Digital Financial Reporting

More and more scientific journals are "marking up" research, published articles, and other knowledge of domain using controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, and ontologies for that domain.

The accounting community should do the same.  I have no idea to what extent this is occurring, but the lack of a financial report ontology which is necessary to do this correctly leads me to believe that very little, if anything, has been done. Perhaps some journals are creating silos of information.

Biology and medicine seem to be leaders in marking up research and published articles and creating the needed underlying ontologies. This link takes you to the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO Foundry).

Microsoft released an add-in for Word back in 2008 which enables one to mark up documents in this way.  This video walks you through marking up documents, gives you an idea of how marking up documents works, etc.  It is worth watching to understand this opportunity.

This blog post provides additional information on this free and open source Microsoft Word Ontology Add-in. You can download this add-in here. (This is the home page of this Microsoft External Research project.)

The advantage of organizing accounting literature in this way should be apparent.

For more information about the possibilities here, watch the first video, Ontologies as a Branch of Philosophy, in this Introduction of Ontology.  In particular, pay attention between minutes 23:30 and about 35:00 in the video.

How about this bold undertaking which shows the possibilities here: The Encyclopedia of Life. This shows vision. Go to that encyclopedia and search on "Cats" and this is what is returned. Look through the tabs provided, particularly the "Resources" tab which takes you to other information about "cats".

Everyone knows how much fun accounting is. This sort of global accounting knowledgebase would go a long way toward improving financial literacy, making this complex domain just a little easier to navigate, and working in this profession just a little easier.