Digital Financial Reporting

Logic is a set of principles that forms a framework for correct reasoning. Logic is a process of deducing information correctly. Logic is about the correct methods that can be used to prove a statement is true or false. Logic tells us exactly what is meant. Logic allows systems to be proven.

The principles of logic are topic-neutral, universal principles which are more general than say the single domain of law, biology, mathematics, accounting, or economics. Logic has to do with the meaning of concepts common to all domains and establishes general rules governing concepts.

Logical truths are necessary. The principles of logic are derived solely using reasoning and the validity of the universal principles are not dependent on any other feature of the world.

Logic is the process of deducing information correctly; logic is not about deducing correct information. Understanding the distinction between correct logic and correct information is important because it is important to follow the consequences of an incorrect assumption. Ideally, we want both our logic to be correct and the facts we are applying the logic to, to be correct.

But the point here is that correct logic and correct information are two different things. If our logic is correct, then anything we deduce from such information will also be correct per the rules of logic.

Now, I have mentioned that there are a number different logic systems that could be used to represent a logical system: OWL+SHACL+RDF, Modern Prolog, ISO Prolog, Datalog, PSOA, GQL/Cypher, XBRL+More, SQL+More.

And so, can you prove the same things in one of the systems mentioned above in another one of the systems above?  Or saying this another way, is the logic of say OWL+SHACL+RDF equivalent to that of say Modern Prolog?

Enter the notion of metalogic.

Metalogic relates to the comparison between the logic of different systems. As pointed on in Specifying the Rule Metalogic on the Web, interoperability issues can become problematic if you are using different logics to perform work and evaluate two different logical systems such as two different financial report models. Both systems, although different software applications, should derive the same logical conclusions.

For things like computational law, computational audit, computational economics, and computational regulation to become useful; many different systems need to process the same information in exactly the same one standard way.  There needs to be some fundamental "baseline".

This becomes apparent with tools such as PSOA that can translate from one logical system to some other logical system.  It is absurd to think that simply by changing which software system is "looking" at information that the meaning of that information could change.