XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a standard way to describe concepts and the relationships between those concepts so computers and humans can understand and share knowledge consistently. SKOS is a lightweight semantic vocabulary for building controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, and classification schemes. SKOS is a standard specification for constructing knowledge organization systems. Home Page SKOS Specification (W3C Recommendation) SKOS Primer SKOS provides four essential building blocks to construct a knowledge organization system: (a) Define Concepts; (b) Group Concepts (a.k.a. Types, Classes); (c) Define Labels; (d) Connect Concepts. Concepts are the things you want to organize.  Labels are the different ways you want to be able to refer to those Concepts. For example, you might have a "preferred label", and "alternative label", and maybe other such labels. Relationships and associations, how concepts are connected, might be ...

Accounting, the universal technology of accountability , is one of the most mature, enduring and robust information processing systems ever devised in human history. With over more than 7,000 years of incremental, iterative refinement; accounting has evolved into one of the most stable, resilient, and interoperable information systems ever developed. Accounting is grounded on a foundation of transparency, traceability , and internal quality control. Its core mechanisms, most notably double entry bookkeeping and financial statement articulation , create a system in which every recorded business event is cross checked, internally validated, and mathematically constrained . The architecture of accounting embodies a zero-error tolerance standard, not merely as a aspirational normative ideal but as a structural property of the system. Its internal checks enable the detection and elimination of unintentional misstatements while simultaneously providing a basis for distinguishing inadvertent...

This blog post summaries information related to "Lego-like" a.k.a. the " Lego analogy ". The Lego analogy is a popular way to explain how complex things can be made simpler by using small, standard parts. Think of a massive Lego castle. If you tried to carve that castle out of a single, solid block of wood, it would be nearly impossible to change later. But because it’s made of Legos, it’s much easier to manage. Here is the Lego analogy broken down into four simple points: Modularity (The "Building Blocks") Instead of one giant, messy project, you break everything down into small, manageable pieces. In Legos: You have individual bricks, wheels, and windows. In the Real World: This could be individual features in an app (like a "login" button) or different departments in a company. Standardization (The "Studs and Tubes") Every Lego brick has the same little bumps (studs) on top and holes on the bottom. Because these "interfaces...

Imagine a system that combines a software application used for performing some task, a knowledge management system that contains machine interpretable knowledge related to performing that task, and a reasoner which understands how to interact with the knowledge base within the knowledge management system, the software application, and the human user of that software system. That is basically a knowledge based system . A conventional knowledge management system (KMS) is a platform that facilitates the capture, represent, storage, organization, sharing, and application of knowledge within an organization, enhancing decision-making and operational efficiency in support of organizational goals and objectives. A knowledge management system is basically a place where an organization keeps what it knows so people can actually use that knowledge. Basically, traditional KMS act like a library. Without a KMS, knowledge stays trapped in people’s heads or scattered across documents. With a KMS, th...

Just as I am reconciling three approaches to representing a conceptualization of a business report ; I am also endeavoring to reconcile several other "inputs" related to accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis.  Here is an inventory of these different inputs: Conceptual Model (CM) of Business Report,  Seattle Method Conceptual Model of a Business Report Data Centric Accounting  (DCA) which was created by Semantic Arts, Dave McComb, and Cheryl Dunn and documented in  The Future of Accounting Reporting Framework  (will tie to each), Seattle Method Report Model and Report (will tie to each), Seattle Method Showcase of Capabilities (will tie to each), Seattle Method Accounting and Economic Ontology Terms , from  ISO/IEC Accounting and Economic Ontology Resources, Events, Agents (REA) which was created by Bill McCarthy and documented in The REA Accounting Model as an Accounting and Economic Ontology , published by the American Accounting Association an...

There is an elephant in the room. Accountants, auditors, and analysts have been performing work related to creating information, attestation related to the trustworthiness of that information, and decision making and other supporting services related to making use of that information for many thousands of years. The basis of that information, the medium used to convey that information , has been the "physical hard copy"; the physical paper-based document; the physical paper-based spreadsheet. These paper based documents were the sources of data used by accountants, auditors, and analysts for literally thousands of years.  Those physical paper based documents evolved from the earlier mediums which included physical objects, clay tablets, papyrus and other earlier forms of physical hard copies. Those physical paper based document oriented artifacts literally drove the universal technology of accountably  for thousands of years. The internetworked computer (a.k.a. the computer h...