Rights and Intentions in Value Modeling - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 192

focusing on the business motivation behind processes. Models on this high level
of abstraction are known as business models or value models [ 13] .
Value models have a special characteristic in that they are formulated declara-
tively without taking into account the order of activities or other forms of activity
dependencies. A value model focuses on high level and business oriented objects
like resources, actors, and value exchanges. It describes business interaction in
terms of intentions and goals, which is a perspective that has been used also in
other areas of the information systems field [ 14, 16] . In contrast, a process model
typically includes procedural and technical details including messages and activi-
ties as well as control and data flow. The high abstraction level of value models
makes them appropriate for representing business cases in a compact and easily
understandable way.
A basic notion in value models is that of value exchange, meaning that something
of value is transferred between two actors. The essence of this exchange is often
taken to be an ownership transfer, i.e. ownership rights on a resource are transferred
from one actor to another. However, some value exchanges cannot be analyzed in
this way, e.g. the use of a service does not influence ownership. Furthermore, many
value exchanges are accompanied by changes of physical states, such as location,
which are unrelated to ownership relationships. Thus, addressing only ownership
transfers in value modeling will result in impoverished models that exclude impor-
tant aspects of value exchange and creation. Therefore, there is a need for a detailed
analysis of the meaning of value exchanges that will help in the design of rich
value models that include not only ownership transfers but also other forms of value
exchange and creation. The goal of this chapter is to offer an analysis of the notion
of value exchanges but also to propose a notation that makes use of this analysis as
well as guidelines supporting the design of value models.
The chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 gives an overview of related
research, in particular value modeling and Hohfeld's classification of rights. Section
3 analyses the notion of value exchanges by describing their context and construc-
tion in the form of a conceptual model. Based on this analysis, Sect. 4 proposes
an extension of the e3value modeling notation and guidelines for designing value
models. Section 5 concludes the chapter with a summary of its contributions and
suggestions for further work.
2 Related Work
This section introduces two of the main ontologies for value modeling, REA and
e3value, as well as Hohfeld's classification of rights, which is used for analyzing
basic notions in value modeling.
2.1 The REA Ontology
The REA (Resource-Event-Actor) ontology was formulated originally in [ 11] and
developed further in a series of papers, e.g. [ 5] . Its conceptual origins can be seen