Problems and Prospect Business Education in Nigeria Colleges of Education
Semantic Modeling in Accounting
Education, Practice, and Research:
Some Progress and Impediments by William E. McCarthy, Arthur Andersen Alumni Professor
Department of Accounting, Michigan State University
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Published in: Conceptual Modeling: Current Issues and Future Directions, Editors: P. P. Chen, J. Akoka, H Kangassalo, and B. Thalheim. Springer Verlag, Berlin and Heidelberg, 1999, pp. 144-53. All of the judgments of past, ongoing, and future research projects and of the ultimate viability of Entity-Relationship and REA commercial implementations in accounting represent the informed conclusions of the author alone
Semantic Modeling in Accounting Education, Practice, and Research:
Some Progress and Impediments William E. McCarthy, Arthur Andersen Alumni Professor
Department of Accounting, Michigan State University 1.0 -- Introduction In late 1979, the first Entity-Relationship (E-R) Conference was held at UCLA in December, and the first semantic modeling paper in the financial systems domain was published in The Accounting Review in October. Those two papers by McCarthy (1979; 1980) were actually based on his doctoral dissertation work completed in 1977 at the University of Massachusetts where a computer science professor -- David Stemple -- had introduced him to the groundbreaking E-R paper of Peter Chen (1976) that was published the prior year in the initial issue of ACM Transactions on Database Systems. An important additional component of that same thesis work was the development of a normative accounting data modeling framework, something which needed more theoretical development at the time of the first E-R Conference. By 1982 however, McCarthy had completed that additional work, and he followed the first E-R paper and conference presentation with a more general semantic theory of economic phenomena in business organizations - the REA accounting model (McCarthy,
Education, Practice, and Research:
Some Progress and Impediments by William E. McCarthy, Arthur Andersen Alumni Professor
Department of Accounting, Michigan State University
____________________________________________________________
_
Published in: Conceptual Modeling: Current Issues and Future Directions, Editors: P. P. Chen, J. Akoka, H Kangassalo, and B. Thalheim. Springer Verlag, Berlin and Heidelberg, 1999, pp. 144-53. All of the judgments of past, ongoing, and future research projects and of the ultimate viability of Entity-Relationship and REA commercial implementations in accounting represent the informed conclusions of the author alone
Semantic Modeling in Accounting Education, Practice, and Research:
Some Progress and Impediments William E. McCarthy, Arthur Andersen Alumni Professor
Department of Accounting, Michigan State University 1.0 -- Introduction In late 1979, the first Entity-Relationship (E-R) Conference was held at UCLA in December, and the first semantic modeling paper in the financial systems domain was published in The Accounting Review in October. Those two papers by McCarthy (1979; 1980) were actually based on his doctoral dissertation work completed in 1977 at the University of Massachusetts where a computer science professor -- David Stemple -- had introduced him to the groundbreaking E-R paper of Peter Chen (1976) that was published the prior year in the initial issue of ACM Transactions on Database Systems. An important additional component of that same thesis work was the development of a normative accounting data modeling framework, something which needed more theoretical development at the time of the first E-R Conference. By 1982 however, McCarthy had completed that additional work, and he followed the first E-R paper and conference presentation with a more general semantic theory of economic phenomena in business organizations - the REA accounting model (McCarthy,
References: Andros, D.P., J.O. Cherrington, and E.L. Denna. 1992. "Reengineer Your Accounting, the IBM Way." Financial Executive (July/August), pp. 28-31. Chen, P.P. 1976. "The Entity-Relationship Model--Toward A Unified View of Data." ACM Transactions on Database Systems (March): 9-36. Cherrington, J.O., E.L. Denna, and D.P. Andros. 1996. "Developing an Event-Based Business Solution: The Case of IBM 's National Employee Disbursement System." Journal of Information Systems 10 (1): 51-69. Codd, E.F. 1970. "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." Communications of the ACM (June): 377-387. David, J. S. 1995. "An Empirical Analysis of REA Accounting Systems, Productivity, And Perceptions of Competitive Advantage." Working Paper, Arizona State University. _____, C. L. Dunn, R.S. Poston, and W.E. McCarthy. 1998. "The Research Pyramid: A Framework for Accounting Information Systems Research." Working Paper, Michigan State University. Denna, E.L. and W.E. McCarthy. 1987. "An Events Accounting Foundation for DSS Implementation." in Decision Support Systems: Theory and Application. C.W. Holsapple and A.B. Whinston (eds.). Berlin: Springer-Verlag: 239-63. Dunn, C.L. and W.E. McCarthy. 1997. "The REA Accounting Model: Intellectual Heritage and Prospects for Progress." Journal of Information Systems. 11 (Spring): 31-51. Frederick, D.M. 1991 "Auditors ' Representation and Retrieval of Internal Control Knowledge" The Accounting Review (April 1991): 240-58. Gal, G. and W.E. McCarthy. 1983. "Declarative and Procedural Features of a CODASYL Accounting System," in Entity-Relationship Approach to Information Modeling and Analysis, P. Chen (ed.), North-Holland, pp. 197-213. _____. and _____. 1986. "Operation of a Relational Accounting System." Advances in Accounting (3): 83-112. _____ and _____. 1994. "The Economic and Strategic Structure of REA Accounting Systems." Paper presented to the 300th Anniversary Program, Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, September. _____ and _____. 1997. Using Object Templates from the REA Accounting Model to Engineer Business Processes and Tasks. Paper presented to the 20th Congress of the European Accounting Association, Graz, Austria, April. Gruber, T. 1993. "A Translational Approach to Portable Ontologies," Knowledge Acquisition, Vol. 5, No.2, 199-220. Haugen, R. 1998 "Which Business Objects?" in Proceedings of OOPSLA '98 Business Object Workshop IV, J. Sutherland (ed.), 1998, Vancouver. Hollander, A.S., E.L. Denna, and J.O.Cherrington. 1995. Accounting, Information Technology and Business Solutions, Richard D. Irwin, Chicago, IL. March, S.T. and G.F. Smith. 1995. "Design and Natural Science Research on Information Technology." Decision Support Systems 15 (4): 251-267. McCarthy, W.E. 1979. "An Entity-Relationship View of Accounting Models." The Accounting Review (October 1979): 667-86. _____. 1980. "Construction and Use of Integrated Accounting Systems with Entity-Relationship Modeling." In P. Chen, ed. Entity-Relationship Approach to Systems Analysis and Design. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1980, 625-37. _____. 1982. "The REA Accounting Model: A Generalized Framework for Accounting Systems in a Shared Data Environment." The Accounting Review (July 1982): 554-578. Nakamura, H. and R.E. Johnson. 1998. "Adaptive Framework for the REA Accounting Model," in Proceedings of OOPSLA '98 Business Object Workshop IV, J. Sutherland (ed.), 1998, Vancouver. Romney, M.B., P.J. Steinbart, and B.C. Cushing. 1997. Accounting Information Systems. AddisonWesley, Reading, MA. Smith, J.M Walker, K. B. and E. L. Denna. 1997. "Arrivederci, Pacioli? A New Accounting System Is Emerging" Management Accounting (July): 22-30.