) and wants
(assumed to be subjective perceptions interpreted as needs).
Often, we infer and articulate our (and other’s) needs as a result of a cognitive process that
also has as outcome a potential satisfier (for the need we are trying to communicate). This leads
to expressing needs via proxy, by stating that a potential satisfier ‘‘is needed’’. For example,
when someone says ‘‘I need a cup of coffee’’, we can infer that they may in fact feel a bit sluggish
and that getting coffee (a need satisfier) would transition them to a (desired) state where they
feel alert. The issue with this approach is that stating a need satisfier as the need may cloud the
true nature of the need.
We also articulate our needs as changes in our situation, e.g., I need to improve my writing
skills and it is this particular approach that is essential to our ontological framework, and will
be expanded upon in the following sections. (In the previous example, it is moving from feeling
sluggish to feeling alert, that the person needed, and this can be accomplished in many different
ways, not just be ingesting coffee.)
After this brief overview of the state of the art regarding the conceptualization of needs,
we will now turn to the presentation of our proposal. Our approach, which also includes
representing client states, problems, and goals in addition to needs and need satisfiers was
informed by the use cases provided by the COMPASS project1 and by those collected during
our previous work with local social services agencies.
In agreement with [12], we consider that, from an ontological point of view, needs are closely
related to motivational attitudes, while from an epistemological one, they are the outcome of a
cognitive process that involves the beliefs of the agents participating in the decision making
activity. This cognitive process also includes selecting need satisfiers that could contribute
to reaching the goal(s) that were the starting point of the process. In our approach, however,
although we introduce a methodology that allows for, and requires, an explicit connection
between goals and needs, we do not consider that once a need satisfier X is selected, ‘‘the
need for X becomes an instrumental goal’’, as goals precede the articulation of needs in our
framework.
The ontological choices we have made in this work are aimed at enabling a representation
of the knowledge in the Social Work domain that supports the structuring of client manage-
ment and social services provision based explicitly, and traceably, on needs and need satisfiers.
(Because of our main focus is on operationalizing needs in the context of social services provi-
sioning, we do not engage at this moment with the debate around distinguishing between needs
and wants that occurs in political and social discourse.) Among those choices we mention that
no distinction is made between needs and desires, and that the focus is on ‘‘instrumentalist’’
needs. While the formalization of needs in the context of social service has been considered in
previous work, e.g., [3], although without an accompanying software artifact (i.e., ontology),
open access evidence of conceptual analysis and formalization of client states, problems, and
goals is scant.
The intended semantics of the concepts in the proposed representational framework are
described in natural language. The framework is axiomatized in the Web Ontology Language
1
https://www.digitalsupercluster.ca/projects/compass/
(OWL), with the resulting artifact being part of the COMPASS Ontology2 The ontology has been
designed to facilitate the correct management and exchange of client and services information
among the systems operating in the Social Work domain. Among the applications we have
considered are social services modeling, matching services to client needs, individual and group
service planning (including scheduling appointments and issuing referrals).
3. Ontology Development
The representational design pattern was developed according to the following steps:
• Requirements gathering. A clear understanding of the domain and required scope of
the ontology was developed by sourcing motivating scenarios, provided as User Stories
and specified as Competency Questions, by the partner COMPASS organizations.
• Reuse of existing ontologies. Whenever possible, existing ontologies suitable for reuse
were identified and incorporated in the development.
• Ontology design and implementation. The concepts to be included in the ontology
were identified with a combined approach: (1) bottom-up, from the motivating scenarios
provided by the partner organizations, as well as (2) top-down, from pertinent literature
in the relevant domains, e.g., Social Work, Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology.
• Evaluation. The evaluation of the ontology design pattern is addressed in the following
ways:
– Competency: the terminology is assessed for completeness against the competency
questions specified in the Requirements gathering stage and for appropriateness by
verification by domain experts.
– Consistency: the ontology is verified using an automated reasoner to demonstrate
its internal logical consistency
Our approach utilizes the ontology design patterns approach as a semantic device that facilitates
the operationalization of needs and the building of technology to support the provisioning of
social services. Linking to appropriate concept in upper ontologies will be undertaken in future
work.
3.1. Use Cases and Competency Questions
Our COMPASS partner organizations developed a set of Competency Questions based on use
cases provided by their domain experts and we supplemented this initial set with questions
we developed independently with the help of local providers of social services. Competency
Questions are a set of questions that a representational framework must be capable of answering.
For example, “What are the needs of client X?” or “What are the problems client X presented
with?”. (An in-depth discussion of the uses cases provided by the domain experts is beyond the
scope of this paper and in the following we will refer directly to the questions developed based
on them.)
In the remainder of this section we introduce the main concepts and properties that comprise
the proposed design pattern, motivated by the relevant competency questions (CQ, for short).
2
available at https://github.com/csse-uoft/compass-ontology
The purpose of this core is to axiomatize a set of intuitive semantic primitives that is adequate
for describing the fundamental concepts related to clients of social services. The characterization
of basic client related concepts makes few assumptions beyond what is needed to describe them
and has, therefore a relatively weak logical expressiveness. The basic ontological commitments
of our proposal are based on intuitions that will be detailed before introducing each concept
(and property).
3.2. States
CQ: What is the current state of my client?
Ontology classes: HumanState, 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒, 𝐶𝑢𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒, 𝐷𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒, 𝑆𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙𝐵𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑟
We define a human state as a person’s condition with respect to circumstances, often, but not
necessarily durable or lasting. Human states range from simple physiological states as feeling
full / hungry to complex cognitive constructs, such as feeling successful in one’s chosen career.
We specialize human states by introducing client states, which are states that are relevant
to the practice of Social Work and we assume that regardless of their 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒, clients
prefer to be in certain states, their desired states. (Depending on the community of practice,
client states can be further divided into various categories, e.g., survival/existence, welfare,
interpersonal relatedness, flourishing. There is no consensus in the field, and many different
categorizations of states exist.) Property hasClientState links client instances to client states.
∀𝑥, 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥) → 𝐻𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥) (1)
∀𝑥, 𝐶𝑢𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥) (2)
∀𝑥, 𝐷𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥) (3)
∀𝑥, 𝑦, ℎ𝑎𝑠𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥, 𝑦) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡(𝑥) ∧ 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑦) (4)
In our framework, client states are conceptually connected to client characteristics or features.
(In this work, we use the two terms interchangeably.) This can be used to operationalize the
connection between the information gathered about a client (e.g., at intake and during various
assessments) and that client’s states. For example, the state is of age of majority is induced by
the fulfillment of the condition that the person’s age3 is greater than 18 or 19 in the province
the person is assessed in4 . Abuses substances is a state induced by the person having a medical
diagnosis of addiction, a history of social services access for help with dependency issues or
self-declared substance abuse-related problems. A refugee’s lack of English or French language
skills render them unable to communicate in the official languages. A client’s acquiring or
changing of status5 also induces a change in the client’s state. When the status of a Canadian
resident changes, for example, from ‘‘temporary worker’’ to ‘‘landed immigrant’’, this induces a
new state in the person, is immigrant. This change, in turn, makes the person eligible to receive
settlement services funded by the Ministry of Immigration and Citizenship (another change in
state).
3
Age is a client’s characteristic
4
18 years of age in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Prince Edward Island, and Saskatchewan, and 19 years of
age in British Columbia, New Brunswick, Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Nunavut, Yukon, and Newfoundland.
5
A status is a standing or position (relative to that of others) in the eyes of the law or some other form of
recognized authority. Commonly occurring examples are the various disability statuses, as recognized by disability
associations and service provider agencies, and immigration statuses, as recognized by a country’s government.
We take the opportunity to note that, in general, many different terminologies can co-exist
within a field to indicate states, statuses, etc. For example, the Canadian Ministry of Immigration
and Citizenship has developed the following methodology to determine the immigration status of
a person (and it requires all settlement agencies that it funds to use it):
• ‘‘Non-immigrant’’: person who is a Canadian citizen by birth;
• ‘‘Immigrant’’:
– person who is, or who has ever been, a landed immigrant or a permanent resident;
– person who is a Canadian citizen by naturalization;
• ‘‘Non-permanent resident’’: person who resides in Canada and does not have Canadian
citizenship and who is not landed immigrant or a permanent resident.
Various local governments and agencies have, however, introduced alternative terminologies to
specify the immigration status of a person in ways that better suit their needs6 and it is therefore
desirable for the information systems operating in this space to be able to handle multiple
parallel vocabularies. Our proposal supports associating the instances of various ontology
classes with multiple such externally defined codes in a traceable way (i.e., each code can be
linked to the organization that developed and maintains it). 7
It must be noted that in practice client states are often inferred manually by social workers
and asserted directly in the client files. Nonetheless, supporting mechanisms for defining a
client’s state based on primary information recorded about that person in an information system
allows organizations to link the data they collect to client outcomes8 in a way that allows them
to measure and track their impact throughout their interactions with the client.
Client States as Barriers. Certain human states constitute (social) barriers to achieving other
states. A social barrier (ontology class SocialBarrier) is a condition in which people are born,
grow, live, learn, work and age that can contribute to decreased functioning and difficulty in
meeting their needs or accessing services, e.g.:
• being homeless is a barrier to becoming employed / achieving sustainable employment
• experiencing (mental) health issues is a barrier to being stably housed
• lacking proficiency in English / French is a barrier to social integration (e.g., for a new-
comer to Canada)
• stigmatization / being stigmatized is a barrier to re-integration in society (e.g., for a
convict)
• underemployment / being underemployed is a barrier to achieving financial stability
∀𝑥, 𝑆𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙𝐵𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑟(𝑥) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥) (5)
Sometimes barriers are described by social workers in the form of challenges. These challenges
can be mapped to client states in our framework, e.g., a person who ‘‘is facing language barriers’’
is unable to communicate effectively in any or both official languages.
6
‘‘Canadian citizen by birth’’, ‘‘temporary resident’’, ‘‘convention refugee’’, ‘‘refugee claimant’’, etc..
7
In our proposal, an instance of most ontology classes can be associated with terminology (i.e., codes) developed
by external communities of practice via property hasCode
8
Outcomes are also connected to client characteristics, and therefore to client states
It is worth mentioning that often a social service’s goals are stated in terms of reducing
or removing barriers, in order to help clients achieve their own goals. For example, one of
the goals of a service that provides job skills training is to reduce barriers to employment
for its beneficiaries. (The achievement of this service goal can be assessed by measuring the
improvement in job-related skills experienced by the clients who completed the program,
under the assumption that improvements in clients’ job-related skills reduce their employment
barriers.)
The basic 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒 class has the following properties:
• 𝑖𝑠𝐵𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑟𝐹 𝑜𝑟: links to instances of type ClientState that specify the other states that
could be adversely affected by this state.
∀𝑥, 𝑦, 𝑖𝑠𝐵𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑟𝐹 𝑜𝑟(𝑥, 𝑦) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥) ∧ 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑦) (6)
• ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑇 𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑆𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑒: specifies the timescale of the state, e.g., ‘‘acute’’, ‘‘chronic’’, ‘‘short-
term’’, ‘‘long-term’’, ‘‘medium-term’’.
∀𝑥, 𝑦, ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑇 𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑆𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑒(𝑥) = 𝑦 → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥) (7)
• ℎ𝑎𝑠𝐶𝑜𝑑𝑒: specifies zero or more codes, created by various organizations, to identify a
type of state for the client.
∀𝑥, 𝑦, ℎ𝑎𝑠𝐶𝑜𝑑𝑒(𝑥, 𝑦) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒(𝑥) ∧ 𝐶𝑜𝑑𝑒(𝑦) (8)
Properties hasStatus and hasClientState link instances of clients to instances that specify, re-
spectively, their status and state.
3.3. Risks
CQ: What is my client at risk of?
Ontology classes: 𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑘, 𝑃 𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑘, 𝑃 𝑢𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑘
Social workers often perform vulnerability assessments to identify the risks present in a client’s
life. A client risk describes a situation involving exposure to danger, something that may cause
loss or injury, such as the risk of becoming homeless, the risk of becoming unemployed, and
the risk of becoming a victim of sexual exploitation. In our framework, risk (class Risk) captures
the uncertainty with respect to human states. Life events increase/decrease or materialize those
risks and may induce changes in client states. For example:
• losing one’s housing materializes the risk of becoming homeless. (New client state: is
unhoused.)
• losing one’s job materializes the risk of becoming unemployed. (New client state: is
unemployed.)
• becoming addicted to methamphetamines increases the risk of becoming unemployed.
(New client state is at risk of becoming unemployed.)
• falling in with dangerous/antisocial individuals increases the risk of becoming an offender.
(New client state: is at risk of becoming an offender.)
Two categories of risk are especially relevant in Social Work:
• private, i.e. the risk concerns only the client;
• public, i.e., the risk concerns not just a client but also the community9 .
Clients are sometimes described as being ‘‘at risk’’ of moving into or experiencing a particular
state. Being ‘‘at risk’’ of moving into / experiencing a state, e.g., (being) at risk of becoming
homeless is, by itself, a client state. In other words, the risks present in a client’s life induces
client states. Social workers may associate a likelihood, severity, or potency score with each
risk identified10 .
A risk factor is something that increases the risk of a person (to develop or enter a condition
or state). For example ‘‘housing precarity’’ increases a person’s risk of becoming homeless.
Risk factors are often divided into categories that are meaningful for a specific community of
practice. For example, risk can be categorization according to its perceived source, such as
physical, psychosocial or personal:
• physical individual risk factor (e.g., lack or precarity of shelter, lack or precarity of food)
• psychosocial individual risk factor (low social status, loneliness, helplessness, lack of
work)
• person’s individual risk factor (e.g., addiction to alcohol, two detox treatments over the
past 3 years, aggressive behavior, convicted and imprisoned twice for petty theft, etc.)
After a risk or vulnerability assessment, a social worker would typically record in a client’s file
the risks and risk factors identified during the assessment. At system level, instances of Client,
Risk and RiskFactor classes get linked via properties hasRisk, hasRiskFactor, and isRiskFactorFor.
∀𝑥, 𝑦, ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑘(𝑥, 𝑦) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡(𝑥) ∧ 𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑘(𝑦) (9)
∀𝑥, 𝑦, ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑘𝐹 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟(𝑥, 𝑦) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡(𝑥) ∧ 𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑘𝐹 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟(𝑦) (10)
∀𝑥, 𝑦, 𝑖𝑠𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑘𝐹 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝐹 𝑜𝑟(𝑥, 𝑦) → 𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑘𝐹 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟(𝑥) ∧ 𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑘(𝑦) (11)
Some risks (e.g., risk of being neglected) can be prevented, modified or controlled through
interventions, and social services goals are often stated in terms of reducing, eliminating,
avoiding, preventing or controlling (client) risks or risk factors, e.g.:
• A service that provides counselling to recently released inmates aims to reduce their risk
of reoffending.
• Placing vulnerable minors in foster care aims to avoid them living in inadequate home
conditions, a risk factor that increases the risk of abuse and the risk of exploitation.
3.4. Problems
CQ: What are my client’s problems?
Ontology classes: 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑃 𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑚
We assume that the difference between the actual and the desired client states (or the existence
of a risk related to exiting a desired state) is perceived by clients and social workers as a problem
9
Timely recognition and designation of relevant client risks as public risks is very important because addressing
them may involve complex, coordinated interventions across multiple agencies and government bodies.
10
Depending on jurisdiction / community of practice, the severity score is assigned a textual value, e.g., “high”,
“medium”, “low” or a numerical value, e.g., 0, 1, 2.
to be solved. A (client) problem (class ClientProblem) is thus a cognitive representation of the
discrepancy between an actual client state and a desired client state.
The use of the term problem has a long pedigree in Social Work. Problems are used to identify
the key areas related to clients’ circumstances (that are relevant for social work practice) and
are often recorded in client files as proxies for client needs. We also assume that a problem
activates the client’s and/or the social worker’s motivation to solve it. This, in turn, leads to
formulating goals for achieving the desired change in state(s), identifying the needs related to
attaining the goals, picking satisfiers for those needs and selecting services that provide the
satisfiers,
Property hasProblem links instances of clients to instances of class ClientProblem that specify
the problems that the client is facing.
∀𝑥, 𝑦, ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑃 𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡(𝑥) ∧ 𝑃 𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑚(𝑦) (12)
3.5. Goals
CQ: What are my client’s current goals?
Ontology classes: 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝐺𝑜𝑎𝑙
Alleviating, resolving or eliminating a (client) problem is integral to the operationalization of
needs. The first step after a problem is identified is to determine the goals associated with
solving it. A client’s goal is the aim of that person’s ambition or effort, and is captured via class
ClientGoal. Property hasGoal links clients to their goals.
Goals can be divided based on various criteria, and can be formulated at several levels of
abstraction, according to what is suitable for the relevant community of practice. A goal can
consist of several sub-goals whose fulfillment contributes to meeting the parent goal. Instances
of type ClientGoal can be linked to other ClientGoal instances via property hasSubGoal. Goals
reveal a client’s needs. Property inducesClientNeed links goals to the needs they engender.
∀𝑥, 𝑦, ℎ𝑎𝑠𝐺𝑜𝑎𝑙(𝑥, 𝑦) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡(𝑥) ∧ 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝐺𝑜𝑎𝑙(𝑦) (13)
∀𝑥, 𝑦, ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑆𝑢𝑏𝐺𝑜𝑎𝑙(𝑥, 𝑦) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝐺𝑜𝑎𝑙(𝑥) ∧ 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝐺𝑜𝑎𝑙(𝑦) (14)
∀𝑥, 𝑦, 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑒𝑠𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑁 𝑒𝑒𝑑(𝑥, 𝑦) → 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝐺𝑜𝑎𝑙(𝑥) ∧ 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑁 𝑒𝑒𝑑(𝑦) (15)
3.6. Needs
What are the unmet needs of client X? What needs are clients presenting to staff?
Ontology classes: 𝐶𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑁 𝑒𝑒𝑑, 𝑁 𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑁 𝑒𝑒𝑑, 𝐸𝑥𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑑𝑁 𝑒𝑒𝑑
Needs provide the conceptual focus for social work practice and several theoretical conceptual-
izations of human needs have been developed to date (reviewed in section 2). In view of Social
Work’s imperative to act in a concrete manner to alleviate the situations experienced by clients,
in our framework,
• a need is explicitly connected to a goal, and through that to the problem that induced it;
• meeting a need has as a consequence the fulfillment or partial fulfillment of the goal that
induced it.
In our ontology, a client need (class ClientNeed) defines the changes needed in a client’s state and
relies on two elements: (1) a type of measurable feature that would be changed (or maintained),
such as life skills or mental health state, and (2) an action (e.g., improve, acquire, develop) that
enacts the change (or maintains the status quo).
Operationalizing needs as differences between measurable/observable features allows us to:
• infer a client’s current needs
• check the satisfaction of a need via observable client outcomes.
Client needs assessment instruments used in social work collect two types of needs (used for
prioritizing services as well as for reporting on client outcomes and client satisfaction):
• normative needs, those identified by the social worker or clinician administering the
assessment instrument
• expressed needs, those described by the client, parent or legal guardian.
A client need can be both normative and expressed. Social workers must also assess the acuity
(e.g., intensity, importance, or urgency, depending on the specific context) of each one of a
client’s needs based on the client’s circumstances. The result of the assessment is embodied in
an acuity score, which can be associated with client needs as well as with clients themselves,
and is used to prioritize (1) the satisfaction of a client’ needs when resources are limited and (2)
a client’s access to services11 . Property hasAcquityScore specifies the acuity level, as assessed by
a healthcare/social work practitioner.
3.7. Areas of Concern
CQ: What needs related to housing and homelessness are being referred for?
Ontology classes: 𝐴𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑜𝑓 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑟𝑛
In the practice of Social Work, client needs are often are grouped by reference to areas of concern,
e.g. health-related needs, employment-related needs, parenting-related needs, housing-related
needs and needs related to (re-)offending. The grouping of needs based on areas of concern
aligns well with our conceptualization of need. The areas of concern, also referred to as areas
of need, are defined by each community of practice. A need may belong to several areas of
concern. (The areas of concern are also used to categorize the problems from which the client
needs arise.)
3.8. Need Satisfiers
CQ: Which (local) services match my client’s unmet needs?
CQ: What supports are available (locally) for my client?
CQ: Which services match mental health-related needs?
Ontology classes: 𝑁 𝑒𝑒𝑑𝑆𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑓 𝑖𝑒𝑟
Needs are met by need satisfiers, which include various categories of beings, havings, doings
or interactings, from concrete resources such as goods and money, to the more abstract laws,
mechanisms, tools, processes, opportunities and settings where the needs are met. In our
11
Some service eligibility conditions specify that the client’s acuity must be, for example, “high” or “medium-high”.
framework, need satisfiers, represented by class NeedSatisfier, are provided via social services.
This helps define a clear relationship between social services and the target needs, via the ‘‘need
satisfier’’ being provided. Many communities of practice divide need satisfiers in the following
categories:
• resources (e.g., goods, money, facilities, housing)
• knowledge and information (e.g., training, coaching, education, legal advice)
• supports (e.g., companionship, supported transportation)
Property forNeed links instances of need satisfiers to instances of Need that specify the needs
the satisfier (partially) fulfills. Property changes links to instances of ClientState that specify the
client states changed by the satisfier.
3.9. Evaluation
We have evaluated our proposed ontology for correctness and completeness by demonstrating
that it meets all the requirements captured in the competency questions provided by our partners.
We provided in a recent paper, [13], the details of the evaluation, including translations of
the competency questions into SPARQL queries. In this paper we focused on presenting the
details the ontological analysis that provided the conceptual underpinning for the proposed
formalization of client problems, goals and needs, and need satisfiers.
4. Conclusion
Up to now, in social work practice, client needs have been recorded via proxy as the social
services provided, or recommended to be provided to the client. This approach obscures the
actual client needs and makes it difficult to properly assess the gap in social services provision
as well as the impact of social interventions.
With the work presented in this paper we have contributed towards a deeper understanding
of the concept of need (as relevant to Social Work practice) and grounded its operationalization
in measurable client features. The core ontology we have proposed allows for the recording of
needs in a way that not only illuminates their connection to the client states they are rooted in
but also makes clear and traceable the link to the social services provided to meet them (via the
satisfiers they supply).
The ontology was evaluated (1) for competency/completeness by demonstrating that it can
answer the competency questions provided by subject matter experts via SPARQL queries and
(2) for consistency via logical reasoning.
In future work we plan to extend our ontology to encompass community needs and facilitate
the analysis of service provisioning at community level, the identification of service gaps and
the optimization of the service supply mix. We also plan to analyze and operationalize client
satisfaction and its connection with the goals and outcomes achieved.
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