Case for Semantic Oriented Accounting and Audit Working Papers

 A kludge (or kluge) is an engineering/computer science term that describes what is best described as a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is typically clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain; but it gets the job done. By contrast, elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness and simplicity. 

Accounting and audit working papers have evolved to become a kludge. That needs to be fixed. My solution is proposed in the document Case for Semantic Oriented Accounting and Audit Working Papers.  VisiCalc popularized spreadsheets.  Then Lotus 1-2-3 improved the capabilities of VisiCalc.  Then Excel improved upon Lotus 1-2-3.  Google Spreadsheet added some features beyond what Excel provided.  It is time for another improvement in the capabilities of the spreadsheet.

Or, maybe the improved tool is not really even a spreadsheet. Perhaps in is more of a "knowledge graph" maybe with "pivot table" type capabilities with a built in DATALOG rules/logic engine. Here is a high level summary of the capabilities:

  • Rather than being presentation-oriented “workbooks”, “sheets”, “rows”, “columns”, and “cells”; the spreadsheets are logical-oriented models.
  • Rather than rules always being combined within a spreadsheet; rules can be separated from the actual spreadsheet to enforce and control the information provided within the spreadsheet.  Imagine a set of spreadsheets all using exactly the same rules.
  • Rather than using position-oriented linking of cells which tends to be brittle; a robust, trustworthy linking mechanism is used, think “linked data” and the semantic web.
  • Rather than being documentation and maintenance nightmares; spreadsheets are self-documenting.
  • Rather than being uncontrollable; boundaries, guardrails, and bumpers can be set and controlled; no more wild behavior of those creating spreadsheets.
  • Rather than being a proprietary format; a global standard spreadsheet format is used.
  • Rather than being a “sheet” or “workbook”; the spreadsheet can be worked with as a machine-readable knowledge graph.
  • Rather than being a “sheet”; the spreadsheet is really a multidimensional pivot table that uses a global standard multidimensional model.  (Not OLAP, but does support OLAP and not restricted by the limitations of OLAP. Not a three dimensional “cube” but rather an “n-dimensional” hypercube . Also, rather than being read only like OLAP, the model would be read/write.)
  • Rather than being readable by humans; a spreadsheet is readable by machines and from that machine readable representation an understandable human readable representation could be generated automatically generated; or, facts can be mapped into a pixel perfect representation if you desire.
  • Rather than being limited to tabular data; those table-oriented limitation are gone.
  • Rather than being individual presentation-oriented tables; logic-oriented representations fit together like “Lego blocks”.

Look no further: XBRL-based reports can do all of the above, today. Here are my test cases, use cases, a conformance suite, and a showcase of reports. Decide for yourself!

This is the information age. Spreadsheets filled a need.  But there are other needs and traditional spreadsheets are probably not the answer.

Additional Information:


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting Started with Auditchain Luca (now called Luca Suite)

Image
(Note that a newer, production version as opposed to only the development version , of Luca Suite is available) The Innovator's Dilemma points out that disruptive innovations often look like toys that are doing everything wrong. Auditchain Luca , which is part of the Auditchain Suite , is a unique approach to creating a knowledge graph .  To experience using Auditchain Luca, have a look at the Getting Started with Auditchain Luca instructions. Be sure to grab the Excel and JSON import files used for this getting started exercise.   This getting started exercise uses one of several different approaches to getting information into a tool for constructing and viewing professional quality knowledge graphs .  Additional getting started guides will be made available over time. Auditchain Luca might not make sense to you if you don't understand the paradigm shift that is occurring and if you have not shifted your mental map. For the next step in your journey, consider t...
Read more

Relational Knowledge Graph System (RKGS)

Image
Relational Knowledge Graph System (RKGS) is an interesting idea that combines the relational paradigm and the knowledge graph paradigm.  This documentation, Why RKGS , explains the idea. This gets even more interesting with the notion of "relational AI".  RelationalAI is described as follows by the company of the same name, Relational.ai : “RelationalAI is a cloud-based relational knowledge graph management system, with state of the art probabilistic processing and declarative reasoning at scale to make developing Data Applications a superpower for your business.” This notion of knowledge graphs represented in relational databases fits into my belief that knowledge graphs have two aspects: the expression SYNTAX and the logic of what is expressed or SEMANTICS. While the LOGIC of a knowledge graph is always the same regardless of technical syntax used to express that logic; there are many, many different technical syntaxes that can be used to represent a knowledge graph. There...
Read more

Professional System for Creating Financial Reports Leveraging Knowledge Graphs

Image
The document Professional System for Creating Financial Reports Leveraging Knowledge Graphs explains a new approach, a new paradigm, for creating financial reports.  The document provides a practical, nontechnical description of a professional system for creating provably high-quality financial reports where the report creator is using financial reporting schemes (such as US GAAP and IFRS) where report creator is permitted to modify the report model which leverages global standard knowledge graphs represented using XBRL. This new approach is useful, it is highly novel, and the details were highly complicated to pull together.  This is certainly not an incremental innovation.  It is definitely a disruptive innovation and it could very well be a foundational innovation. You can decide which for yourself. Foundational technologies have two dimensions that need to be considered: novelty and complexity. The more novel the technology is, the more effort needed to ensure users ...
Read more