A Reference Ontology of Money and Virtual Currencies

In recent years, there has been a growing interest, within the financial sector, in the adoption of ontology-based conceptual models to make the nature of conceptualizations explicit, as well as to safely establish the correct relations between them, thereby supporting semantic interoperability. Despite the wide number of efforts to create a unified view of the reality related to economic and financial domains, no comprehensive enough formal model has been developed to, on one hand, accurately describe the semantics regarding the world of money and currencies and, on the other hand, differentiate them from virtual currencies - of which cryptocurrencies are the most significant representative. This research aims at tackling these questions by conducting an ontological analysis of money and related concepts, grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology, based on a literature review of the most relevant economic theories, and considering recent innovations in the financial industry.