Digital Financial Reporting

Computer science is, well, science.  Getting a computer to successfully perform work has little or nothing to do with emotion, theological dogma, personal opinion, or such.  (Although, when you are creating a standard some of the discussions can be emotional, theological, and filled with personal opinion.)

Zeroing in on the Holy Grail of Meaningful Information Exchange summarizes what I have learned and discovered while trying to make digital financial reporting work appropriately.  My document was inspired by the introduction to the document Ontology for the Twenty First Century: An Introduction with Recommendations.  That document tends to be more oriented to scientific domains.  My document tries to explain the same ideas to business professionals.

Here are the bullet points:

• Computers have three strengths
  • Information storage
  • Information retrieval and processing
  • Ubiquitous information distribution
• Computers can be harnessed to perform certain work effectively, if done correctly
• There are major obstacles to harnessing the power of computers
  • Business professional idiosyncrasies
  • Information technology idiosyncrasies
  • Inconsistent domain understanding of and technology's limitation in expressing interconnections
  • Computers are dumb beasts
• Computers are tools
• Ontologies are tools
  • Philosophy has used ontologies for 2000+ years (not machine-readable)
  • Computer science now leverage ontologies (machine-readable)
• Knowledge engineering is, well, engineering
• Technical syntax matters, but not that much
• Software must be usable by business professionals because they own the problem domains
• The holy grail of meaningful information exchange is...

Deliberate, rigorous, clear, logically coherent, consistent, and unambiguous ontologies created by business professionals can make dumb beasts appear to perform magic.