[Back]

D. Mayrhofer, C. Huemer:
"Business-Model-Driven Data Engineering Using the REA-DSL";
Talk: 6th International Workshop on Value Modeling and Business Ontology (VMBO 2012), Vienna, Austria; 02-20-2012 - 02-21-2012; in: "6th International Workshop on Value Modeling and Business Ontology (VMBO 2012)", (2012).

The most prominent business ontology for accounting information systems is the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology developed by McCarthy, Geerts and others. REA is a widely accepted framework for the design of a conceptual model of the accountability infrastructure of enterprise information systems. Originally, REA targeted the resource flows within and between companies describing what is currently occurring and what has occurred in the past. This is known as the operational layer. Later it was extended by a planning layer and a policy layer capturing what should, could, or must be occurring sometime in the future. Today, REA may be considered as a powerful business ontology capturing all relevant data to generate the conceptual design of an Accounting Information System (AIS). However, we feel that it does not deliver an appropriate representation of the business model which can be understood not only by the IT expert, but also by the business expert. Thus, the use of REA in the design of AIS does not yet reach its full potential. We argue, that an easy-to-understand REA notation will accelerate, streamline, and reduce the costs of the AIS development process.

Consequently, we have developed a domain specific modeling language for the REA concepts called the REA-DSL which aims at both (i) delivering an intuitive REA notation and (ii) retaining the full expressiveness of the REA concepts. The step we are conducting right now and covering in this paper is the incorporation of properties and primary keys into our REA-DSL and the final automatic generation of an Entity-Relationship-Diagram (ERD) for an AIS from the REA-DSL using our tool.

REA DSL business modeling AIS

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_207339.pdf