Events

Building on the blog post Classic Transactions and Canonical Representations of Business Events and Describing Situation Semantics using Situation Theory.

I have become aware of several people or groups which are trying to do what appears to be exactly the same thing.

  • Bill McCarthy created Resources, Events, Attributes (REA) in the 1980s which has the notion of a "business event". REA appears to be an ISO standard of some sort.
  • Willi Brammertz created Algorithmic Contract Types Unified Standards (ACTUS) which is for financial institutions, but the same idea. ACTUS has the notion of a "financial contract".
  • Dave McComb and Cheryl Dunn created what they call Data Centric Accounting (DCA).  DCA is somewhat based on REA; but DCA took the notion of a business even a step further and they identified core patterns of business events.
  • Peter Frampton and Mark Robilliard who wrote The Joy of Accounting and came up with the notion of “classical transactions” which instantiate patterns of financial transactions in an accounting system.
  • Roy Roebuck came up with the General Endeavor Management (GEM) which appears to have what amounts to a similar idea of the business event but more general in nature, an endeavor event or undertaking event. Within GEM, Roebuck has the notion of a "perception" which is a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something.
  • Myself (with help from Rajib Doogar and Andrew Noble) who came up with the notion of what I called the fact ledger and what I first referred to as transaction grouping or roll forward codes.
  • Workday has this notion of what they call "worktags".  A worktag is similar to my transaction grouping or roll forward codes.
  • Situation Theory is described as explaining how people or machines use information within a specific context.  Roy Roebuck's GEM explains how situations spawn events.
All this distills down into the following essence: (1) Business events of economic entities are accounted for as financial transactions within an accounting system. (2) The notion of a business even can be made more general, the economic event. (3) An economic event can be generalized even more, the endeavor event or the undertaking event. (4) Situations can become events.

The graphic below tries to capture what I am trying to describe:

Why bother?  Well, if you want to digitize something you have to figure out stuff like this.  It is part of digital proficiency. Me; I am trying to digitize accountancy.  Why? In order to build better accounting tools.  But also, the same ideas that are used to build better accounting tools can be leveraged to build other types of tools.

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