Basic Human Values and Moral Foundations Theory in ValueNet Ontology

Values, as intended in ethics, determine the shape and valid- ity of moral and social norms, grounding our everyday individual and community behavior on commonsense knowledge. The attempt to untan- gle human moral and social value-oriented structure of relations requires investigating both the dimension of subjective human perception of the world, and socio-cultural dynamics and multi-agent social interactions. Formalising latent moral content in human interaction is an appealing perspective that would enable a deeper understanding of both social dynamics and individual cognitive and behavioral dimension. To formal- ize this broad knowledge area, in the context of ValueNet, a modular ontology representing and operationalising moral and social values, we present two modules aiming at representing two main informal theories in literature: (i) the Basic Human Values theory by Shalom Schwartz and (ii) the Moral Foundations Theory by Graham and Haidt. Val- ueNet is based on reusable Ontology Design Patterns, is aligned to the DOLCE foundational ontology, and is a component of the Framester factual-linguistic knowledge graph