Glenda Carla Moura Amaral, an ex-PhD student at the former Faculty of Computer Science at unibz, was awarded the“Best PhD Thesis” Award at the CAiSE Conference 2024. Her thesis, “An Ontology Network in Finance and Economics: Money, Trust, Value, Risk and Economic Exchanges,” was recognized for its outstanding contribution to information systems engineering.

Amaral’s research introduces “OntoFINE”, an ontology network designed to represent knowledge in finance and economics. This network aims to support financial and economic actors in reasoning about information in these domains while adapting to technological innovations. By leveraging philosophical analysis, conceptual modeling, and ontologies, her work establishes solid ontological foundations for key concepts like money, trust, value, risk, and economic exchanges — concepts that directly relate to recent challenges faced by the financial industry. 

“Besides the theoretical work, we demonstrated how these theories can be applied and used for conceptual modeling and enterprise architecture design, language evaluation and (re)design, data mining, value and risk assessment under a game-theoretical perspective, trust management, and requirements engineering,” adds Amaral, who defended her PhD thesis at unibz in November 2022. 

The Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE) is a leading international forum for academic and industry experts to present and discuss advancements in information systems engineering.