An Ontology Network in Finance and Economics

This book is the PhD dissertation written by the author to receive her PhD from the Faculty of Computer Science at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. By exploiting methods from philosophical analysis, conceptual modeling, and ontologies, it contributes to the definition of ontological foundations for economics and finance, with a focus on the domains of money (including digital currencies), trust (and trustworthiness), 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 federation of well-grounded reference models representing knowledge in the aforementioned domains. Its usability and relevance are demonstrated through several applications in the fields of requirements engineering, enterprise modeling, decentralized finance, and game theory. In 2024, the PhD dissertation won the CAiSE PhD Award, granted to outstanding PhD theses in the field of information systems engineering.