Gloria Sansò

The 2007–2008 financial crisis demonstrated the devastating consequences of inadequate communication and integration between information systems. This dissertation seeks to contribute to the development of a computational ontology designed to address the issues that emerged in that circumstance and support the financial industry. I argue that Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) offers the ideal framework for this endeavor. Building such an ontology, however, requires a preliminary philosophical investigation into the nature of entities pertinent to the financial sector. What are the fundamental entities constituting this domain? How should things like transactions, contracts, and ownership be characterized? What is the optimal way to represent these entities and achieve both philosophical soundness and practical utility? In order to answer these questions, I begin by examining the Action Theory of Exchanges, which offers valuable insights into trades but falls short of providing a fully satisfactory characterization of economic exchanges. By analyzing its limitations, first and foremost, its focus on actions as the universal target of exchanges, I argue for the need for an alternative. I therefore propose the Contractualist Theory of Transactions, which defines a transaction as the realization of certain economic contracts. By focusing on the type of contract actualized (rather than on the type of entity involved in the transaction) this approach offers a unified account while avoiding ontologically problematic or unsatisfactory solutions.

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 showed, among other things, that the information technology in the financial sector was inadequate to assist institutions in producing reliable reports and keeping track of the securities issued. This, in turn, compromised the chances of correctly estimating financial risk. In this paper, I explain how a well-designed computational ontology of finance could help improve data management. I also argue that this ontology should be realism-based and conformant to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). This choice, however, does not come without complications because it requires some preliminary reflections on the nature of the entities involved. Fortunately, some philosophical literature can be a valuable starting point for these reflections; in the paper, this is shown by considering money as a case study.

The Action Theory of Exchanges is based on three main assumptions: i) an exchange is motivated by people having convergent preferences, ii) people exchange actions, and iii) offers and acceptances are crucial parts of an exchange and they bring about rights and obligations. The main aim of this paper is to discuss three aspects of this theory to better understand its ontological implications and, possibly, improve it. I first examine the expression “transferring the ownership” by showing an ontological issue behind it; after that, I propose an interpretation that might solve this issue. I then show that convergent preferences are not enough to motivate an exchange; accordingly, one has to introduce two more preferences possessed by the agents. I finally propose a characterization of buying and selling (and buyer and seller) which, in addition to being compatible with the Action Theory of Exchanges, has the advantage of accounting for both monetary and non-monetary exchanges.

One famous scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is the dialogue between the young Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the expert trader Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey). Hanna is complaining that the stock market is unpredictable; it’s “fugazi … it’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is not matter. It’s not on the element chart. It’s not real”. But the fact that something is unpredictable and non-physical does not imply that it does not exist. On the other hand, its unpredictability, non-physicality, and the fact that the stock market trend is largely determined by investors’ beliefs, do make its nature difficult to grasp. This special issue of Rivista di Estetica aims to explore the financial sector from an ontological point of view. While the ontology of money has been extensively studied, few scholars have focused on the stock market and, more generally, on those entities belonging to the investment landscape. Matters are made more complicated by the fact that the financial sector is characterized by an ever-increasing use of digital technology, including software elements that trade in the market themselves. We believe that a careful study of this phenomenon may help us better to understand the role of artificial agents in the social world.

One famous scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is the dialogue between the young Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the expert trader Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey). Hanna is complaining that the stock market is unpredictable; it’s “fugazi … it’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is not matter. It’s not on the element chart. It’s not real”. But the fact that something is unpredictable and non-physical does not imply that it does not exist. On the other hand, its unpredictability, non-physicality, and the fact that the stock market trend is largely determined by investors’ beliefs, do make its nature difficult to grasp. This special issue of Rivista di Estetica aims to explore the financial sector from an ontological point of view. While the ontology of money has been extensively studied, few scholars have focused on the stock market and, more generally, on those entities belonging to the investment landscape. Matters are made more complicated by the fact that the financial sector is characterized by an ever-increasing use of digital technology, including software elements that trade in the market themselves. We believe that a careful study of this phenomenon may help us better to understand the role of artificial agents in the social world.

The 10th International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO 2019), was held at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences of the University at Buffalo, in Buffalo, NY, USA. It was the 10-year anniversary of the ICBO series, and the return of the conference to Buffalo after the first two ICBO conferences were held in Buffalo in 2009 and 2011. ICBO 2019 was well attended, with 115 registered attendees and additional walk-ins from the local academic community. The program included excellent keynote talks by Barry Smith, “International Standard Ontology,” and Bjoern Peters, “Putting principles into practice: OBO ontologies and applications in immunology,” as well as 23 oral presentations, 26 posters, and one software presentation. There were 53 papers and abstracts submitted for peer-review to ICBO 2019. Each submission was reviewed by three members chosen from the Program Committee. Of these submissions, 43 were accepted for this volume: 19 full papers, 23 poster abstracts, and 1 software demonstration extended abstract. We thank our program committee for their thoughtful reviews. There were also three workshops and four tutorials (listed below) held in conjunction with the main ICBO 2019 meeting.

According to complexity economics, a speculative bubble is a paradigmatic case of emergence which forms from individual behaviour. In order to provide a more detailed ontological investigation of this ‘lower level’, this paper aims to understand what a transaction is and how people actualize their financial choices. Given that selling and buying operations may involve just machines, it is argued that collective intentionality, at least in John Searle’s version, is not successful. It would seem, therefore, that the pivotal role is played by documents. The paper focuses mostly on the documents’ capacity to anchor quasi-abstract entities to reality and to attribute social and economic properties, such as property having a certain value. The latter is clearly involved in the emergence of a bubble.