Abstract
Finance and information technology are deeply intertwined and have been mutually reinforcing over time. Historically, fnance 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 fnancial intermediaries. Similarly, information technology lies at the very heart of the fnancial sector. New tech nology developments can foster greater effciency and fnancial inclusion, as well as to improve the quality and reduce the costs of fnancial products and services. However, at the same time that they open several opportunities, these advances may also pose signifcant challenges. In fact, much of the literature on fnance history shows that several challenges faced by the fnancial sector over the years are interwoven with technological issues. Over the past few decades, innovative technologies, such as blockchains, cryptocurrencies, asset tokenization, and central bank digital currencies have revolutionized the world of money, payments, and economic exchanges. They have fostered the creation of fnancial products and services on top of decentralized technologies, giving rise to the concept of decentralized fnance — the decentralized provision of fnancial products and services. Although these new developments have the power to make payments and other fnancial services cheaper, faster and more accessible, they also pose several challenges related to the safeguarding of fnancial stability, the defnition 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 fnance sector due to recent innovations, are related to a lack of conceptual clarity, which hinders the communication among the different actors in the fnancial industry, and consequently, the defnition of laws, regulations and proper governance models. Also, without a common underv standing about concepts it is diffcult to integrate information and provide semantic interoperability. However, the vast majority of initiatives developed to provide an unifed view of these domains share two common limitations: (1) they are not specifed 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 fnance paradigm, and consequently, do not address issues that have arisen with the introduction of decentralized fnance, 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 semantic 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 fnancial 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 Unifed 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 felds of requirements engineering, enterprise modeling, decentralized fnance and game theory.