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An International Meeting of 2005 Annual MeetingAugust 7–10, 2005
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The Ontological Foundation of REA Enterprise Information SystemsGuido L. Geerts William E. McCarthy Abstract: Philosophers have studied ontologies for centuries in their search for a systematic explanation of “What kinds of things exist?” Recently, ontologies have emerged as a major research topic where they address this content issue of “What kinds of things should we represent?” The answer to this second question differs with the scope of the ontology. Ontologies that are subject-independent are called upper-level ontologies, and they attempt to define concepts shared by all domains, such as time and space. Domain ontologies, on the other hand, attempt to define the things that are relevant to a specific application domain. Both types of ontologies are becoming increasingly important in an era where consistent and machine-readable semantic definitions of economic phenomena become the language of e-commerce. In this paper, we propose the conceptual accounting framework of the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) model of McCarthy (1982) as an enterprise domain ontology, and we build upon the initial ontology work of Geerts and McCarthy (2000) which explored REA with respect to the ontological categorizations of John Sowa (1999). Because of its conceptual modeling heritage, REA already resembles an established ontology in many declarative (categories) and procedural (axioms) respects, and we also propose here to extend formally that framework both (1) vertically in terms of entrepreneurial logic (value chains) and workflow specification (business process state machines), and (2) horizontally in terms of time with type and commitment images of enterprise economic phenomena. A strong emphasis throughout the paper is given to the microeconomic foundations of the category definitions. |