Transitioning to Digital General Purpose Financial Reports

Transitioning to Digital General Purpose Financial Reports

By Charles Hoffman, CPA

The article Why Semantic Knowledge Graphs are the only way to build an Enterprise Data Fabric provides a graphic.  That graphic is shown below which I modified adding the three green arrows.  The green arrows are intended to indicate that in the future information from the categories "Only for communication among experts" and "Not suitable for enterprise data management" and "The world of workarounds" will be recast as Semantic Knowledge Graphs or "Technologies suited for Data Fabric".


The author of the article prefers "Semantic Knowledge Graphs".  And by semantic knowledge graphs the author means technologies provided by the W3C including RDF, OWL, SHACL, SPARQL; the their semantic web stack.

But there are other approaches to creating knowledge graphs and using those knowledge graphs to solve problems.  RuleML provides the following graphic that summarizes the three categories of problem solving logic:



Each implementation approach has a basket of PROS and CONS.  The Sematic Web technologies provided by the W3C would not be a wrong approach.  Graph databases are preferred by others and are increasing in general popularity.  Logic programming such as Modern Prolog also has advantages and disadvantages.

One thing is certain. Change is inevitable for financial reporting.  Many people think change is scary, and change can be scary.  But sticking with the status quo too long can be the death of your skills or your organization.

Weigh the alternatives carefully.


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