* ANNOUNCEMENT * (01)
We are please to announce that *Professor William E. McCarthy* from
Michigan State University will be giving a talk entitled: "*The
Integration of an Accounting Domain Ontology (REA) with an Upper
Ontology (SUMO)*" during our March 17, 2005 conference call session. (02)
Conference call-in details: (03)
Date: Thursday, Mar. 17, 2005
Start Time: 10:30am PST / 1:30pm EST (World Time:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=3&day=17&year=2005&hour=10&min=30&sec=0&p1=224 (04)
)
Session Duration: 1.5 ~ 2 Hours
Dial-in Number: 1-702-851-3330 (Las Vegas, Nevada)
Participant Access Code: "686564#" (05)
****The Integration of an Accounting Domain Ontology (REA) with an Upper
Ontology (SUMO)****
by William E. McCarthy (06)
Abstract: (07)
The REA (Resource-Event-Agent) enterprise ontology is a well-accepted
model of the concepts and relationships that exist in a normal economic
exchange between companies or conversions within companies. REA is based
upon a foundation grounded in both accounting and economic theories of
the firm, and it is used in the accounting domain extensively for both
research and teaching in accounting systems. The seminal REA paper was
published in The Accounting Review in 1982, and its basic framework has
been extended multiple times in recent years in work by Geerts and
McCarthy. The REA ontology has been used in standards work within the
UN/CEFACT, ISO, and other standards bodies. (08)
All domain ontologies need to reconciled eventually to an upper ontology
if they expect to be used extensively across domains, and the
interrelated domain concepts and associations need to be mapped to those
of the upper ontology where those correspondences exist. The upper
ontology to be used in this mapping exercise with REA is SUMO, the
Suggested Upper Merged Ontology, one of the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology
working group starter documents. SUMO is extensively used and researched
in the computer science community, and its conceptual structures are
better defined and integrated than those of more informal ontological
frameworks like Bunge and Sowa. Sowa’s conceptual framework fits REA
well, but Bunge’s is a clear conceptual mismatch. (09)
Mapping to more general ideas and axioms can be both a quality control
and a concept expansion exercise. There are bound to be many gaps and
overlaps, just as one would find in mapping individual external schemas
to a more general conceptual schema in the database design process of
view modeling and view integration. The integration exercise to be
described in this presentation is most certainly preliminary, and it is
being accomplished by an REA expert who is also an acknowledged SUMO
novice. The domain concepts of REA work extremely well in the process
modeling of inter-firm business collaborations and in the re-orientation
of basic accounting ideas away from the artifactual grip of general
ledgers and traditional accounting reporting. Their integration with
SUMO will be another step on the path to assessing their suitability for
use as a more general enterprise ontology. (010)
**About the Speaker:* * (011)
William E. McCarthy is a Professor of Accounting and Information Systems
at Michigan State University. He received his A.B. in economics from
Boston College in 1968 and his Ph.D. in accounting and computer science
from the University of Massachusetts in 1978. His homepage is available
at http://www.msu.edu/user/mccarth4/ (012)
Professor McCarthy’s research interests center around the application of
knowledge-based systems, object orientation, and database theories to
the problems of building information architectures for use between and
within business enterprises. His papers have been published in many
leading accounting and computer science journals, and he has given
invited presentations to a wide variety of academic and business
institutions in the USA, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Professor
McCarthy’s paper on REA accounting systems was given the first Seminal
Contribution to Accounting Information Systems Literature Award at the
American Accounting Association meeting in Chicago in 1996. His present
research focuses on (1) the development of REA enterprise ontologies,
(2) the integration of REA models within XML, and (3) the development of
agent-oriented information systems with REA business process patterns. (013)
Most recently, he has been especially active in international e-commerce
standardization efforts. He was a member of the business process team of
the UN-based ebXML project, and he is also active with the UN’s
Technologies and Methods Workgroup and the ISO-based Open-edi
initiative. He was also active in semantic integration and model-based
standards development work with the Open Applications Group (OAG) and
the Object Management Group (OMG). For the years 2001-2003, he was the
Vice-President of the American Accounting Association (AAA), and every
summer he teaches at MSU an AAA-sponsored workshop on REA accounting
systems to accounting faculty from all over the world. (014)
Professor McCarthy teaches a wide variety of graduate and undergraduate
information systems classes at MSU, and he was the recipient of the
Department of Accounting’s Roland F. Salmonson Outstanding Teaching
Award in 1985, in 1993, and again in 2003. He is also cited in the 1995,
1998, and 2001 versions of the Business Week Guide to the Best Business
Schools as one of the outstanding graduate teachers in the Broad College
of Business, and in 1999 he was given the outstanding faculty teaching
award from the Spartan Business Journal (MBA student newspaper). In
1999, Professor McCarthy was given the Withrow Teacher-Scholar Award,
the lifetime teaching award from the Broad College of Business, and in
2003 he was given the American Accounting Association’s Innovation in
Accounting Education Award. In February 2000, he was presented with the
highest recognition given to professors at Michigan State University:
the MSU Distinguished Faculty Award. (015)
Please refer to details on the session wiki page at:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2005_03_17 (016)
Please point your browser to this wiki page during the session.
Shared-screen support (VNC session) will also be available and be
started 5 minutes before the call. (017)
Look forward to having you at the session. (018)
Regards. =ppy (019)
P.S. to help us with the logistics, please add your name under the
"expected" attendees section
(http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2005_03_17#nid019
) if you are planning to attend, and haven't responded otherwise. Tx. -ppy (020)
P.P.S. Please note that this event was originally planned for March 10,
2005, and has now been rescheduled to Mar. 17, 2005 due to the fact that
a number of our members will need to be at the Semantic Technology
Conference 2005 (March 7~10, 2005, San Francisco, ref:
http://www.semantic-conference.com/ ). We apologize for any
inconvenience caused. Please make a note of this new date and come join
us. =ppy
--
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