On behalf of XBRL, Mr. Cohen has served as a liaison to numerous other (standards) organizations, seeking interoperability and harmonization; this includes ACORD, ANSI X12, HR-XML, OASIS, OMG, MISMO, OECD, UN/CEFACT and W3C, and Mr. Cohen helped lead the

1
Eric E. Cohen, XBRL Global Technical Leader,
PricewaterhouseCoopers. Author, speaker,
technology geek. Co-founder of XBRL (second in
continuous service only to Charlie) and
creator/chief architect of XBRLs Global Ledger
Framework. Began implementing accounting software
in the early 80s was a specialist in
customizing accounting software, report writing
and integrating external applications. Accounting
technology futurist.
On behalf of XBRL, Mr. Cohen has served as a
liaison to numerous other (standards)
organizations, seeking interoperability and
harmonization this includes ACORD, ANSI X12,
HR-XML, OASIS, OMG, MISMO, OECD, UN/CEFACT and
W3C, and Mr. Cohen helped lead the
Interoperability Summit / Interoperability Pledge
(2001-2002) with a goal of seeking to agree upon
common models and approaches to support
interoperability the effort continues today with
the OMG. He has actively worked with both XBRLs
friends and competitors to bring harmonization
and mutual benefit, including Dutch AuditFile,
OECD Tax eAudit and UN/CEFACT TBG 12/DWG 14. He
has worked extensively with the audit community
through service on AICPA and CICA working/study
groups the tax community through OASIS Tax XML,
OECD Tax eAudit and SBR Forum and the academic
community through many fruitful relationships.
Mr. Cohen believes solutions that do not
incorporate the distinctives of XBRLs Global
Ledger Framework will not meet true needs today
and the business environment of tomorrow. He also
believes that agreement is more important than
technology or method.
2
Cheryl Dunn justcheryl.dunn_at_gmail.com

• I am an associate professor of accounting at
  Grand Valley State University, soon to be
  visiting for a year at Michigan State University.
  At GVSU I teach graduate level AIS and
  Accounting Theory classes, along with some
  undergraduate principles of managerial
  accounting. At MSU I will be teaching
  undergraduate and graduate AIS and XBRL.
• I author the REA-based textbook Enterprise
  Information Systems A Pattern-Based Approach
  (McGraw-Hill), and hope to complete the 4th
  edition this summer or fall.
• My primary research interest with respect to REA
  is its use in the development of improved
  financial and managerial reporting models
  including revised financial statements,
  standards, and executive dashboard elements.
  Independent-view reporting is needed and requires
  a solid ontological foundation. Many existing
  assumptions and principles (such as periodicity,
  conservatism, matching, absorption-costing, and
  others) must be replaced.

3
Julie Smith David

• History
• MSU undergrad, MBA, and PhD
• FOB
• REA
• Value of accounting systems and the definition
  of accounting
• Systems integration
• Internal
• B2B
• Issues
• Control of
• Software vendors
• Trading partners

4
Roger Debreceny

• I am a Professor in the School of Accountancy at
  the Shidler College of Business at the University
  of Hawaii. I teach auditing, accounting
  information systems and strategic accounting to
  our MBA students.
• Coming to academia after a career in government
  and industry, my doctorate was on the application
  of object technologies to accounting systems. I
  have been working on XBRL from a research and
  professional perspective for a decade. My other
  research interests are in the area of IT
  governance and technology-enhanced accounting
  disclosures.
• My concerns are with building reliable and
  ontologically complete reporting systems that
  will ensure reporting of performance information
  to stakeholders. I believe that many information
  systems that couple transaction-level systems to
  higher level reporting systems (e.g. financial
  accounting reporting) are fragile and lack the
  robustness required by stakeholders. We need to
  be able to reliably drill down from some high
  level data point (e.g. profit per unit in
  division X) to the transaction level. This
  criterion does not hold at present.
• We need ontological interoperability at each
  stage of this information supply chain.

5
Carsten Felden carsten.felden_at_bwl.tu-freiberg.de

• I am full university professor for information
  systems/computer science at Technical University
  of Freiberg (Saxony, Germany). I am teaching
  courses in Business Intelligence (BI), data base
  and software engineering, and electronic
  commerce. My research interests are centered
  around the ontology-based integration of
  structured and unstructured data in BI-systems
  for decision support, Analytics and the
  evaluation of IT-solutions in maturity models.
• Among other things I am member of the XBRL
  Germany advisory board. In this position, I am
  dealing as a think tank for analyzing
  approaches in the context of XBRL. Additionally,
  I am working, together with The Data Warehouse
  Institute Germany (TDWI), on multidimensional
  XBRL as a decisions support solution for small
  and midsize companies.
• I think that most people in companies do not
  understand, why and how to use XBRL. The why
  leads to the point that there is no common sense
  about interoperability. There is a need to make
  the reporting supply chain obvious (business
  process modeling) and the information products
  which emerge during the information flow. In
  context of the how I wonder that XBRL is not
  dealing with aspects of Online Analytical
  Processing and the development of analytical
  information systems. I think that there is a need
  for a multidimensional basis to describe the
  structure of the processed information products
  (which reflects the multidimensional aspects of
  users) and an XBRL engineering method to support
  XBRL development activities. In favor of an XBRL
  engineering method, ontology engineering and
  software engineering have to be analyzed
  carefully to gain an applicable approach.

6
Frederik Gailly (Frederik.Gailly_at_Ugent.be)

• I am PhD student in the Management Informatics
  Research Group which is part from the Department
  in Economics and Business Administration at Ghent
  University, Belgium. I have a degree in Applied
  Business Economics but also in Computer Science.
  My research interests are conceptual modeling,
  business modeling, business domain ontologies and
  ontology-driven model engineering.
• I have published some articles together with my
  supervisor Prof. Geert Poels where we evaluate
  the use of the REA-ontology as a pattern for
  conceptual modeling. In the articles for my PhD
  we focus more on the formalization of the REA
  ontology and have proposed a formal specification
  of REA in OWL. In future research we want to
  investigate how this formal specification can be
  used during the model driven development of
  systems and also to create interoperability
  between different systems.
• In our research group we firmly believe that the
  REA-ontology needs a more formal specification in
  order to be successful in different applications
  domain, certainly if we want to use the
  REA-ontology for creating interoperability.
  However we also think that this formal
  specification should be also accessible to
  business users by means of ontology
  representation techniques founded on OMGs MOF.
  We also believe that in order to really show the
  benefits of the REA-ontology for creating
  interoperability the REA-ontology should be
  further specialized/extended for different type
  of process (sale, purchase, production).

6
7
Graham Gal gfgal_at_som.umass.edu

• I am on the faculty of the Isenberg School of
  Management at the University of Massachusetts. I
  teach accounting information systems, systems
  analysis, and IT security and audit classes. In
  both systems classes we discuss the issues of
  interoperability and students do projects with
  XBRL. My research interests include database
  design issues particularly as the relate to
  semantic specification of internal controls and
  the ability to continuously monitor the
  activities of the firm.
• I spent a sabbatical at RSA Security and spent
  some time looking at methods to secure
  information and assign access based on
  responsibilities.
• It is my feeling that systems whose focus is on
  syntax at the expense of semantic expressiveness
  are doomed to be replaced or preempted by systems
  with the next great syntax. When the development
  of tools and theory has a firm ontological base
  and has ontological expressivity as its
  underlying focus the effort provides a
  development path that will not be diverted.
  There is a long line of work on business
  ontologies that builds upon business events and
  states. Efforts to incorporate these concepts
  into practical tools promise not only further
  theoretical insights, but also systems with much
  greater applicability and longevity.

8
Gianluca Garbellotto gg_at_iphix.net

• I am an IT consultant with extensive experience
  in data integration and accounting, financial and
  auditing software development and implementation.
  I have a specific focus on ERP systems,
  consolidation/business intelligence applications
  and XML/XBRL implementations. I developed a full
  ERP system for banks and financial institutions
  where the key feature was the capability of
  effectively exchanging accounting and financial
  data with the extremely diversified accounting
  applications used by their clients.
• I am an expert on the business and the technical
  aspects of XBRL and XBRL Global Ledger Framework,
  and I have extensive experience in their
  implementation in the Government and in the
  private sector. I am a member of the XBRL
  International Consortium Standards Board, the
  current Chair of the XBRL Global Ledger Working
  Group, and the XBRL columnist for IMAs Strategic
  Finance magazine.
• I am convinced that real interoperability in
  business and accounting data requires both a
  sound and comprehensive data model and a
  consistent way to represent the links between
  different levels of aggregation/summarization of
  data as they flow from first entry to multiple
  end reporting formats.
• I also think that the theoretical formulation of
  a business/accounting/financial data model and
  its practical implementation have to go hand in
  hand, as the latter influences the former. Some
  degree of adoption, even at the early stages of
  the development of a data model, can make the
  difference not only (obviously) for its success,
  but also for the soundness of its concept and,
  more importantly, for its capability to
  effectively adapt to real world use cases without
  undermining the integrity of its theoretical
  model.

9
Guido Geerts geertsg_at_lerner.udel.edu
I am an associate professor of accounting and MIS
at the University of Delaware (Lerner College of
Business). I have taught accounting information
systems, databases, and object-oriented analysis
and design classes in recent years. My research
focuses primarily on enterprise ontologies. One
of the issues that I have explored in my research
is how to design, implement, and use enterprise
systems that integrate semantic definitions. Such
systems require (1) a precise definition of an
enterprise ontology, (2) the explicit recording
of the ontological specifications, and (3) the
design of enterprise applications that are able
to employ such advanced semantics. My research
illustrated that two main advantages of such
systems (and thus increased semantic
expressiveness) are reusability and
interoperability. The feasibility of such
semantic enterprise systems depends on a number
of factors including level-of-agreement and
technology. The extent to which the ontological
specifications are agreed-upon drives the level
of reusability and interoperability that can be
accomplished (i.e., there should be one
standard). Technology is another important
driver. I used Prolog and XML in my research to
illustrate the explicit recording of semantics
and their use. Other technologies have emerged in
recent years, in particular semantic web
technologies such as OWL.
10
Arofan Gregory

• My relevant positions include these 
•         -Technical Expert, SDMX Initiative
•      -Technical Advisor to the TBG Chair,
  UN/CEFACT
•          -Member of US TAG, TC-154
•         -Technical Expert, Data Documentation
  Initiative (DDI)
•        -Executive Manager, Open Data Foundation,
  Inc.
• I have been involved in producing the draft
  mapping between SDMX and XBRL I am not an XBRL
  expert but I do understand the specification
  reasonably well.
• I also have some background with ebXML Core
  Components, and I am a major proponent of ISO/IEC
  11179 for modelling concepts, and have found this
  standard to be very useful for aligning/mapping
  between other standards, given the thoroughness
  of its model (as used in ebXML CCTS, for
  example).
• I dont have a strong position other than
  thinking that interoperability is desirable,
  based on existing standards.

11
Peter R. Gillett, FCA 18 years in professional
accounting BA MA in Mathematics and Philosophy,
PhD in Business (Accounting) Associate Professor,
Accounting Business Ethics and Information
Systems Academic Director, Prudential Business
Ethics Center

• I have found myself seduced by the attractiveness
  of the Semantic Modeling Principle. Having seen
  no formal statement of it, I have adopted my own
  that I pass on to students
• Data in an information system should model the
  structure of the relevant categories of reality
  in its application domain
• REA has been the basis of my 36 Accounting
  Information Systems courses since 1996
• Philosophically, I am concerned that REA is not
  grounded in a more basic metaphysics
• No principles of identity and individuation nor
  theory of how events relate (refine, require,
  imply)
• No fundamental ontology so we have to guarantee
  our own consistency internally
• No clear articulation, for example of why events
  should be primitive, as opposed to, say, states
• No principles guiding choices as to parsimony
  versus profligacy
• Practically, I am concerned about the pedagogical
  and implementation inconveniences of
• Granularity choices (Directors Staff
  Machinists works fine for Sales, Production but
  not for HRM)
• Difficulties of implementing Generalization
  especially via RDBMS
• Ambiguity as to Agents v. Roles etc. (especially
  in small businesses with more roles than people)
• Ambiguity as to Machinists as Agents v.
  MachinistHoursWorked as a Resource in Conversion
• Depreciation as an information process v.
  depreciation as an (accounting) event
• Depreciation as an implementation compromise
  choosing not to document Fixed Asset consumption
• Poor (i.e., not rich) ad hoc models of conversion
  processes
• Discontinuity between recording purchasing of
  Services as Events and overhead in Conversion
• Difficulty representing how derived data
  accumulates as F/S items as data rather than
  procedurally
• Tedium associated with prepayments, accruals,
  brought-forward balances, adjusting journal
  entries

12
(No Transcript)
13
Christian Huemer

• I am associate professor in the Business
  Informatics Group (BIG) at the Vienna University
  of Technology, Austria. I am teaching courses on
  object-oriented modeling, model engineering and
  e-commerce. My research interests are
  methodologies for modeling e-business
  transactions as well as model driven approaches
  to service oriented architectures.
• I am involved in the standardization efforts of
  UN/CEFACT. Currently, I am Acting Chair of its
  Techniques and Methodologies Group (TMG) and the
  project lead of the UN/CEFACT Modeling
  Methodology (UMM).
• My academic position (not necessarily my
  UN/CEFACT position) is the following There is
  too much discussion on which business document
  standard to use. More important is an agreement
  on why exchanging which information. If the
  information remains unchanged, switching the
  business document standard is comparatively
  simple. Limit the information in an exchange to
  the minimum required each additional piece of
  data may be a source of incompatibility. A
  business process perspective helps in identifying
  the minimum information required to change a
  business entity state in the partners
  information systems. A conceptual model is used
  to define the core information accepted
  globally by any industry. More advanced
  ontological concepts may be used to extend the
  core.

13
14
Jesper Kiehn jkiehn_at_microsoft.com

• Application Developer of Microsoft Dynamics NAV
  SCM group
• Focus on application architecture and design
  tools
• Have participated in a research program for
  modelling and here studied the R.E.A. Ontology
  (2002)
• Co-Author of book on Business modelling using
  R.E.A. with Pavel Hruby Christian Scheller
• I believe modelling with an ontological
  foundation will prevail over homegrown solutions
  and is needed for interoperability
• Knowledge representation technologies are needed
  for the future systems both because of
  development cost TCO and interoperability
  issues
• Motto Knowledge into the product

15
Philipp Liegl

• I am project assistant at the Business
  Informatics Group at the Vienna University of
  Technology, Austria. My research focuses on
  inter-organizational business process modeling,
  business documents in a service oriented context,
  and service oriented architectures. I am teaching
  courses in electronic commerce.
• I am involved in the standardization efforts of
  UN/CEFACT where I am a member of the Technologies
  and Methodologies Group (TMG). My standardization
  work focuses on UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology
  (UMM) and on the UML Profile for Core Components
  (UPCC).
• In my PhD thesis I focus on the role of business
  documents in a service oriented context. From my
  point of view finding a common semantic base for
  business documents is a crucial task in order to
  help service oriented concepts to evolve beyond
  theoretical approaches. Solid and well elaborated
  business document ontologies can help to achieve
  this goal. Part of my PhD thesis focuses on the
  task on how to integrate business document
  concepts and ontologies and business process
  modeling concepts in order to leverage the most
  benefit.

15
16
Arun Majumdar arun_at_vivomind.com

• I have a highly diversified background work
  experience ranging from the entertainment
  industry, fortune 50 corporations to government.
  One of my key concerns is the engineering and
  design of infrastructures for large-scale
  distributed and heterogeneous but seamlessly
  interoperable enterprise systems. I am a
  co-founder of VivoMind Intelligence Inc., a
  research organization for industry, academia and
  government, as well as a Senior Consultant for
  the Cutter Consortium. I also support the
  IBM-CSLI Verb Ontology project at Stanford
  University for semantic specifications of verbs,
  prepositions and other linguistic resources.
• I am a member of ACM and IEEE and participate in
  various academic and industry conferences by way
  of publications, speaking, presentation or
  attendance.
• My vision is, in a phrase, to remove all
  barriers to communications. My intention is to
  define architectures, patterns and processes that
  encompass the full scope, breadth and depth of
  designing, choreographing and orchestrating both
  component and systems capabilities in synergetic
  harmony to a world of enterprise requirements.
  This means understanding both low and high level
  cross-cutting concerns in software and
  operational practices development through
  ontology, epistemology and teleology --- creating
  the language, apply it to a domain of meanings,
  and doing so purposefully within a mission theme.
  I see the future of interoperability as the
  ability for systems to carry out effective
  electronic dialogs to negotiate or resolve
  issues, provide services, and deliver value. The
  operational aspects must enable the concerns,
  collaboration, cooperation, coordination, and
  computation to be resource-efficient while
  delivering results. I believe we must work with
  standards and build real-systems with these
  standards because, as the world gets increasingly
  more and more complex, the do-it-yourself
  approach prevalent at large, will simply fail to
  scale across organizational and geo-political
  boundaries in an continually growing networked
  world.

17
Bill McCarthy mccarthy_at_bus.msu.edu

• My day job is accounting systems professor at
  Michigan State University where I teach courses
  on semantic database design, object-oriented
  methods, XBRL, and accounting/enterprise
  information systems. My research interests
  center around the development of accounting
  domain ontologies, most specifically the REA
  (resource-event-agent) accounting ontology.
• I am a member of the UN/CEFACT business process
  techniques and methods group where I am working
  (slowly) on an REA specialization module for the
  UMM (UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology). In ISO, I
  work with JTC1/SC32/WG1 (Open-edi) where I am the
  editor of the ISO/IEC 15944-4 international
  standard the accounting and economic ontology.
• I think ontological expressivity is the
  preemptive consideration in developing standards
  for networks of accounting concept definitions.
  I think we need to get the concepts defined
  correctly as a first priority before we worry
  about time to implementation and definable
  packages of immediate benefits. However, I also
  think that usability is an important issue. For
  example, the Open-edi economic and accounting
  ontology has an inventory of well-developed (IMHO
  since I did them) frame-based (UML) accounting
  concepts that is based on earlier academic work
  by Geerts and McCarthy. However, there is no
  implementation vision yet in ISO 15944. That
  vision is an important link that is being
  supplied by the UMM development team through the
  mechanism of business object state machines.
  Thus, we can see our way to both theoretical and
  practical end results. When we advance up the
  expressivity dimension to logic-based theories, I
  am unsure how this usability aspect is affected.

18
Brand Niemann/Mills Davis

• Brand is a Senior Enterprise Architect at the US
  EPA and Mills is is founder and managing director
  of Project10X a research consultancy
  specializing in next wave semantic technologies
  and solutions. Together they have Co-chaired the
  Federal Semantic Interoperability Community of
  Practice (SICoP) and now are involved in Semantic
  Community.Net and the Semantic Exchange,
  respectively.
• SICoP has fostered the Agile Financial Data
  Services CoP to bring XBRL, Semantic SOA, and the
  Semantic Web together to solve the need for the
  federal government to become more interoperable
  with financial data information sharing and
  integration.
• SICoP has used the Ontological Expressivity
  Schematic of Leo Obrst to classify the pilots it
  has fostered in many application areas across the
  federal government that have received Special
  Recognitions (slides 14-27).
• Semantic Community.Net and Semantic Exchange are
  fostering a new series of pilots for the 2008
  Semantic Technology Conference that involve
  Automatic and Semi-automatic Semantification of
  Emails and Documents and for Getting to Web
  Semantics for Spreadsheets in the U.S.
  Government.
• The MAX Federal Community (previously the Budget
  Community) is a large CoP that uses spreadsheets
  in a Wiki to collaborate on the Federal Budget
  each year that would benefit for the work of the
  NSF Supported Workshop on Ontological
  Specification of Interoperability Semantics for
  Financial Information and Business Reporting
  Systems.

19
Maciej Piechocki mpiechocki_at_iasb.org

• I am XBRL project manager at the International
  Accounting Standards Committee Foundation
  responsible for technology aspects of the IFRS
  taxonomy development. My area of responsibilities
  covers also the interoperability among XBRL
  taxonomies and IFRS taxonomy and financial
  information and business reporting systems. I
  have also been involved in a number of efforts to
  standardise financial reporting domain
  (especially on the regulatory and government
  level in Poland and Germany).
• Previous to my work on the IFRSs I was head of
  the Competence Centre for Information Logistics
  (CC InfoLog) at the Freiberg University of
  Technology in Germany conducting ontology, data
  warehousing, OLAP, data mining and business
  intelligence related projects. My PhD thesis at
  the chair of MIS covered the XBRL Financial
  Reporting Supply Chain Architecture and applied
  Zachman Enterprise Architecture Framework with a
  number of formally modelled views of the supply
  chain to the financial accounting domain.
• From my involvement in XBRL and my research
  activities I observed that the automation of the
  FRSC suffers insufficient discussion at least at
  two levels. First is the automatic creation of
  the financial report with the notes from
  underlying trial balance data and other sources
  (inclusive mapping of these sources to financial
  reporting taxonomies and extending them). Second
  is the reporting process between the preparer and
  the receiver of the financial information and the
  distinction in the open and closed reporting
  (inclusive issues with extensibility and
  interoperability between the core taxonomies and
  ontologies). Although a number of ontological
  components is in place which in theory should
  enable interoperability of financial information
  and business reporting systems the number of
  implementations is very limited.

20
Tom Saleh Bio

• Mr Saleh has been a leading entrepreneur in the
  computer industry for more than three decades,
  during which time he has founded five successful
  high-technology companies, and influenced the
  success of several more. As a Software and
  hardware designer prior to his first
  entrepreneurial venture, he held senior technical
  positions at Telenet, Gruman Aircraft, BBN, and
  Tymnet. In the late seventies, Mr. Saleh founded
  Applied Logic, an early provider of Virtual
  Private Network Services, acquired by Raytheon in
  1980. In the eighties, Mr. Saleh started XNET
  Corp., which developed the first fully automated
  financial futures and commodities exchange. Exnet
  was aquired by its largest customer, the
  International Futures and commodities exchange,
  in 1983.
• Immediately following Exnet, Mr. Saleh founded
  American Real Time Services (ARTS), which
  developed and operated Information delivery
  networks for many large financial services firms
  including Citibank, Prudential securities, AG
  Edwards, Charles Schwab, SG Cowen, McDonald
  Securities, and Fidelity Investments. ARTS was
  acquired by Reuters in 1993, where Mr. Saleh held
  the title of Senior Vice President of New
  Business Development.
• In 1997, Mr. Saleh led an investor group in
  acquiring the network services division of ADP,
  which served as the core of NetworkTwo. In 1999,
  NetworkTwo was acquired by Splitrock, a larger
  network services company, which was itself soon
  acquired by McLeodUSA, a large Publicly traded
  CLEC.
• In 2000, he founded Erevu, a software company
  focused on extending the concept of "Policy Based
  Management" to the business process level. In
  2002, Erevu was acquired by Aladdin Systems
  Holdings where Mr. Saleh continued as President
  of the Aladdin Enterprise Solutions until Aladin
  was sold to Broadcast .Com, a large public
  company in 2003.
• In 2004 Tom was engaged by the NASDAQ to perform
  a review of their technical operations and
  recommend a complete restructuring of their
  Systems and Operations departments. This was
  completed and his recommendations implemented in
  early 2005.
• Since 2005 Tom has been retained as a senior
  advisor by several industry leaders including
  Safeway Supermarkets, Telmar, and the NYSE.. He
  has served as a director of 3 venture backed
  corporations and advises several private equity
  funds. Mr Saleh is currently research on Semantic
  Web and Web 2.0 technologies and their relation
  to financial services, media and advertising.
• In 2007 he led the FASBs efforts to develop a
  complete US-GAAP taxonomy in conjunction with the
  SEC. This taxonomy will be used by every publicly
  traded company as part of their SEC mandated
  public disclosure process.

21
Fred van Blommestein

• Assistant Professor at the Information Systems
  group of the University of Groningen, NL
• Contributor to the UN/CEFACT Core Component
  Technical Spec, team lead of the Core Component
  User Guide and editor of the Core Component
  Message Assembly spec
• Member of UN/CEFACT TBG 1 (Trade) and TBG 17
  (Harmonization)
• Observed that designing ontologies, process and
  data models by Standardization Committees is not
  scalable and not feasible on the long term. We
  need a mechanism for user organisations to extend
  ontologies and libraries on-the-fly, while
  maintaining integrity and consistency. Web-based
  tools and smart middleware may support the
  extension of ontologies and libraries (and their
  integration in applications) without manual
  intervention
• Found that the UN/CEFACT Core Components
  methodology offers a strong basis for dynamic
  ontology and library extension. CC also assure
  that resulting data structures can be represented
  as standardized XML messages.
• For dynamic extension one needs a Core Ontology
  to start from. UN/CEFACT needs the help from
  Ontolog and OMG people to make this Core
  consistent and future proof. REA bridges the
  transactional and the reporting world. The REA
  ontology therefore should be extended (with e.g.
  operational, technical and legal concepts) to
  become the Common Business Core Ontology
• Financial reporting is reporting on operational
  transactions. It is vital that XBRL taxonomies
  and UN/CEFACT libraries are based on the same
  ontological principles, and build on the same
  Core.

2008-05-12
22
David vun Kannon

• A broad range of academic and professional
  experience culminating in work on the design and
  implementation of XBRL 1.0- 2.1 since 1999.
• Currently a Director for PricewaterhouseCoopers,
  LLP in New York.
• My position on interoperability and ontologies
• Relatively sophisticated financial services now
  need ontologic interoperability to operate
  successfully. The next generation of such systems
  will need much greater use of ontologic
  agreements and machine processing of knowledge in
  order to reduce risk. These factors will drive
  ontology adoption at the high end.
• Consumers will not be aware of the benefits of
  ontologies until one or more competitive
  ontologies are synthesized from the existing
  Web/blogoshere/social netspace.

23
(No Transcript)
24
Non-attendees positions
25
Position Statement for the 20080512
workshop on Ontological Specification of
Interoperability Semantics for Financial
Information and Business Reporting Systems
Adrian Walker My experience
includes over 10 years at the IBM Yorktown
Research Laboratory, and I'm currently the CTO
of a small company called Reengineering. The
workshop overview states that We are at a
critical juncture in the definition of
scientific methods for creating financial
ontologies and for specifying methodologies for
data aggregation and view materialization with
the components of those ontologies. I suggest
that now is the time add a semantic layer,
namely, executable English. There is emerging
technology that unifies executable English
semantics, with the model theoretic semantics of
an inference method, and with the semantics of
data. The technology is online as a kind of Wiki
at the site listed below, and shared use is
free. The design is novel, and circumvents some
difficult open research questions concerning
strict semantics for computing with English. For
accounting interoperability, the advantages of
hiding the logic under executable English
include (1) end users can read the authors'
intentions (2) aggregations and other complex
deductions can be explained on demand in
English, at the business level (3) ontological
knowledge from different sources can be merged
in a way that end users can understand, check,
and -- with permission -- modify. The system
that supports this is called Internet Business
Logic -- a Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable
Open Vocabulary English over SQL. It's online at
www.reengineeringllc.com, and shared use is free.