A Core Ontology for Economic Exchanges

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the development of well-founded conceptual models for Service Management, Accounting Information Systems and Financial Reporting. Economic exchanges are a central notion in these areas and they occupy a prominent position in frameworks such as the Resource-Event Action (REA) ISO Standard, service core ontologies (e.g., UFO-S) as well as financial standards (e.g. OMG's Financial Industry Business Ontology -FIBO). We present a core ontology for economic exchanges inspired by a recent view on this phenomenon. According to this view, economic exchanges are based on an agreement on the actions that the agents are committed to perform. This view enables a unified treatment of economic exchanges, regardless the object of the transaction. We ground our core ontology on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), discussing its formal and conceptual aspects, instantiating it as a reusable OntoUML model, and confronting it with the REA standard and the UFO-S service ontology.

UFO: Unified Foundational Ontology

“…agriculture (Neves and Cruvinel, 2021;Niederkofler et al, 2019) accounting (Blums and Weigand, 2021;Fischer-Pauzenberger and Schwaiger, 2017;Fraller, 2019;Laurier et al, 2018) business processes (Guizzardi and Wagner, 2011a;Guizzardi et al, 2016;Santos Júnior et al, 2010; van Wingerde and Weigand, 2020) biodiversity (Albuquerque et al, 2015) bioinformatics (Gonçalves et al, 2011;Rodrigues et al, 2017) branding (Elikan, 2019) communities (Almeida and Guizzardi, 2013) capabilities (Azevedo et al, 2015) competition (Sales et al, 2018c) data processing (Moura et al, 2021) decision making (Guizzardi et al, 2020;Richetti et al, 2019) design science research (Weigand et al, 2021) digital platforms (Derave et al, 2021) discrete event simulation (Guizzardi and Wagner, 2010, 2011b, 2012, 2013 economic exchanges (Porello et al, 2020) emergency and disaster management (Ferreira et al, 2015;Khantong and Ahmad, 2019;Moreira et al, 2015) engineering (Pereira et al, 2019) e-government (Barcelos et al, 2013;Detoni et al, 2018;Křemen and Nečaský, 2019;Pereira et al, 2020) game theory (Amaral et al, 2020c) game design (Franco et al, 2018;Kritz, 2020) goals and motivation (Azeve...…”

Modeling Payments and Linked Obligation Settlements

“…The Core Ontology for Economic Exchanges 1 (COEX) [32] is a well-founded reference ontology, specified in OntoUML, that formally characterizes the concept of economic exchanges based on the Action Theory of Economic Exchanges [30]. In this theory, an economic exchange is based on an agreement in which agents commit to performing certain reciprocal actions.…”

“…For the modeling of payments and linked obligation settlements, we reuse concepts and relations defined in COEX [32] and ROME [4,5] (step 1). As a result, we propose two ontology patterns (step 2) and apply them to model payments and different types of linked obligation settlements [9] (step 3), namely, Delivery versus Payment, Delivery versus Delivery and Payment versus Payment.…”

“…Economic exchanges are a central notion in the Resource-Event Action (REA) ISO Standard [31]. In fact, as shown in [32], REA can be seen as subsumed by the Common Ontology for Economic Exchanges (COEX), on which our proposal is based. However, REA does not address the particularities of linked obligation settlement mechanisms (DvP, DvD and PvP) nor does it provide an ontological account of payments.…”

Modeling the Emergence of Value and Risk in Game Theoretical Approaches

“…A different strategy that avoids introducing future or possible events is to rephrase the model using types of actions and events, cf [29]…”