ValueFlows
= "A vocabulary for the distributed economic networks of the next economy". ... "Value Flows is a set of common vocabularies to describe flows of economic resources of all kinds within distributed economic ecosystems".
URL = https://valueflo.ws/
Description
"Value Flows is a set of common vocabularies to describe flows of economic resources of all kinds within distributed economic ecosystems.
Purpose: to enable internetworking among many different software projects for resource planning and accounting within fractal networks of people and groups. The vocabulary will work for any kind of economic activity, but the focus is to facilitate groups experimenting with solidarity / cooperative / collaborative / small business ecosystem / commons based peer production / any transitional economies.
Or, with less buzzwords, "let's help a lot of alternative economic software projects that are solving different pieces of the same puzzle be able to work together".
One of the purposes of this vocab is to support resource flows connecting many software applications. These flows may be oriented around processes that make things, exchanges that trade things, or combinations of both.
The vocabulary is presented in several ways, as Linked Open Data using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) family of languages, as well as a GraphQL reference, json-schema reference, and a UML model. We want to support RDF based and non-RDF based use of the vocabulary, basically any way that people want to use software and data on the internet to help create economic networks."
Characteristics
"The vocabulary for distributed economic networks (is) built on three layers:
Knowledge
Resource specifications define what kind of thing something is - the lowest-level type (a specific bread, a specific vaccine, a specific tool). Above them, resource classifications form a hierarchy of categories: food → grain → bread. A recipe is a reusable template for producing or maintaining a resource: its inputs, the processes that transform them, and the outputs they yield - a directed graph from raw ingredients to finished product. A resource may have both a production recipe (build a house) and a maintenance recipe (maintain a house for one period); both generate work-intents in the plan. Plan. The planner generates plans from recipes by scaling to demanded quantities. Each plan carries work-intents (demands for specific skills at specific times). When a citizen’s availability matches and they agree, an intent becomes a commitment - a scheduled promise.
Observation
Economic events record what actually happened - resources produced, consumed, or transformed. Events are immutable: they describe the past."
(https://playnet.earth/docs/playnet.pdf)
Discussion
Sacha Pignot:
"ValueFlows separates observation from valuation. It is a vocabulary for distributed economic networks built on resource, event and agent accounting. Its core records flows: an economic event is an observed movement with a provider, a receiver, a resource and a measured quantity. What matters is what the core leaves out. It gives you a rigorous account of what happened and does not fix how a network should assign worth to it. Worth is a reading, and it belongs to whoever is doing the reading. That is why incompatible communities can adopt it without being forced to converge, which is not common in accounting ontologies. The same discipline shows up inside the core: a resource carries both an accounting quantity, what an agent has rights over, and an on hand quantity, what is physically present. Two numbers for one physical situation, because rights and presence are two different frames. The ontology keeps both rather than resolving them into one true quantity.
ADAM separates addressing from interpretation. Coasys’ agent centric meta ontology is built on agents, languages and perspectives, using Holochain underneath. Every piece of data is an expression: a statement signed by its author, carrying author, timestamp, content and proof. Their own framing is that this produces a web of verifiable claims rather than a body of objective data, which is the same distinction built into the storage primitive. What is checkable is that this agent said this at this time, and that is checkable absolutely. What is not thereby settled is whether it is true or what it means. Then a language is a pluggable adapter defining how an expression is stored and shared, saying nothing about meaning, while a perspective is a personal semantic graph that gives meaning to expressions through links. Publishing one creates a shared space others can join. The passage from a private reading to a shared interpretive space is an ordinary runtime operation rather than something fixed before anyone has read anything.
Functional programming separates composition from emergence. This one looks like the wrong ally, since referential transparency says the meaning of an expression does not depend on its context of evaluation, which is the flat contradiction of the hermeneutic position. It serves the pattern anyway, for a reason usually stated badly. FP does not remove complexity, it relocates all of it into composition. When every rule is locally deterministic and nothing hides in mutable state, a surprising system level behaviour is attributable to interaction rather than to something concealed. That is what makes emergence observable instead of indistinguishable from a bug. And the tension with situatedness resolves in the type signature: rather than letting context be ambient, make it an argument, observe : Observer -> EventStream -> View. A reader over a fold. Meaning still depends on position, but the dependency is declared rather than suffered.
The honest tradeoff: compositionality assumes the whole is the composition of its parts, and strong emergence is exactly what is not recoverable from composition. This gives you a faithful description of an ecology, not a prediction of its behaviour. Compositional semantics at the level of rules, non compositional behaviour at the level of the system. Only simulation covers the second."