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Valueflows (VF) is a vocabulary for the distributed economic networks of the next economy, to coordinate the creation, distribution, and exchange of economic resources.

Abstract

The Valueflows vocabulary (ontology) is intended to support coordination and accounting of economic activity, with extra attention to experimental and solidarity economic networks, but also fully supporting conventional businesses and supply chains. It utilizes resource flows connecting many agents (people, organizations, ecological agents). These resource flows can include value creation, usage, and/or transfer.

As a flow-oriented model, Valueflows can coordinate whole networks as easily as one company, including regions and circular economies. An economic network consists of independent economic agents collaborating to produce and distribute goods and services to meet human and ecological needs. For example, food, clothing, housing, education, health care. healthy soil, etc.

At its core, Valueflows implements an ontology called REA (Resources Events Agents). REA is an accounting and business process modeling ontology, which was initially driven by the advent of computers and the concept of normalization of data models. As such it represents a simple and elegant model for planning and recording real-world economic activity, as opposed to the conventional abstraction of debits/credits, although those can be derived. To REA we have added some concepts found in various economic groups (for example recipes, offers and requests), and ecological accounting (which is ignored in most accounting treatments), as well as made the ontology more implementation-ready and friendly to distributed protocols.

For example, the Valueflows ontology is designed to support

coordination of economic activity both inside and between organizations, an enterprise is not assumed;
reciprocity with or without money, money is not assumed;
ecological agents as part of the network; externalities documented as resource flows.

On a more technical level, the main purpose of Valueflows is to facilitate interoperability among different software applications. It specifies the vocabulary, but not the technical protocol. The Valueflows core model has also been used to design new economic software applications, but that is not necessary for interoperability.

Namespace

The namespace for Valueflows terms is https://w3id.org/valueflows/ont/vf#. The preferred namespace prefix is vf.

Using the documentation

Here are some suggestions to help you find your way into this documentation, depending on your specific interest and level of prior understanding.

For a high level understanding of what Valueflows is for, you could start with this introductory summary. You could also check into what other groups are doing with Valueflows in the reference implementations, or take a peek at the algorithms overview for more possibilities.
To learn about the vocabulary itself, we usually recommend the fun and friendly Valueflows story about apple pie, yum! to start.
Or (less fun and friendly) you could start with the high-level description of the core model, and then continue as you like in these directions...
- For the more visually oriented or people who like diagrams, head to the class diagram.
- Whether or not you look at the big diagram, see these class and relationship explanations with diagram by subject area, which also point to the related concepts pages. Or just go straight to the concepts section.
- For even more gory details, check the rest of the specification pages, and/or examples section.
To lookup specific details, you can use the Search function above. Definitions and relationships by data element (class, property, etc.) are linked on the first formatted spec here; and are textually described by subject area here. The concepts section and examples section also might be helpful to lookup developer level information.

You can find the repository here on codeberg, also mirrored on github.

Or come on over and say hello or ask questions in matrix element.

This vocabulary and documentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.