The Common Ontology of Value and Risk

Risk analysis is traditionally accepted as a complex and critical activity in various contexts, such as strategic planning and software development. Given its complexity, several modeling approaches have been proposed to help analysts in representing and analyzing risks. Naturally, having a clear understanding of the nature of risk is fundamental for such an activity. Yet, risk is still a heavily overloaded and conceptually unclear notion, despite the wide number of efforts to properly characterize it, including a series of international standards. In this paper, we address this issue by means of an in-depth ontological analysis of the notion of risk. In particular, this analysis shows a surprising and important result, namely, that the notion of risk is irreducibly intertwined with the notion of value and, more specifically, that risk assessment is a particular case of value ascription. As a result, we propose a concrete artifact, namely, the Common Ontology of Value and Risk, which we employ to harmonize different conceptions of risk existing in the literature.