An ontology modelling perspective on business reporting

In this paper, we discuss the motivation and the fundamentals of an ontology representation of business reporting data and metadata structures as defined in the eXtensible business reporting language (XBRL) standard. The core motivation for an ontology representation is the enhanced potential for integrated analytic applications that build on quantitative reporting data combined with structured and unstructured data from additional sources. Applications of this kind will enable significant enhancements in regulatory compliance management, as they enable business analytics combined with inference engines for statistical, but also for logical inferences. In order to define a suitable ontology representation of business reporting language structures, an analysis of the logical principles of the reporting metadata taxonomies and further classification systems is presented. Based on this analysis, a representation of the generally accepted accounting principles taxonomies in XBRL by an ontology provided in the web ontology language (OWL) is proposed. An additional advantage of this representation is its compliance with the recent ontology definition metamodel (ODM) standard issued by OMG.