Imagine something. What if the accounting standards as written by standards setters (such as the ASC), books for working with the accounting standards (such as this book published by CCH), other interpretations of the accounting standards (such as this Wiley US GAAP Guide), chart of accounts (such as this chart of accounts in CCH Audit Accelerator), the chart of accounts used by AI assisted audit software (such as this MindBridge software), XBRL-based taxonomies published by standards setters (such as the US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy), Intermediate Accounting Textbooks (such as this textbook), other resources created by Big 4 CPA firms and others (such as USGAAP Plus created by Deloitte), dynamic audit solution metadata (see here), reporting checklists (such as this), the reports themselves (such as this), and other such things (here is a cross reference I created) were all CONNECTED via machine-readable metadata.
What if all these things that are connected were not created in individual silos, but where interconnected using machine-readable metadata.
What if things that were published using books were published using a media that was human-readable and machine-readable.
What new sorts of products could be created? How might functionality provided by existing products be enhanced?
How would all this impact accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis workflow?
Here is some brainstorming and testing I am doing in this regard.
These are some of the sorts of changes that the fourth industrial revolution will bring.