A vocabulary for the distributed economic networks of the next economy

Valueflows (VF) is a standard vocabulary (ontology) to coordinate the creation, distribution, and exchange of economic resources.

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. We want to enable internetworking among many different software projects for resource planning and accounting within fractal networks of people and groups. Specifically, we want to support resource flows connecting many software applications.

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 interoperate".

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 and a UML model. We want to support RDF based and non-RDF based uses of the vocabulary, basically any way that people want to use software and data on the internet to help create economic networks. We will add formats as requested.

If this document seems too much to start with, or you just want a more friendly overview, you can start here with a Valueflows Story about apple pie (yum!).

You can find us here on gitlab, also mirrored on github.

Or come on over and say hello, ask questions, or request gitlab permissions in gitter or matrix element.

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