OPEN VALUE: Accounting for value created in open collaborative networks – the case of SENSORICA
“A value network is a business analysis perspective that describes social and technical resources within and between businesses. The nodes in a value network represent people (or roles). [1]”
Inspired by the abstract concept of the “value network”, Sensorica is a network of real people spread across the globe that currently experiment with ways of creating value together in the real world economy. Sensorica is composed of academics, engineers, farmers and computer programmers and the core products are sensors for scientific measurement and for industrial applications.
Sensorica calls itself an Open Value Network and has developed a scheme in which contributors gets paid according to the value of individual inputs to the prodoctive process. The system is called Network Resource Planning and Value Accounting System (NRP-VAS) and uses the REA Resources, Events, Agents (REA) ontology.
The REA model is a new standard for accounting which gets rid of many accounting objects that are not necessary in the computer age. Most visible of these are debits and credits—double-entry bookkeeping which disappears in an REA system. REA treats the accounting system as a virtual representation of the actual business. In other words, it creates computer objects that directly represent real-world-business objects [2].
More detailad explanations about this can be found on the url valueflo.ws.
There is an effort to integrate the REA ontology with the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). SUMO is an upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems. [3]
If the REA-system is integrated with SUMO it is possible to create a minimally artificially intelligent system that can be used to monitor and facilitate productive processes in various ways – such as helping collaborators find eachother.
2) Wikipedia / REA Resources, events, agents (accounting model)
3) Wikipedia / SUMO Suggested Upper Merged Ontology
