About Deontik

Deontik was founded in 2004 by Andrew Berry and Zoran Milosevic to continue a productive collaboration first established at DSTC, and to leverage their complementary research and commercial experience.

The name Deontik is derived from the Greek word deon, meaning duty or of that which is binding or obligatory. Philosopher Ernst Mally developed a logic of permissions, prohibitions and obligations that he called his Deontik. Subsequent authors have refined this logic and it is known as Deontic Logic. We use this logic in the specification of business policies and contracts.

Mission and Principles

Our mission is to apply leading edge enterprise distributed computing in support of business needs through integrating people, policy and process.

Our guiding principles are:

• Provide business value — through aligning business and IT
• Empower users — through ownership and control over systems
• Emphasise predictability and compliance — through explicit process and policy
• Support guided evolution — through strategic systems thinking
• Ensure quality — through deep technical competency
• Ensure fit for purpose — through understanding client needs

Activities

Since inception, Deontik has been engaged in various consulting activities, and its principals have published a number of new and innovative research papers. We are also collaborating with Rising Sun to build a leading-edge platform for complex event processing.

The Deontik founders have made significant contributions to open standards, including:

• ISO/ITU-T standards for Open Distributed Processing (ODP), ODP Enterprise Language and the UML profile for ODP
• OMG Standards for UML, UML profile for ODP and Organisational Structure
• OASIS standards for legalXML, and in particular, the e-contracts specification
• The ebXML Business Process Specification Schema

Many of these contributions were made through our previous involvement with DSTC.