Post-workshop note

The organizers would like to thank all participants for a successful workshop. Pictures from the workshop can be found here. The workshop proceedings has been published as a technical report in the ITU Technical Report Series. You can download the report here. Please use this report as a reference when quoting workshop papers.

Description

The REA (Resources, Events and Agents) model originating from the accounting domain is maturing to a conceptual framework and ontology for Enterprise Information Architectures in general. The goal of this workshop is to enhance the participant's understanding of the REA modeling framework by mutual discussions, to present and discuss the current state of the ontology, the latest state of implementation technology and realization of REA systems, and to identify key areas for further research.

Instructions to Participants

Prospective participants without position paper, but with an interest in the use, formalization or implementation of the REA ontology should inform the organizers (mjaquet@itu.dk) in advance, because the workshop only has room for 20 participants. At the beginning of each paper session, the authors will be permitted a 15 minute slot to briefly describe the work of their group and the contents of their paper. The rest of the session, we will spend with questions and answers to gain deeper insight into the problem described in the authors’ paper, or to other related problems.

Each participant will be expected to review everyone else's paper before the workshop and complete the following two sentences for each:

  - What I really liked about this paper is...
  - The most important question I would like to ask the author is...

Each participant will be requested to present their completion of these two sentences, and the author will be given opportunity to answer questions. The open discussion at the end of the workshop will be devoted to problems that extend the topics related to the papers.

Program Outline

9:00 - 9:15: Introduction and welcome.
9:15 - 10:15: Key note by Professor William E. McCarthy on recent work with REA related standards: ISO/IEC 15944-4:2006, pt. 4, draft (slides)
10:30 - 11:15: Piet Erik Adolf Vandenbossche and J.C. Wortmann: "Why accounting data models from research are not incorporated in ERP systems" (slides)
11:15 - 12:00: Mette Jaquet: "A Property Driven Approach towards Describing Semantics of REA Entities" (slides)
12:00 - 13:00: Lunch
13:00 - 13:45: Frederik Gailly and Geert Poels: "Towards an Operational REA Ontology Using Web Ontology Languages" (slides)
13:45 - 14:30: Fred van Blommestein: "REA as an e-business ontology" (slides)
14:45 - 15:30: Anders Hessellund: "Modeling Issues in REA" (slides)
15:30 - 16:15: Pavel Hruby and Jesper Kiehn: "Revised Classification of the Enterprise Information Architecture Elements" (slides)
16:30 - 17:30: Concluding discussion
17:30 - 19:00: (optional) Continued discussion and hands-on modeling
19:00 - 20:30: (optional) REA dinner

All position papers can be downloaded together in this zip-file. Similarly, all presentation slides can be downloaded together in this zip-file. The proceedings of the workshop will later be published as a technical report in the ITU Technical Report Series. See photos from the workshop here

The following people participated without a position paper:
- Kerstin Siaka, ATEI of Thessaloniki, Dept. of Informatics, siaka@it.teithe.gr
- Benita Gullkvist, Vaasa Polytechnic, Business Economics, benita.gullkvist@puv.fi
- Tom Henelius, University of Lapland, Dept. of Business and Tourism/Accounting, theneliu@ulapland.fi
- Constantinos J. Stefanou, ATEI of Thessaloniki, Dept. of Accounting, stefanou@acc.theite.gr

Topics and Questions of interest

  • Precise semantics of the ontological categories in REA
  • Extensions of the REA ontology as we know it today
  • Accounting artifacts and REA, transformation and correspondence between double-entry accounting and REA
  • REA as a mechanism for interoperability
  • Meta-modeling in the context of REA
  • REA and Model-Driven Engineering (MDE)
  • REA-based software architectures (current and future ones)
  • Software applications based on REA
  • International standards based on REA
  • Maintenance and Evolvability of REA-solutions
  • Using process modeling patterns with REA
  • Best practices and guidelines for creating REA-based models - How easy or difficult it is for business people and software developers to understand REA models?
  • What benefits can users and developers of ERP systems gain from using REA?
  • What level of detail is appropriate when creating enterprise models using REA?
  • How can we make existing ERP systems REA compliant, and is it possible at all?
  • How can the REA ontology be implemented to support multiple application domains?
  • Business problems for which adopting REA gives an advantage. I.e. joint venture accounting, accounting for rights and responsibilities, supply chain or value system management
  • Are REA systems being implemented today? Are they in production?
  • Can REA be used to ease comprehension of existing systems?
  • Are REA models descriptive or prescriptive?

Sponsor

This workshop is sponsored by the NEXT project at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Microsoft Dynamics.
IT University of Copenhagen Microsoft Dynamics