Ontolog invited Speaker Presentation - Professor William McCarthy - Thu 2008.06.05    (1CD0)

Conference Call Details    (1HPA)

Attendees    (1HQ4)

Agenda & Proceedings:    (1HQC)

http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/presentation/BillMcCarthy_20080605/BillMcCarthy_20080605.jpg [Professor William E. McCarthy]    (1IHX)

Abstract: (by BillMcCarthy)    (1HSR)

The ontology spectrum of LeoObrst poses a challenge for researchers and developers trying to build standards for business process interoperability, because it envisions a notion of clear structural progress toward the goal of full semantic expressiveness. However, this notion of structural progress needs to be augmented in my opinion with the idea of domain completeness which I consider to be the ability of a domain theory to explain the separate and distinctly different aggregation level of its theory components.    (1HSS)

In this review, I will discuss these notions of structural and domain progress by using the example of the REA ontology (originally posed as an accounting domain theory) and its realization in one final international standard and in one ongoing standards development project:    (1HST)

1. The Open-edi Business Transaction Model (ISO/IEC 15944-4); and    (1HSU)

2. The REA Specialization Module for the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM).    (1HSV)

I will also discuss some more general ontology development ideas that arose from consideration of these projects at the NSF-sponsored Workshop on Financial Interoperability that occurred on May 12-13 in Arlington, Virginia.    (1HSW)

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/    (1II3)

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.    (1II4)

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.    (1II5)

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.    (1II6)

Questions, Answers & Discourse:    (1IJC)

 PeterYim: Welcome to the Ontolog invited Speaker Presentation - Professor William McCarthy - Thu 2008.06.05    
 * Invited Speaker: Professor William E. McCarthy, Michigan State University
 * Title: "Ontologically-Driven Standards Development for Business Process Systems"    (1IXJ)
 ToddSchneider: Question for Bill: In describing the 'When' part of the model, could this have been
                derived as ontological dependence of domain representation?    (1IXK)
 ToddSchneider: Common Logic may be the best mechanism for formalizing this domain.    (1IXL)
 ToddSchneider: REA should assume there won't general agreement on the meaning of all terms and 
                provide a mediation capability.    (1IXM)
 RaviSharma: Notes 060508 ontolog for Prof. McCarthy    (1IXN)
             Qs
             1. Accounting systems are documented since Mohanjodaro Seals and Silk Routes and 
                barter systems prevailed 5000 BC at least, and into accounting systems such as 
                Khatas, not 500 years ago when transactions concepts and modern accounting started.    (1IXO)
             2. If you can not fight them, join then as in JOIN in views. In Ontology it implies 
                Concept Sharing or Concept matching which are then executable in MDAs.  Thus Answer 
                to your question is that you keep their Namespaces same but map their domains and 
                process by relationships based on concepts such as is a custom in UNCEFACT REA etc!    (1IXP)
             3. In COPs the Trust is close to commitment without the accounting rigor and sometimes 
                even more reliable as in real-time NASA Robotics Inference Engines and Ontologies.    (1IXQ)
             4. This is one of the real examples recently seen that probably can be used to bound 
                the diversity and also the variety of allowed relationships and their hierarchies. 
                This would hopefully be true of the other domains in addition to Financial Systems domains?    (1IXR)
             5. What are the decision rules that depend on values of cardinalities among the classes?    (1IXS)
             6. I see Manufacturing and supply chain interwoven in your account ting model and 
                vocabulary of automotive Supply Chain perhaps due to location - Lansing? I have 5 years 
                at GM and one at GMAC.    (1IXT)
             7. Is Homo-economicus role simplistic in actual practice for satisfying multiple regulatory 
                and environmental policies, stakeholder ROI and Bottom Line economic optimization 
                simultaneously! REA will have to have linkages among multiple objectives for a single Goal?    (1IXU)
             8. In slide 29 the actual manufacturing or warehouse related inventory was not clearly mentioned?    (1IXV)
             9. Returns, refurbishments and partial assemblies are missing in slide 30? I guess that 
                is covered in post-actualization in 31.    (1IXW)
             10. Negotiations and semantic understanding of different business policies and rules 
                 in automated processing is hard to execute, unlike CPA & CPP and Registries of ebXML?    (1IXX)
             11. Req Response model has to keep track of VARs and Aggregators of Services? Is that 
                 done in the Model in UMM?    (1IXY)
             12. Slide 38 could be modeled using Complex or Regular Event processing viewpoint? 
                 Another projection of BPM?    (1IXZ)
             13. Role based terminology change is well understood by Accounting people but it is 
                 only now understood by IT folks as compensating transactions etc that sometimes 
                 relate to Actualizing??    (1IY0)
             14. Ontology view is OK in 39 only Namespace descriptions change based on the role 
                 such as Enterprise 3 etc.    (1IY1)
             15. Workflow and Orchestration need more effort and also commonality of processes or 
                 at least cross mapping interfaces among enterprises.    (1IY2)
 MichelleRaymond: Yeah! Fantastic that ISO standards will be available for standards work via the web. 
                  Oh, such delight!  This core topic of this presentation has given me some excellent 
                  take aways; but (sorry) the BEST take away is access to ISO standards.  Double yeah!    (1IY3)
 ToddSchneider: For Bill: If you have a formal ontology then you can move away from relation databases 
                to RDF triple stores and support more 'intelligent' systems.    (1IY4)
 ToddSchneider: Peter, I won't be able to join in the questioning using audio. 
               Can you read my questions/comments at the top of the chat list?    (1IY5)
 PeterYim: Got it ... I will read out your questions. Todd, which would be your top 2 questions?    (1IY6)
 ToddSchneider: Bill: I'll e-mail you separately [on some of the other issues.]    (1IY7)
 Mike Bennett: This will be very useful in the work I am doing on defining an financial securities 
               ontology model. I'm also a messy modeller but using (heavily adapted) OWL stuff. On the 
               question of "Economic agent" v "Person", I use Dr Sowa's distinctions of first, second 
               and third order Things, which deals with this. I've got a huge untidy model which covers 
               a lot of this ground but will try to replace with REA as I'm using it as a framework from 
               which to derive components of financial securities terms.    (1IY8)
 MichelleRaymond: Re: Commitments and probability of triggers - How is the probability of 
                  an event occurrence and probability of a resource availability at the time 
                  a commitment is called for realization included in modeling of a commitment? 
                  How are collections of resources that MIGHT be available at time to meet a 
                  commitment handled?    (1IY9)
 RaviSharma: For Michelle - Stochasticity was an excellent addition. Even though accounting does not 
             address this, the risk and economic capital aspects of economic modeling does include this, 
             also risk models? What does Prof. McCarthy think about it?    (1IYA)

Audio Recording of this Session    (1IIJ)