Digital Financial Reporting

Here is how Wikipedia describes an oracle:

An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities.

and

Oracles were thought to be portals through which the gods spoke directly to people.

Down a little further in that article it discusses the notion of a oracle machine. An oracle machine is described thus:

An oracle machine can be conceived as a Turing machine connected to an oracle. The oracle, in this context, is an entity capable of solving some problem, which for example may be a decision problem or a function problem. The problem does not have to be computable; the oracle is not assumed to be a Turing machine or computer program. The oracle is simply a "black box" that is able to produce a solution for any instance of a given computational problem.

Imagine an accounting oracle. In this context, I see an oracle as a reliable machine-readable, and human-readable preferably, source of information.  No magic involved.  You have a knowledge graph of machine-readable accounting knowledge, a software application that can process the logic represented within that knowledge graph, and an interface for asking questions and receiving answers.

We have accounting oracles today.  Examples include the Bragg GAAP Guidebook and other such interpretations of US GAAP, similar guidebooks for IFRS, Deloitte's IFRS Plus resource, the AICPA's Best Practices in Presentation and Disclosure, and the plethora of other such resources.

But what do all these current accounting oracles have in common?  They tend to be readable by humans (i.e. not machine-readable), tend to exist in silos and not interconnected in any way (i.e. not standard), and tend to be managed by one specific entity (i.e. not open source).

Think standard, think data fabric rather than data silo, think artificial intelligence, think knowledge graphs done right. Think semantic wiki.

And so what if there were an accounting oracle that was machine-readable and also human-readable, it was based on standards, and it was open source to a certain degree.

Personally, I think it is only a matter of time before you see something like this.

What do you think?

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