An Ontology Network in Finance and Economics: Money, Trust, Value, Risk and Economic Exchanges

Finance and information technology are deeply intertwined and have been mutually reinforcing over time. Historically, finance has played a key role in innovation in the
overall economy. The industrial revolution of the XVIII and XIX centuries, for example, was facilitated by the provision of capital provided by financial intermediaries.
Similarly, information technology lies at the very heart of the financial sector. New technology developments can foster greater efficiency and financial inclusion, as well as to improve the quality and reduce the costs of financial products and services. However, at the same time that they open several opportunities, these advances may also pose significant challenges. In fact, much of the literature on finance history shows that several challenges faced by the financial sector over the years are interwoven with technological issues.
Over the past few decades, innovative technologies, such as blockchains, cryptocur-
rencies, asset tokenization, and central bank digital currencies have revolutionized the world of money, payments, and economic exchanges. They have fostered the creation of financial products and services on top of decentralized technologies, giving rise to the concept of decentralized finance — the decentralized provision of financial products and services. Although these new developments have the power to make payments and other financial services cheaper, faster and more accessible, they also pose several challenges related to the safeguarding of financial stability, the definition of law and regulation, the adjustment of current regulatory frameworks, among many others. In this new scenario, as nicely put by the Darwinian evolutionary theory, success is directly related to the ability to promptly adapt to evolution and respond adequately to the changes in the environment.
In this work, we claim that many challenges faced by the finance sector due to recent
innovations, are related to a lack of conceptual clarity, which hinders the communica-
tion among the different actors in the financial industry, and consequently, the definition of laws, regulations and proper governance models. Also, without a common understanding about concepts it is difficult to integrate information and provide semantic interoperability. However, the vast majority of initiatives developed to provide an unified view of these domains share two common limitations: (1) they are not specified using an ontologically well-founded conceptual modeling language, supported by expressive logical theories, which allows the representation of the subject domain with truthfulness, clarity and expressivity and (2) they were conceived in the light of the traditional finance paradigm, and consequently, do not address issues that have arisen with the introduction of decentralized finance, like the emergence of new forms of trust, money and payment instruments, as well as new business models for economic exchanges.
In this thesis, we address these limitations by means of ontologically well-founded
reference conceptual models to make the nature of the conceptualizations explicit, as
well as to safely establish the correct relations between them, thereby supporting se-
mantic interoperability. In particular, we focus on the notions of money, trust, value,
risk and economic exchanges, as these are intertwined concepts, directly related to recent challenges faced by the financial industry, due to emergence of new technologies.
One main contribution of this thesis is the Ontology Network in Finance and Economics (OntoFINE), a network of reference ontologies, grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology, which provides ontological foundations on money, trust, value, risk and economic exchanges. We demonstrate the usability and relevance of OntoFINE by means of several applications in the fields of requirements engineering, enterprise modeling, decentralized finance and game theory.