Book

Model-Driven Design Using Business Patterns

Authors:
  • CSC, REA Technology

Abstract

Business applications are designed using profound knowledge about the business domain. Nonetheless, the pattern community's ideas for software engineering have not impacted at the application level; they are still mostly used for technical problems. This book shows how to apply the pattern ideas in business applications. It presents more than 20 structural and behavioral business patterns that use the REA (resources, events, agents) pattern as a common backbone. The book explains the REA patterns in detail, and shows how to find business objects and related modeling elements. The author works at Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen. He shows the developer working on business frameworks how to use the patterns to derive the right abstractions, and to design and ensure that the meta-rules are followed by the developers of the actual applications. The application developer can use these patterns to design a business application, to ensure that it does not violate the domain rules, and to adapt the application to changing requirements without the need to change the overall architecture. This approach allows for more flexible and solid software architectu.

Chapters (10)

... The REA enterprise ontology is the concept for designing and a model creation of enterprise infrastructures. It is based on the resource ownership and its exchange [4]. The REA ontology does not use general concepts but specific. ...
... The first mentioned is restricted to the operational level (base) of the REA model level and therefore it is not usable for tools in practice. The second metamodel has been modified to suit to a particular use (specification of business rules) and it is not consistent with the structure of the ontology as described in [4]. None of available metamodels of the REA ontology is general and therefore they cannot be used to create variety tools. ...
... Entity type is divided by the object that aggregates into three elements: resource type, event type and agent type. Although the REA ontology allows creating types of policy level concepts (see [4]), they are almost not used in practice and therefore they were not included in the metamodel. ...
Article
This paper describes the gradual formation of the metamodel of the REA model level of the REA enterprise ontology. The paper aims to create a basic structure that allows creating valid models of the ontology. The first part of the paper discusses the identification of the elements used as a basis for the metamodel and their relationships. The second part describes the creation of the metamodel itself. This metamodel serves as the fundament for creating domain-specific modelling tool and can be used as a basis for an information system based on the REA enterprise ontology.
... The REA model level is divided according to functionality into two groups [7]: ...
... Another advantage is the independence of the model in relation to technical aspects of the transfer of resources. Therefore it is not necessary to change the model in case of changing the technical infrastructure and due to the strict rules of the REA ontology the integrity and consistency of the model is ensured [7]. ...
... Basic operational level of the REA model level contains 3 concepts [7]: ...
Article
Full-text available
The paper deals with the value modelling of business processes using the REA ontology. This ontology, which has its roots in accounting systems, provides a comprehensive framework to business process modelling. The REA ontology is focused on modelling values of resources of business processes. A business process model, which uses this ontology, introduces two levels of abstraction - the operational level and the policy level. That fact allows a greater range of possibilities of usage compared to standard modelling methods. The paper describes the use of domain-specific modelling to create a modelling tool based on the REA ontology. This approach allows creating a tool that uses specific properties of the ontology to ensure validation of the model and automatic source code generation.
... PM is performed on publicly available, real-world healthcare event logs [65]. Based on the evaluations, the conceptual modeling frameworks are drawn using Resource Event Agent (REA) ontology [66] and e 3 -value modeling [67]. Furthermore, the expert's opinion further verified the evaluations and conceptual modeling frameworks. ...
... The results also apply to the metadata shared across vertically distributed caregivers (hospitals, labs, pharmacies, and GPs). Furthermore, we extended the Insurance Model (IM) of REA ontology [66] highlighting the key-value agents, their prime resource interactions, and mutual value gain/loss. Additionally, we explicated privacy as a Materialized Claim in the Dutch healthcare landscape using REA. ...
... IT expert is affiliated with a Dutch diagnostic lab and a local Dutch hospital. Afterward, the REA's Insurance Model (IM) [66] is extended. The model verifies who, how, and what leads to patients' un-anonymized metadata-share amongst the Dutch caregivers and explicates privacy as a materialized claim. ...
Article
Full-text available
Healthcare providers are legally bound to ensure the privacy preservation of healthcare metadata. Usually, privacy concerning research focuses on providing technical and inter-/intra-organizational solutions in a fragmented manner. In this wake, an overarching evaluation of the fundamental (technical, organizational, and third-party) privacy-preserving measures in healthcare metadata handling is missing. Thus, this research work provides a multilevel privacy assurance evaluation of privacy-preserving measures of the Dutch healthcare metadata landscape. The normative and empirical evaluation comprises the content analysis and process mining discovery and conformance checking techniques using real-world healthcare datasets. For clarity, we illustrate our evaluation findings using conceptual modeling frameworks, namely e3-value modeling and REA ontology. The conceptual modeling frameworks highlight the financial aspect of metadata share with a clear description of vital stakeholders, their mutual interactions, and respective exchange of information resources. The frameworks are further verified using experts’ opinions. Based on our empirical and normative evaluations, we provide the multilevel privacy assurance evaluation with a level of privacy increase and decrease. Furthermore, we verify that the privacy utility trade-off is crucial in shaping privacy increase/decrease because data utility in healthcare is vital for efficient, effective healthcare services and the financial facilitation of healthcare enterprises.
... Let us now clarify at what level of abstraction REA is expressed. While originally referred to as a "framework" by McCarthy (1982), it has frequently been described as a "design pattern" in later works such as for example Geerts and McCarthy (1997) and Hruby (2006). We employ the latter terminology since a framework, in contrast, is defined by Gamma et al. (1995, p. 26) as "a set of cooperating classes that make up a reusable design for a specific class of software". ...
... Note that the word 'classes' may, to generalize, be exchanged for the word 'types', since the word 'framework' might as well be used to describe a set of types and functions in for example a functional programming language. REA on the other hand, is a design pattern in the sense that it is a meta model that must be 'implemented' or 'realized' as, what Hruby (2006) calls, a REA "application model" for any given domain. More exhaustively, Hruby (2006, p. 356) suggests that REA must be understood from four levels that are also depicted in Figure 3.3. ...
... Expressing constraints at compile-time (for example via types) is evidently superior to expressing them at runtime (for example via if-else checks), and is arguably part of the point of having a type system in the first place. Unfortunately it seems that neither REA as originally proposed by McCarthy (1982) nor as revamped and extensively detailed by Hruby (2006) is able to support compile-time checking of these constraints. To understand why, we must first explore the notion of the so called trading partner view and the independent view. ...
Thesis
Antibiotic resistance is eroding the efficacy of the drugs we have and, unless future science dictates otherwise, bacteria will eventually become resistant to whatever new antibiotics we discover. We must therefore plan for a continuous stream of innovation. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical firms have left the scene to pursue more profitable areas. While the free market may eventually give rise to a solution, the question is how much destruction we are willing to accept on the way, and whether it eventually will be too late. A plethora of policy interventions, aimed at stimulating antibiotic research and development, have been suggested, and simulation modelers have begun estimating their effects. Suggested interventions range from prizes, grants, and competitions to regulatory fast-tracking and non-profit development. No unified picture of what to do has emerged. From the perspective of policy-makers, the need does not seem to be for more but for better information. This thesis suggests that to truly compare policy interventions, aimed at stimulating antibiotic development, we should draw on simulation model alignment techniques. To support such an endeavor this thesis presents the seeds of a compositional language capable of formally expressing policy interventions as offers that can be actualized into contracts. The language is not merely theoretical but implementable and usable within actual simulation models. The language is not only derived from previous research on compositional contracts in functional languages and the resources-events-agents ontology, but also the author's unique position as a participant in DRIVE-AB, which comprised 16 public and 7 private partners from 12 countries, and finally six separately published simulation experiments that are all based on work by the author. A constructive proof is provided to establish the utility of the solution in terms of its capacity to capture important facets of important policy interventions.
... Our approach uses the Open-edi reference model to map SOA services to business patterns in order to enable their specication. For that, we have identied and adapted patterns from [15,16,17] for each Open-Edi phase. To delimit the Open-edi phases for each (sub)process/business transaction, our approach uses a semi-automatic approach that asks the user (e.g., a business analyst) to: ...
... To allow the specication of identied services in the next step, each service has to be linked with one or more business patterns based on the Openedi reference model. Therefore, services supporting choreography tasks that exchange resources during the actualization phase (i.e., products, services, etc.) are associated with the exchange pattern (see [17]). Services that support the claim 4 management (e.g., invoicing) during the actualization phase use the Claim/Claim Materialization pattern (see [17]). ...
... Therefore, services supporting choreography tasks that exchange resources during the actualization phase (i.e., products, services, etc.) are associated with the exchange pattern (see [17]). Services that support the claim 4 management (e.g., invoicing) during the actualization phase use the Claim/Claim Materialization pattern (see [17]). Services supporting the exchange contract activities (e.g., Purchase order, Sales order) between the partners during the negotiation phase use the commitment and contract patterns (see [17]). ...
Chapter
Organizations build information systems to support their business processes. Today’s business processes often cross the organizations’ boundaries and become increasingly complex. Therefore, information systems that automate these business processes must take into account collaborative and complex scenarios involving distributed partners. Designing such systems is not trivial considering: (i) the complexity of the cross-organizational business processes, and (ii) the large gap between business processes and information systems. To address this gap, this paper relies on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm to propose an end-to-end method to design SOA-based information systems from business process models. More precisely, this paper proposes to generate SOA design models expressed in SoaML from the specifications of a collection of organizations’ private processes expressed in BPMN.
... By using a business ontology, the business modeler can elicit the actors involved in a business scenario, and explain their relationships in terms of economic resources exchanged between actors [1]. In this work, we chose the REA business ontology [23] that is getting wider attention from the community [29,30]. REA was introduced by McCarthy as an accounting framework to record economic phenomena in a shared data environment [23]. ...
... Then it has evolved to become a business ontology [26]. In REA, an organization can increase or decrease the value of its resources through either exchanges or conversions [29]. In an exchange process, the organization receives resources and provides other resources in return. ...
... Economic resources are scarce objects that have utility for the organization [23]. An economic agent is an individual or an organization capable of controlling economic resources [29]. An economic event is a phenomenon that reflects changes in economic resources. ...
Article
Full-text available
Today’s business processes become increasingly complex and often cross the boundaries of the organizations. On the one hand, to support their business processes, modern organizations use enterprise information systems that need to be aware of the organizations’ processes and contexts. Such systems are called Process-Aware Information System (PAIS). On the other hand, the service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a fast emerging architectural style that has been widely adopted by modern organizations to design and implement PAIS that support their business processes. This paper aims to bridge the gap between inter-organizational business processes and SOA-based PAISs that support them. It proposes a novel model-driven design method that generates SOA models expressed in SoaML taking the specification of collaborative business processes expressed in BPMN as input. We present the principles underlying the approach, the state of an ongoing implementation, and the results of two studies conducted to empirically validate the method in the context of ERP key processes.
... In simple case 'paired commitments' are represented by two commitments in which one commitment is in consideration of the other or it may be represented by two groups of commitments in which one group of commitments is in consideration of the other group. T According to [1,6], an economic commitment is a type of obligation by one human being to transfer economic resources to another human being at some specified point of time usually in future. Commitments can be a part of contract or may stay alone, in which case they are often re- garded as uncontracted commitment. ...
... There are two methodologies, we focus on, dealing with business process modeling and working with the notion of commitment. The DEMO enterprise ontology [3] and the REA value modeling ontology [2,5,6]. The DEMO methodology has its foundation in the DEMO enterprise ontology and provides a strong theoretical foundation for business process modeling. ...
... REA considers service to be an economic resource. Rather than focusing on debits and credits which by design omit important data about economic event, REA proposes capturing the detail about each resource under the organization's control, the events that change the amount of each resource, and the agents who participate in these events, according to [6,7,9]. Both the REA and DEMO methodologies utilize the notion of transaction in which commitment is included. ...
... It aims at providing a domain ontology which is a necessary condition of any system that provides some perspective of "phenomena in the real world". However, so far any attempts to apply REA for accounting systems using the current representation [8,9] have encountered serious problems that are difficult to identify and even more difficult to fix [11,12]. Its present formal representations appear not appropriate enough [12]. ...
... The main benefit of the REA approach is that all accounting artifacts such as debit, credit, journals, ledgers, receivables, and account balances are derived from the data describing exchange and conversion REA processes. It means that all accounting artifacts are always consistent, because they are derived from the same data; for example, data describing a sale event is used in warehouse management, payroll, distribution, finance and other application areas, without transformation or adjustment [9]. ...
... These are all important facts for accounting systems. Yet not provided by the current representation [9]. 3. ...
Conference Paper
The REA ontology is a domain ontology that aims to support accounting information systems that must provide a truthful and appropriate – GAAP compliant - descriptive perspective of an enterprise in operation. While the application of a domain ontology provides strong benefits, the current representation of the REA model does not provide the desired results; an appropriate working accounting system. One of the root causes of this problem is the lack of a proper formal representation of the REA model. In this paper the DEMO methodology is applied to provide a generic domain and application-independent DEMO model (the CC-CP model) for co-creation and co-production in any industrial production chain. This model appears to be also appropriate to capture any interaction between an enterprise and any external parties, stakeholders, customers, suppliers, personnel etc., and support accounting systems. This approach offers several new advantages, notably: (i) prescriptive workflow-like operation of the enterprise with full transaction driven execution; (ii) process-mining (-like) analysis of daily operation; (iii) ontological completeness of factual knowledge as required not only for accounting systems but also for other descriptive information systems and (iv) completeness of implementation for any kind of business interactions between enterprises.
... The main benefit of the REA approach is that it enables the keeping track of primary and raw data about economic resources. All accounting artifacts are derived from the data describing exchange and conversion REA processes [9]. All reports based on the accounting artifacts are always consistent, since they are derived from the same data. ...
... REA Model with commitments and claim entities. Source:[9] ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
DEMO (Design Engineering Methodology for Organization) has its foundation in Enterprise Ontology and provides a strong theoretical foundation for business process modeling. Thanks to its theoretical background, the DEMO methodology has a good body of empirical appropriateness for many different areas of enterprise modeling. On the other hand, the DEMO methodology provides generic framework for business process modeling and doesn’t deal with domain specific artifacts. The aim of the paper is to contemplate and propose some ways how to utilize the DEMO potential for collaboration with other business process modeling methodologies.
... The main benefit of the REA approach is that it enables the keeping track of primary and raw data about economic resources. All accounting artifacts are derived from the data describing exchange and conversion REA processes [9]. All reports based on the accounting artifacts are always consistent, since they are derived from the same data. ...
... REA Model with commitments and claim entities. Source:[9] ...
Chapter
DEMO (Design Engineering Methodology for Organization) has its foundation in the DEMO Enterprise Ontology (DEO), and provides a strong theoretical foundation and a generic platform for business process modeling. The REA (Resource-Event-Agent) ontology, which originates from accountancy systems, provides a domain-specific platform for value modeling business processes. Rather than traditional approaches to accountancy, REA captures the details of each resource under an enterprise’s control, and thus is able to offer a wider, more precise, and more up-to-date range of reports. Despite its great potential, REA ontology suffers from anomalies which have their origin in the absence of rigorous theoretical foundations. These anomalies can be overcome either by introducing rigorous theoretical foundations for the current REA ontology, or by useful collaboration of REA ontology with an ontology that provides a strong theoretical foundation. The paper deals with the latter option. It not only contemplates different aspects of both ontologies, but also analyzes and proposes a possible way for collaboration between these modeling frameworks.
... In addition to the primary data set, we have used a secondary data set, which is also based on typical sampling. Design patterns and problems from the mainstream modeling literature have been selected (e.g., Geerts and McCarthy, 2006;Halpin, 2016;Henderson-Sellers et al., 2013;Hruby, 2010;Shanks and Weber, 2012;Steimann, 2000a;Vieu et al., 2008;Wieringa et al., 1995;Wand et al., 1999). Using such typical problems and patterns as a secondary data set is an established method in the conceptual modeling literature. ...
... A property is intrinsic to human beings and physical entities, whereas a right is relational and exists within an institutional relationship. In summary, rights cannot be modeled simply as attributes but require relational constructs to be represented (Geerts and McCarthy, 2006;Hruby, 2010). ...
Article
Conceptual models are intended to capture knowledge about the world. Hence, the design of conceptual models could be informed by theories about what entities exist in the world and how they are constituted. Further, a common assumption within the field of conceptual modeling is that conceptual models and information systems describe entities in the real world, outside the systems. An alternative view is provided by an ontological commitment that recognizes that the institutional world is constructed through language use and the creation of institutional facts. Such an ontological commitment implies that there is an institutional reality, which, to a great extent, is constructed using information infrastructures. Accordingly, conceptual models have not only a descriptive role but also a prescriptive one, meaning that modelers set up a framework of rules that restrict and enable people to construct institutional reality using information infrastructures. Understanding the prescriptive role of conceptual models may revive the area of conceptual modeling in the information systems research community. Reviving conceptual modeling through institutional modeling is motivated by the effect that implemented conceptual models have on information infrastructures and institutions. The purpose of this article is to propose an institutional ontology that can support the design of information infrastructures. The ontology is theoretically informed by institutional theory and a communicative perspective on information systems design, as well as being empirically based on several case studies. It is illustrated using a case study in the welfare sector. A number of guidelines for modeling institutional reality are also proposed.
... As mentioned above, we expect more prototypes to materialize in the future as REA conversion is studied more extensively. Indeed, the entire concept of developing design patterns for such prototypes is an area of intense study in the object-oriented community (Hruby, 2007;Hruby & Kiehn, 2006). Some initial design pattern work for REA exchanges was started but not finished by Geerts and McCarthy (1997b), and it needs to be developed further for both exchanges and conversions. ...
Preprint
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The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds John Maynard Keynes (1936, p. viii) Please note that this document is an authors' draft (version 0.90). We have many small additions and corrections here that are yet to be made, but this 0.90 version conveys, in a very substantial way, the essential monograph contents. We make this version available to accelerate dissemination of our groundbreaking content. The finished version of the monograph is available from the American Accounting Association (AAA) bookstore: https://aaahqbookstore.org/catalog/book/rea-accounting-model-accounting-and-economic-ontology The official AAA version has all the corrections and content, plus the final figures with detailed color on many.
... A value chain model of a Pizzeria (adapted from[23]). ...
... Business processes are formally defined in order of their automated transformation in accordance with MDD approach [30]. One of the major problems in modeling and specification of business processes is the communication of business experts with software engineers. ...
Article
Full-text available
The relationship between business and IT is a constant theme in both academic and industrial circles for more than 30 years. Aligning Business and Information Technology (IT) is generally seen as an important component of the foundation to optimize business performance. Due to constant changes in both the IT world and in modern business, working on an alignment of business and IT is becoming increasingly important. The aim of this paper is to offer an approach to solving the alignment problem of IT and business complex in the company, with particular emphasis on applications in the field of insurance industry. The cause of alignment problem lays primarily in different abstraction levels of business and IT concepts [9]. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes the construction of Enterprise Architecture (EA) [25], which connects models of the organization and its business processes to software architecture models and an implementation environment. The first layer of this architecture is a Business architecture that is defined here as the map of comprised business processes, and is a concretization of contemporary business models in the field of enterprise architecture. Concretization is done here in the context of the insurance company, and is the basis for the definition of the other layers of the architecture.
... However, the actual business processes are obscure in nature, which is often a black box in reality. In the present case study, this generic trading company corresponds to a simulation model implemented in Multi-Agent Resource-Event-Agent (MAREA) simulator (Vym etal and Scheller, 2012;Vym etal and Šperka, 2013), which is a simulation framework for a multi-agent-based company model with Resource-Event-Agent ontology as the base of the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) (McCarthy, 1982;Hruby, 2006;Gailly and Poels, 2007;Ito and Vym etal, 2013). ...
Article
Purpose The need for assuring correctness of business processes in enterprises is widely recognised in terms of business process re-engineering and improvement. Formal methods are a promising approach to this issue. The challenge in business process verification is to create a formal model that is well-aligned to the reality. Process mining is a well-known technique to discover a model of a process based on facts. However, no studies exist that apply it to formal verification. This study aims to propose a methodology for formal business process verification by means of process mining, and attempts to clarify the challenges and necessary technologies in this approach using a case study. Design/methodology/approach A trading company simulation model is used as a case study. A workflow model is discovered from an event log produced by a simulation tool and manually complemented to a formal model. Correctness requirements of both domain-dependent and domain-independent types of the model are checked by means of model-checking. Findings For business process verification with both domain-dependent and domain-independent correctness requirements, more advanced process mining techniques that discover data-related aspects of processes are desirable. The choice of a formal modelling language is also crucial. It depends on the correctness requirements and the characteristics of the business process. Originality/value Formal verification of business processes starting with creating its formal model is quite new. Furthermore, domain-dependent and domain-independent correctness properties are considered in the same framework, which is also new. This study revealed necessary technologies for this approach with process mining.
... Assim como a Enterprise Ontology, a ontologia de modelo de negócios REA (Resource-Event-Agent) proposta por McCarthy (1982) também está focada na empresa. Ela evoluiu a partir de uma estrutura generalizada para modelar sistemas de informações contábeis, para uma ontologia de sistemas de informações empresariais [Hruby 2006]. A ontologia é composta de recursos -agentes -eventos e foi formalizada usando diagramas de classes UML. ...
Article
Full-text available
Este artigo descreve uma ontologia para otimizar a modelagem de redes de valor. Este tipo de modelagem ainda depende consideravelmente do conhecimento tácito do analista de negócios, o qual pode ser representado em linguagem de máquina para facilitar a gestão do conhecimento em uma empresa ágil. A ontologia proposta é baseada em conceitos de Teoria de Agência Múltipla, Enterprise Ontology, Modelagem de Redes de Valor e Teoria dos Atos de Fala, permitindo a configuração semiautomática de modelos de redes de valor. A utilidade da ontologia é avaliada com três cenários de estudo de casos reais. A análise dos casos foi baseada em um protocolo de estudo de caso observacional adaptado de Design Science.
... This combination of events is called duality and is an expression of an economic reciprocity -an event receiving some resource is always accompanied by an event provisioning another resource. Lately, it has been argued that application models developed based on the REA ontology can capture duality containing more than two economic events [8]. For instance, in banking, a loan receipt may be compensated with both an interest payment and a loan return. ...
Chapter
Traditional organizational structures evolve towards online business using modern IT – such as cloud computing, semantic standards, and process- and service-oriented architectures. On the technology level, Web services are dominantly used for modeling the interaction points of complex Web applications. So far, development of Web services has matured on the technical perspective considering for example the development of standards for message exchanges and service coordination. However, business concepts, such as economic assets exchanged in transactions between cooperating actors, cannot be easily traced in final Web service specifications. As a consequence, business and IT models become difficult to keep aligned. To address this issue, the authors propose an MDD approach to elicit business services and further software services using REA business model as the starting point. The proposal focuses on a value-explorative elicitation of business services at the top level and model transformations using UML 2 to the system level by utilizing well-defined mappings.
... Assim como a Enterprise Ontology, a ontologia de modelo de negócios REA (Resource-Event-Agent) proposta por McCarthy (1982) também está focada na empresa. Ela evoluiu a partir de uma estrutura generalizada para modelar sistemas de informações contábeis, para uma ontologia de sistemas de informações empresariais [Hruby 2006]. A ontologia é composta de recursos -agentes -eventos e foi formalizada usando diagramas de classes UML. ...
Article
Full-text available
This paper describes an ontology for leveraging value networks modeling. Currently, this modeling technique demands substantial tacit knowledge from a business analyst, which could be represented in a machinereasonable language to enable knowledge management in an agile enterprise. The ontology is based on concepts of Multiple Agency Theory, Enterprise Ontology, Value Network Modeling and Speech Acts Theory, supporting semiautomatic configuration of value network models. The utility of the ontology is evaluated by means of three scenarios of real-world case studies. Case analysis was based on an observational case study protocol adapted from Design Science.
... Data sharing in supply and logistics will be based on concepts derived from service science (Spohrer, May 2009). Firstly, the concept of business service is introduced as: a classification of economic events (Hruby, 2006), e.g. to transport, to tranship, and to store, to achieve particular goals. These logistics services can be published as timetables of a transport means. ...
Article
Each manufacturer, supplier, and retailer has its own chain of collaborating stakeholders to meet their customer demands. Many perspectives can be taken like food safety, security, and sustainability, which may each lead to separate solutions that are not necessarily interoperable with each other. Data can only be shared within the context of those solutions and only with extra effort, and thus costs, across these solutions. To address this solution, this paper proposes a methodological approach for specification of data that can be shared with rapid deployment by for instance a blockchain based - or a peer-to-peer infrastructure. The methodological approach is based on basic informatics principles like the Turing machine and ontologies.
... And further inspection shows that it adopts an owner-counterparty viewfocusing on the view from a single entity. Hruby et al. [19] makes this point (in Section 1.2.1), where he clarifies that "(t)he terms decrement and increment are relative to the model viewpoint: they depend upon the economic agent which is in the focus of the model" and in the context of his example, "if we modelled the same process from the perspective of the Customer, the transfer of the pizza would be an increment (would be called Purchase) …". ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Double entry bookkeeping lies at the core of modern accounting. It is shaped by a fundamental conceptual pattern; a design decision that was popularised by Pacioli some 500 years ago and subsequently institutionalised into accounting practice and systems. Debits and credits are core components of this conceptual pattern. This paper suggests that a different conceptual pattern, one that does not have debits and credits as its components, may be more suited to some modern accounting information systems. It makes the case by looking at two conceptual design choices that permeate the Pacioli pattern; de se and directional terms - leading to a de se directional conceptual pattern. It suggests alternative design choices - de re and non-directional terms, leading to a de re non-directional conceptual pattern - have some advantages in modern complex, computer-based, business environments.
... A prime example may be e.g. transactions in REA model [5], which apart from others, deals with accountancy systems. There are no parent-child relationships between these transactions, transactions are placed in parallel. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
Co-creation and Co-production in production chains is the typical way of cooperation one observes in high value industrial production chains. The DEMO (Design Engineering Methodology for Organization) co-creation and co-production (CC-CP) model is based on the DEMO methodology and the DEMO Enterprise Ontology. This model enables modeling paired transactions applications. The paired transactions mean that the core of the application is formed by two different kinds of transactions, where one kind of transactions is in consideration of the other kind of transactions. This is the fundamental aspect of e.g. accountancy systems, or various applications that utilize a contract. The paper describes and explains the main features of this model and then shows the model’s application on a Rent-A-Car example. This is an example in which service (services) is exchanged for money. The paper also discusses various possibilities that the DEMO CC-CP model provides to properly capture modeling reality, and also mentions future research in this area.
... According to Hruby (2006), Business Patterns are patterns for concepts that can be found in almost all business software applications. Such concepts include economic resources, economic agents, economic events, commitments, and contracts. ...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose Patterns have proven to be useful for documenting general reusable solutions to a commonly occurring problem. In recent years, several different business process management (BPM)-related patterns have been published. Despite the large number of publications on this subject, there is no work that provides a comprehensive overview and categorization of the published business process model patterns. The purpose of this paper is to close this gap by providing a taxonomy of patterns as well as a classification of 89 research works. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyzed 280 research articles following a structured iterative procedure inspired by the method for taxonomy development from Nickerson et al. (2013). Using deductive and inductive reasoning processes embedded in concurrent as well as joint research activities, the authors created a taxonomy of patterns as well as a classification of 89 research works. Findings In general, the findings extend the current understanding of BPM patterns. The authors identify pattern categories that are highly populated with research works as well as categories that have received far less attention such as risk and security, the ecological perspective and process architecture. Further, the analysis shows that there is not yet an overarching pattern language for business process model patterns. The insights can be used as starting point for developing such a pattern language. Originality/value Up to now, no comprehensive pattern taxonomy and research classification exists. The taxonomy and classification are useful for searching pattern works which is also supported by an accompanying website complementing the work. In regard to future research and publications on patterns, the authors derive recommendations regarding the content and structure of pattern publications.
... And any enterprise social interaction type can be thought of as a business archetype pattern, as it involves interactions between actors considered as business archetypes. Hruby (2006) defined a business pattern as "a specification of abstractions and models above the implementation level" (p. 358). ...
... It was proposed by W. McCarthy in 1982 [15] and evolved as an ISO standard in 2007 [16] after a re-visitation in the light of ontological principles [4]. Since then, various scholars contributed to enhance REA's understandability and applicability [3,10,11,22], aiming at the same time at considering REA (or a suitably extended and revised version of it) as a foundation for business modeling and enterprise modeling in general. More recently, two groups of authors [1,2] attempted an ontological re-engineering of REA in the light of the UFO ontology and the OntoUML language, developed by Giancarlo Guizzardi and his group [7]. ...
Conference Paper
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In this paper we review and discuss some recent attempts at ontological re-engineering of REA in the light of the UFO ontology and the OntoUML language, focusing in particular on different choices concerning the UFO notion of relator. We also take this as an opportunity to clarify and revise Guarino and Guizzardi's general theory of reification and truthmaking proposed in the past.
... Engineering of the value chain is aimed at enhancing company's competitive position in the market, increasing the efficiency of company's operations (extension of the value added as well as improvement of its structure). In academic literature one may find a lot of researches dedicated to the issue of value chain design, including the papers of R. Grant and Baden-Fuller (2003), J. L. G. Dietz (2006), L. Horvath (2001), P. Hruby (2006). At the same time, the criteria for distinguishing strategically important activities within the value chain and the criteria for selecting the most effective design of the value chain are not well substantiated in academic literature. ...
Article
Company’s strategic development has to be aimed at value growth. External growth is connected with effective using of new assets at the created value chains. The goal of the paper is to distinguish organizational and economic conditions of economic efficiency of the value chain transformation. Research Methods: the comparative analysis of financial results of the mining companies for 2003–2015, technology, economic and institutional factors, the case method and strategic and investment analysis are applied. Results: geological, technical, economic and other specific conditions of the value chain transformation as strategic development are formulated; estimate new effects of added assets at the value chains is offered.
... According to Hruby (2006), Business Patterns are patterns for concepts that can be found in almost all business software applications. Such concepts include economic resources, economic agents, economic events, commitments, and contracts. ...
Conference Paper
While a large number of business process model patterns have been suggested in the literature, it is currently difficult to find patterns that might be useful in a given context. The reason is that the relevant publications are spread in various journals and other types of publications, and there is no guidance for locating a pattern that can be useful for solving a given problem. In our article, we present the results of a literature survey that has been conducted with the aim to get an exhaustive overview on existing publications on business process modeling patterns. The results of the survey allowed us to propose a taxonomy of existing patterns as a first step towards a pattern language of business process model patterns. Furthermore, we created an online catalog that allows finding publications on business process model patterns based on various search criteria. It is intended to be useful both for business process modeling practitioners as for researchers in need of sound literature references. Currently, this catalog includes links to 89 publications (usually containing more than one pattern). It is our aim to populate the catalog with patterns published in the future.
... REA was originally intended as a basis for accounting information systems, [15], and focused on representing increases and decreases of value in business organizations. In later work, REA has been extended to form a foundation for enterprise information systems architectures, [8], [13], where REA also addresses the policy level in organi-zations. REA places commitments and contracts into the center of business models, thereby emphasizing their importance for regulating business interactions. ...
Chapter
Conceptual modeling is often viewed as an activity of representing a preexisting world that should be faithfully mirrored in an information system. This view is adequate for modeling physical domains but needs to be revised and extended for social and institutional domains, as these are continuously produced and reproduced through communicative processes. Thereby, conceptual modeling moves beyond analysis and representation in order to cater also for design and creation. Following such a view on conceptual modeling, this paper proposes an ontology for modeling institutional domains. The ontology emphasizes the role of institutional entities in regulating and governing these domains through rules and rights that define allowed and required interactions. Furthermore, the ontology shows how these institutional entities are dependent on and grounded in material entities. Conceptual modelers can benefit from the ontology when modeling institutional domains, as it highlights fundamental notions and distinctions in these domains, e.g., the role of rights, the role of processes in creating institutional facts, and the difference between documents and institutional information. The ontology is illustrated using a case on public consultation management.
... Be aware that some of the patterns that are going to be analyzed in this section were not classified with the same pattern type name they were classified with using the classification in this chapter. For instance the Posting pattern was classified as a business pattern by Pavel Hruby in [103] but this thesis classifies it as an analysis pattern. ...
... A literature review on contemporary BM theory shows that various authors have tried to describe and present the framework of a BM, mainly by decompressing it into separate model components (Hamel, 2000;Petrovic et al, 2001;Weill & Vitale, 2001;Alt & Zimmermann, 2001;Methlie, 2001;Linder & Cantrell, 2000;Gordijn, 2000;Osterwalder, 2004;Hruby, 2006). In the same year, the ontology approach of Osterwalder (2004) integrates all the important elements of a BM and becomes widely accepted as an adequate conceptual representation of the developed theory on BMs (Table 16). ...
Thesis
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This dissertation deals with the Information and Communication Technology advances in the hotels industry and their effect on their business model (BM). During the last fifteen years, the pace of technological developments in the hospitality industry has exponentially increased, leading hotels to integrate ICTs in the various facets of their daily operations. From the wide assimilation of in-house technologies to the exploitation of numerous online opportunities, ICTs are dramatically changing the industry's landscape. More than ever before, ICTs enable hotels to compete on a global scale, aiming for both the business and the leisure traveler. The traditional organizational business model is fundamentally affected, forcing hotels to reformulate their processes, enabling new technological solutions. Although it is widely accepted that hotels respond to this necessity of ICTs integration, there is insufficient research carried out with regard to the transformation methodology and its effect on the organization's BM. It largely remains a matter of hypothesis, whether hotels follow a specific framework when integrating ICTs and how they manage the BM change process. This dissertation aims to contribute to this shortfall, by presenting the findings of a research carried out with hotels operating in northern Greece and by introducing a stepwise change methodology, the Business Model Evolution Framework. Participating hotels of various sizes, classification and technological familiarization, test the validity of the proposed methodology and provide interesting insights in ICTs integration and BM transformation.
... They can be generated, activated, operated, and finished. It is an REA [6] object. ...
Conference Paper
We discuss a collection of document-oriented software design patterns and tools used by a medium-sized software firm during implementation of an autonomous extension of already used business system. The attitudes are enabled by a document management system used as a data tier managing documents being similar to generalized spreadsheets. It enables construction of easily usable interfaces of software entities, typically software services. End users feel it as a transparent variant of their everyday activities. The built (sub)systems can have many further crucial quality characteristics. The system is transparent, modifiable, and has many further desirable properties. They are applicable in small as well as in large projects. We show that properly applied document-oriented philosophy enables many interesting and usable software engineering solutions.
... The REA model derives its name from the three distinct categories of entities resources, events, and agents [1,2]. ...
... The main class of our economic events ontology is called EventType. Following Hruby [14], we differentiate between two major economic event types: events increasing and decreasing the value of agent's resources. These sub-classes are called IncrementEventType and DecrementEventType, respectively. ...
Conference Paper
We address the problem of extracting structured representations of economic events from a large corpus of news articles, using a combination of natural language processing and machine learning techniques. The developed techniques allow for semi-automatic population of a financial knowledge base, which, in turn, may be used to support a range of data mining and exploration tasks. The key challenge we face in this domain is that the same event is often reported multiple times, with varying correctness of details. We address this challenge by first collecting all information pertinent to a given event from the entire corpus, then considering all possible representations of the event, and finally, using a supervised learning method, to rank these representations by the associated confidence scores. A main innovative element of our approach is that it jointly extracts and stores all attributes of the event as a single representation (quintuple). Using a purpose-built test set we demonstrate that our supervised learning approach can achieve 25% improvement in F1-score over baseline methods that consider the earliest, the latest or the most frequent reporting of the event.
... Thus allowing Model Implementation (MI) by exporting from Protégé the SQL schema, which can then be used to load the enterprise domain database into the chosen database software (MySQL, Oracle etc.). The resulting database should then mimic the domain model as closely as possible [18]. ...
Conference Paper
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This paper demonstrates a toolset developed by the authors to enable a machine-readable REA ontology specification. Information modelling techniques are used to provide a unified enterprise ontology by capturing the business semantics using Conceptual Graphs (CGs) using Common Logic (CL) and the Conceptual Graph Interchange Format (CGIF) dialect for information exchange and transmission. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is used for model verification, knowledge discovery and extraction. The enterprise design follows the Open Groups definition of the TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM) to define the system architecture and subsequently provide a method for defining and automating the (REA) design models for; Business Architecture, Information System Architecture and Technology Architecture.
Article
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The notion of affordance remains elusive, notwithstanding its importance for the representation of agency, cognition, and behaviors. This paper lays down a foundation for an ontology of affordances by elaborating the idea of “core affordance” which would serve as a common ground for explaining existing diverse conceptions of affordances and their interrelationships. For this purpose, it analyzes M. T. Turvey’s dispositional theory of affordances in light of a formal ontology of dispositions. Consequently, two kinds of so-called “core affordances” are proposed: specific and general ones. Inspired directly by Turvey’s original account, a specific core affordance is intimately connected to a specific agent, as it is reciprocal with a counterpart effectivity (which is a disposition) of this agent within the agent-environment system. On the opposite, a general core affordance does not depend on individual agents; rather, its realization involves an action by an instance of a determinate class of agents. The utility of such core affordances is illustrated by examining how they can be leveraged to formalize other major accounts of affordances. Additionally, it is briefly outlined how core affordances can be employed to analyze three notions that are closely allied with affordances: the environment, image schemas, and intentions.
Article
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Data integration is one of the core responsibilities of EDM (enterprise data management) and interoperability. It is essential for almost every digitalization project, e.g., during the migration from a legacy ERP (enterprise resource planning) software to a new system. One challenge is the incompatibility of data models, i.e., different software systems use specific or proprietary terminology, data structures, data formats, and semantics. Data need to be interchanged between software systems, and often complex data conversions or transformations are necessary. This paper presents an approach that allows software engineers or data experts to use models and patterns in order to specify data integration: it is based on data models such as ER (entity-relationship) diagrams or UML (unified modeling language) class models that are well-accepted and widely used in practice. Predefined data integration patterns are combined (applied) on the model level leading to formal, precise, and concise definitions of data transformations and conversions. Data integration definitions can then be executed (via code generation) so that a manual implementation is not necessary. The advantages are that existing data models can be reused, standardized data integration patterns lead to fast results, and data integration specifications are executable and can be easily maintained and extended. An example transformation of elements of a relational data model to object-oriented data structures shows the approach in practice. Its focus is on data mappings and relationships
Article
The formalization of the REA2 ontology presented in this paper offers a minimal set of operationalized semantics for a single white-box model relevant to all business stakeholders independent of their role or involvement in economic activities. This paper's theoretical innovations are the use of MERODE to model increment and decrement semantics as fundamental stand-alone concepts that simultaneously affect economic resources, event, agents and the semantics of the stock-flow, participation and ownership associations and the formalization of the REA axioms as executable finite state machines. MERODE's possibilities for model execution through fast prototyping allowed validation through the modeling of an archetypical exchange scenario. Both innovations contribute to the reliability of a generic semantic model for finance and logistics in both the traditional as well as the sharing economy, thus promoting traceability and accountability in value networks and supply chains supported by both centralized and decentralized ledger technologies.
Chapter
Treatments are entities of central importance in many practices and applications, including both medical and technical ones. Treatments exhibit a number of intricate characteristics that give rise to practical as well as theoretical modelling challenges. One issue is that treatments can be viewed as endurants as well as events, the latter ones being temporally extended and having both a completed life history and a planned life for their future. There is also a normative relationship between a treatment viewed as an endurant and its life history. Other issues include various abstraction levels of treatments and their divisions into subtreatments. We address these issues by proposing an ontologically grounded modelling pattern of treatments based on an ontological analysis of the event notion in UFO. We also use this analysis to suggest visualizations of treatments.
Chapter
It is widely recognized that ontologies can be used to support the semantic integration and interoperability of heterogeneous information systems. Resource Event Agent (REA) is a well-known business ontology that was proposed for ontology-driven enterprise system development. However, the current specification is neither sufficiently explicit nor formal, and thus difficult to operationalize for use in ontology-driven business information systems. In this chapter REA is redesigned and formalized following a methodology based on the reengineering extension of the METHONTOLOGY framework for ontology development. The redesign is focused on developing a UML representation of REA that improves upon existing representations and that can easily be transformed into a formal representation. The formal representation of REA is developed in OWL. The chapter discusses the choices made in redesigning REA and in transforming REA’s UML representation into an OWL representation. It is also illustrated how this new formal representation of the REA-ontology can be used to support ontology-driven supply chain collaboration.
Chapter
The architecture of a system is a specification of software components, interrelationships, and rules for component interactions and evolution over time. In 2001 OMG, adopted an architecture standard, the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). MDA is an architectural framework for improving portability, interoperability and reusability through separation of concerns (MDA, 2003) (MDA, 2005). It is not itself a technology specification but it represents an evolving plan to achieve cohesive model-driven technology specifications. MDA is built on OMG standards including the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) (XMI, 2007) and CORBA (CORBA, 1992) (CORBA, 2002) a major middleware standard. MDA is model-driven because it uses models to direct the complete lifecycle of a system. All artifacts such as requirement specifications, architecture descriptions, design descriptions and code, are regarded as models. MDA provides an approach for specifying a system independently of the platforms that it supports, specifying platforms, selecting a particular platform for the system, and transforming the system specification into one implementation for the selected particular platform. Why MDA? OMG has focused on the creation of open specifications to encourage application interoperability. It was defined to solve enterprise application integration. A middleware describes a piece of software that connects two or more software applications, allowing them to exchange data. To achieve this, it must be implemented for all different languages and platforms that need linking.
Chapter
One symptom characterizes today’s times: A high rate of change. This fact is especially true for information technology systems—they must continuously be adapted to new requirements, to changes in the operational environment, and evolving laws and regulations. Because of market pressure, these changes must be done under intense time and cost pressure. Therefore, an excellent changeability, i.e., a low resistance to change, is a crucial property of the IT system. Changeability is a consequence of good underlying architecture, which is implemented by following proven and enforceable architecture principles. This chapter introduces 12 tried and tested architecture principles to ensure sustainable changeability in evolving IT architectures.
Chapter
In the previous chapters, the essential knowledge about software architecture, software evolution, and software engineering has been presented. The questions coming up at this point are (1) How is good architecture defined? (2) How is good architecture formalized? (3) How is good architecture taught? (4) How is good architecture enforced? The answers in this book are: By defining, formalizing, strictly applying, and enforcing architecture principles. Architecture principles represent proven, long-tested, reliable knowledge about successful systems’ architecting—sometimes called “the eternal truths of software architecture”. Today, architecture principles (and their derivatives: Architecture patterns) are available for all disciplines of architecting, i.e., for all horizontal and vertical architecture layers. The following chapters introduce, explain, and justify an important number of architecture principles. The main focus is on architecture principles for changeability and dependability. For this approach to architecting software-systems, the term “Principle-Based Architecting” has been coined.
Conference Paper
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The Resources-Events-Agents (REA) model is a semantic data model for the development and integration of conceptual schemas of accounting information systems. This paper is to change the look of REA modeling and to test the REA as a conceptual design, this study is to model the knowledge sharing mechanism in KPT system of SerindIT Company using REA component, also to use the Protégé OWL software as a tool to validate the REA ontology on the selected case which is Knowledge sharing mechanism adopted in KPT system.
Chapter
One of the key tasks of the CDD methodology concerns designing capabilities starting from existing business requirements, enterprise models, and other kinds of organizational designs. As described in this chapter, the CDD methodology contains three complementary strategies for the design of capabilities: goal-first, process-first, and concept-first strategies. The view of the goal-first strategy is that capabilities exist as means to fulfill an organization’s long-term business objectives. The process-first strategy considers that capabilities are delivered through the execution of well-established business processes and therefore should be designed based on such processes. The concept-first strategy views stable information structures as the primary means for capability design. All three strategies for capability design shares four generic phases: scoping, identification, interlinking, and contextualizing and adapting. Each phase involves the use of some of the main CDD concepts in the capability design, such as goals, processes, context elements, or delivery patterns, as well as their relationships, with the final aim to obtain a well-defined model of one or several capabilities. Documentation of capabilities designed by the strategies is supported by the CDD environment, in particular the CDT tool support, a model-driven design.
Article
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Through a proof of concept in SWI-Prolog, this paper demonstrates a business transaction model by which the trading partners can derive their own, personal perspective from shared data. The demonstration is an innovative formalisation of the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology as it allows for switching viewpoints in real-time between one trading-partner’s perspective and that of a trading-partner with an opposing view (i.e. customer or supplier), or a trading-partner independent perspective (e.g. trusted third-party). The business transaction model is achieved by uniting REA with the Open-EDI Business Transaction Ontology (OeBTO). The resulting unified formalisation of the REA ontology (REA2) also highlights implications for the future development of a) enterprise information systems (EIS) in the cloud, b) social-media based EIS, c) blockchain EIS, and d) EIS interoperability across business paradigms. The EIS interoperability such as between traditional EIS (which typically uses a trading partner perspective), and EIS for the collaborative economy (which typically uses a trading-partner independent perspective) is particularly highlighted as it becomes much more transparent than previously.
Article
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A multi-agent system is a useful modeling architecture in business process modeling in the sense that we can naturally implement participants in a real company with software agents. However, analyzing and interpreting the simulation results of multi-agent models tends to be difficult due to the inherent complexity of the models. In this regard, another discipline—process mining—is useful for such purposes because it has demonstrated its usefulness in analyzing real processes. In this article, our aim is to combine these two disciplines for exploitation in business process modeling and simulation; we extend a multi-agent-based business simulator named Multi-Agent system with Resource-Event-Agent ontology (MAREA) to be able to be analyzed by means of process mining techniques. To this end, we formalize the abstract multi-agent architecture of MAREA and establish its relationship to process mining by defining how execution of a multi-agent system can be recorded as an event log, which is later analyzed by process mining techniques. Based on this definition, we implement functionality to extract event logs from simulation runs in MAREA. For demonstration, we implement a model of a generic trading company in MAREA and perform process structure verification and social network analyzes by means of process mining techniques.
Article
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Contemporary organizations are required to adapt to a changing environment in an agile way, which is often deemed very challenging. Normalized Systems (NS) theory attempts to build highly evolvable software systems by using systems theory as its theoretical underpinning. A modeling method which supports the identification of the NS elements, required for building NS sofware in practice, is currently missing. Therefore, the paper introduces an approach for creating both data models and processing models in the context of NS, as well as their integration. It is discussed how these models can be taken as the input for the actual creation of evolutionary prototypes by using an earlier developed supporting tool. The modeling approach and its suitability for feeding the tool are evaluated to discover their current strengths and weaknesses.
Conference Paper
Substantial number of the current information system (IS) implementations is based on transaction approach. In addition, most of the implementations are domain-specific (e.g. accounting IS, resource planning IS). Therefore, we have to have a generic transaction model to build and verify domain-specific IS. The paper proposes a new transaction model for domain-specific ontologies. This model is based on value oriented business process modelling technique. The transaction model is formalized by the Petri Net theory. First part of the paper presents common business processes and analyses related to business process modeling. Second part defines the transactional model delimited by REA enterprise ontology paradigm and introduces states of the generic transaction model. The generic model proposal is defined and visualized by the Petri Net modelling tool. Third part shows application of the generic transaction model. Last part of the paper concludes results and discusses a practical usability of the generic transaction model.
Book
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference, EEWC 2017, held in Antwerp, Belgium, in May 2017. EEWC aims at addressing the challenges that modern and complex enterprises are facing in a rapidly changing world. The participants of the working conference share a belief that dealing with these challenges requires rigorous and scientific solutions, focusing on the design and engineering of enterprises. The goal of EEWC is to stimulate interaction between the different stakeholders, scientists as well as practitioners, interested in making Enterprise Engineering a reality. The 12 full papers and 4 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: formalisms; standards and laws; business processes; normalized systems and evolvability; ontologies; and organization design.
Chapter
valuation semantics. First, we will show how to translate an arbitrary contract, written in our language, into a value process, together with a handful of operations over these processes. These processes correspond directly to the mathematical and stochastic machinery used by nancial experts.
Article
A limitation of existing accounting systems is their lack of knowledge sharing and knowledge reuse, which makes the design and implementation of new accounting systems time‐consuming and expensive. An important requirement for knowledge sharing and reuse is the existence of a common semantic infrastructure. In this article we use McCarthy's (1982) Resource‐Event‐Agent (REA) model as a common semantic infrastructure in an accounting context. The objective is to make knowledge‐intensive use of REA to share accounting concepts across functional boundaries and to reuse these concepts in different applications and different systems, an approach we call augmented intensional reasoning. Intensional reasoning is the active use of conceptual structures in information systems operations such as design and information retrieval. For augmented intensional reasoning, the conceptual structures are extended with domain‐specific REA knowledge. Sections II and III describe different dimensions of augmented intensional rea...