Towards an ontology of value ascription

The analysis of value, value ascription mechanisms, and their motivating and influencing factors is useful for decision making processes of both customers and providers. In particular, enterprise modeling can greatly benefit from a proper understanding of value-related notions. Nonetheless, existing value models mainly focus on the value exchange between subjects, disregarding the understanding of "what" value is and of "why" something is valuable. In order to exploit the benefits of value analysis, a precise and rigorous conceptualization, based on foundational ontologies, is needed. To this aim, we present and discuss here a preliminary core ontology of value ascription and we discuss the main issues.