The OntoREA Accounting and Finance Model: Ontological Conceptualization of the Accounting and Finance Domain

摘要

Geerts and McCarthy [1, 2] extended McCarthy's [3] Resource-Event-Agent (REA) accounting model with a forward-looking perspective by including commitments and economic contracts. Schwaiger [4] investigated the extended REA accounting model with respect to accounting and finance requirements and developed the REA-based Asset-Liability-Equity (ALE) accounting model. Due to the ontological neutrality of UML class diagrams [5], financial instruments are not concisely conceptualized. This holds true especially for derivative instruments which have very special temporal modal and identity-related peculiarities. For modeling them the OntoUML language developed by Guizzardi [6] provides a solid foundation. In this article ontological meta-properties of OntoUML are used to specify these peculiarities and to derive the OntoREA Accounting and Finance Model, which constitutes a valid ontology-based conceptualization of the accounting and finance domain. This model should be beneficial especially for business analysts who have to understand and develop conceptual models for up-to-date enterprise and accounting information systems.