Others use "Ontology" and "Accounting" or "Business" in Same Sentence

Saturday, April 4, 2015 at 12:51PM
Charlie in Becoming an XBRL Master Craftsman, Digital Financial Reporting

I use the term financial report ontology.  But, it is not only me who uses the term "ontology" together with the term "accounting" or "business" or "financial report". Here are others:

• Richard Mattessich, University of British Columbia - Department of Accounting, wrote the book Reality and Accounting: Ontological Explorations in the Economic and Social Sciences (Routledge New Works in Accounting History).
• The paper written by Marthinus Cornelius Gerber, Aurona Jacoba Gerber, Alta van der Merwe, An analysis of fundamental concepts in the conceptual framework using ontology technologies, explains how ontologies can be used to make financial reporting standards less vague, inconsistent, logically incoherent, and otherwise ambiguous.
• The acccounting ontology was created in a revised version of the paper above.
• Alexander OSTERWALDER, wrote THE BUSINESS MODEL ONTOLOGY, A PROPOSITION IN A DESIGN SCIENCE APPROACH, in 2004.
• Then there is the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) which is being created by OMG.
• Marcus Spies did a presentation in 2007, An ontology modelling perspective on business reporting languages
• Here you have some folks creating a government bugeting ontology.

"Digital" is not software, it is a mindset.

If you want to understand ontologies and ontology design, the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) provides a lot of very useful information.

Article originally appeared on XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting (http://xbrl.squarespace.com/).