XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

I used to think of knowledge representation approaches as a spectrum.  Now, I look at them as a pipeline . In her article, Systems for Organizing , Jessica Talisman refers to these sorts of systems as knowledge organization systems (KOS). When you are talking about artificial intelligence, it is very important that you understand two key details and distinguish between (a) the type of artificial intelligence you are talking about and (b) the problem that you are trying to solve.  The point here is that not all artificial intelligence is the same and not all problems are the same.  If you do not understand this, I highly recommend that you read Jessica Talisman's article (i.e. System for Organizing ). As Talisman points out in her article; metadata, taxonomy, thesaurus, schema, ontology, and knowledge graph work together as she describes: " Metadata establishes identity, taxonomy imposes hierarchy, the thesaurus maps equivalence and association, the schema enforces s...

Effectively, what financial reporting standards do is prescribe standard "buckets" into which information about business events needs to go.  There are relationships between some of the "buckets" and the "buckets" need to be organized in certain specific ways. You don't really need "accounts" to create a financial statement.  But you do need to understand which standard financial report line item needs to contain the information about the business event. But accounting systems tend to not track this business event information.  As such, the information has to be added manually. That is why accounting systems cannot output proper cash flow statements and statements of changes in equity. The business event information does not exist in the accounting system. Traditionally, in the world of accounting, these "buckets" are formally known as " accounts ".  Companies create these accounts, they organize the accounts into what is...

The Kimball Method is a dimensional modeling approach for building a data warehouse that builds the data warehouse from business‑focused data marts, using fact and dimension tables to create a fast, intuitive, and scalable analytical environment.  The Kimball method is based on a series of key principles that define how data should be structured and organized to facilitate its analysis and exploitation. These principles form the basis of dimensional modeling, providing a clear and systematic framework. The Kimball Method was conceived during the 1980s by Ralph Kimball and other colleagues at Metaphor Computer Systems. Since then, it has been successfully utilized by thousands of data warehouse and business intelligence project teams. Kimball and his colleagues did not invent the idea of multidimensional data or even the earliest forms of star schemas; what they did was formalize, popularize, and systematize them into the modern dimensional modeling method used worldwide. Kimball’s...

In a prior blog post I mentioned the limitations of traditional business intelligence and business analytics. One of the more significant limitations of traditional business intelligence is the lack of support for semantics by traditional business intelligence and business analytics platforms.   To address this limitation, traditional business intelligence is adding what is being referred to as a " semantic layer ".  A semantic layer is the governed business meaning layer that defines the " things ", the " associations between things ", and other stuff necessary for a analytics systems and artificial intelligence systems speak the same language. An example of adding a semantic layer can be seen by checking out Google Looker . Looker uses something called LookML or Looker Modeling Language .  Looker Modeling Language is described as the language that is used in Looker to create semantic data models. Looker says that a "semantic model is the foundat...

First, what exactly is business intelligence (BI)? Here is how several business intelligence software platform vendors describe business intelligence as it is currently instantiated today: Per IBM  ( IBM Cognos Analytics ): Business intelligence (BI) is a set of technological processes for collecting, managing and analyzing organizational data to yield insights that inform business strategies and operations. Per Microsoft ( Microsoft PowerBI ): Business intelligence (BI) uncovers insights for making strategic decisions. Business intelligence tools analyze historical and current data and present findings in intuitive visual formats. Per Salesforce  ( Tableau ): Business intelligence combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations make more data-driven decisions. In practice, you know you’ve got modern business intelligence when you have a comprehensive view of your organizatio...

This is some brain storming to figure out how to think about a "theory of the enterprise " that I want to create. One of the inputs is that there is already a " theory of the firm ". That is an economic theory that is used to understand things like why firms (i.e. businesses, organizations) exist; understand boundaries between firms; why firms are structured the way they are structured; what drives actions of firms; and how to test theories.  That is not really what I want. Another input, as I point out in this blog post , is the fact that Object Management Group (OMG) and the Enterprise Knowledge Graph Foundation (EKGF) are " championing the use of enterprise knowledge graphs ".  This appears to be their definition of a knowledge graph: "An Enterprise Knowledge Graph is a governed, semantics‑first, graph‑based representation of an enterprise’s concepts, relationships, rules, and facts; integrating data and meaning across systems to create a unified,...