Towards an Ontology Network in Finance and Economics

Finance and economics are wide domains, where ontologies are useful instruments for dealing with semantic interoperability and information integration problems, as well as improving communication and problem solving among people. In particular, reference ontologies have been widely recognized as powerful tools for representing a model of consensus within a community to support communication, meaning negotiation, consensus establishment, as well as semantic interoperability and information integration. In domains like economics and finance, which are too large and complex to be represented as a single, large and monolithic ontology, it is necessary to create an ontological framework, built incrementally and in an integrated way, as a network. Therefore, in this paper we introduce OntoFINE, an Ontology Network in Finance and Economics that organizes and integrates knowledge in the realm on finance and economics, serving as a basis to several applications. We discuss the development of OntoFINE and present some of its applications.