TR8-02 Metamodel of XBRL GL and REA – A basis for integration of both approaches

Presenter: Johannes Buder

Full enterprise ontologies like the REA ontology or the XBRL taxonomy are used to improve communication between as well as within organizations to understand business processes by giving business facts semantic meaning, and to support decision makers. According to the object oriented paradigm, the several XBRL GL artifacts (business process, accounting entry, account, and report) represents objects. The consolidation activities of the financial reporting supply chain as well as the validation process of the auditing supply chain describe actions that present the behavior. In order to improve the comprehension, transparency, and quality of XBRL GL, a transformation of the artifacts in an object oriented model will be developed. By transforming the XBRL GL into an object oriented model, parallels become obvious to the REA accounting model. Whereas the object oriented REA model has to be extended with dynamic aspects, the object oriented model of XBRL GL will enable the creation of well-structured models of XBRL.Due to these reasons, the object oriented models of REA and XBRL GL contain the same aspects. Hence, the research question is to examine these parallels in order to generate an integrated model of both REA and XBRL GL.