The authors wish to thank Patricia Everaert (Ghent University) and two anonymous reviewers of the 2 nd Int’l Workshop on Conceptual Modeling Quality (IWCMQ’03) for their useful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper. D/2004/7012/05

Abstract. Business domain ontologies offer great opportunities for facilitating communication between people in business, for improving the enterprise system engineering processes and for creating interoperability between enterprise systems. However despite these opportunities, their use in practice is still limited. This can be partly attributed to the lack of formal representation of these ontologies. This paper analyses current formalizations of the Resource Event Agent business domain ontology (REA-ontology) and investigates how this formalizations can be improved. Our approach recognises the opportunities that the conceptual modelling and database field can offer for ontology engineering and as a consequence a UML conceptualization of the business domain ontology is used as starting point of the formalization. Based on the transformation guidelines from UML to OWL and the current formalization of OWL we present some transformation dilemmas. It is our believe that these formalization problems are not unique to business domain ontologies and that other domain ontologies can also benefit from standard solutions to these formalization problems. 1 Problem and Context Business domain ontologies offer great opportunities for creating interoperability between enterprise systems. The successful application depends on the quality of the business domain ontology. Important ontological quality factors are reusability, reliability, shareability, portability and interoperability[1, 2]. In our view a business domain ontology with a strong theoretical basis which is engineered following a good methodology resulting in a proper formalisation will be of a much higher quality. This in turn will lead to more and successful applications. The last decade different business domain ontologies (Tove[3], Enterprise Ontology[4], REA Business Ontology[5], E3 value Ontology[6] and Business Model Ontology[7]) have been proposed. The developers of these business domain ontologies have different scientific backgrounds and this is shown in the different theoretical backgrounds of the ontologies. The creators of Tove and the Enterprise Ontology have an artificial intelligence background and the development

pp.59 to 80 The purpose of this paper is to describe how the accounting REA model can be incorporated into the Information Engineering set of methodologies in the Accounting or Financial Information Systems classroom. We contrast the traditional Information Engineering approach with one that includes REA modeling. We argue that the REA model is an interaction model, and that its use enables accounting students to develop business information systems that more adequately depict business phenomena. We also advocate a hands-on approach to systems development by supplementing conceptual model building with actual systems building through the use of a systems development toolset that automatically generates both application and database programming code from the logical models developed by the students. Consequently, students can see how their abstractions have real-world consequences.

Abstract. This paper presents a laboratory experiment that evaluates the REA approach for modelling enterprise-wide accounting information systems. REA is a pattern-driven conceptual modelling approach that is based on the Resource-Event-Agent semantic model of a company’s accountability infrastructure. Using a between-subjects experiment with business students we investigated whether Entity-Relationship (ER) diagrams that show a REA pattern occurrence are better understood than informationally equivalent ER diagrams that do not show a REA pattern occurrence. The results of our experiment indicate that students develop a more accurate understanding of the business processes and policies modelled when they recognize the REA structure of accounting information in ER diagrams. Students also perceive such diagrams to be easier to use when performing model comprehension and validation tasks. The experiment further showed that the number of information systems courses taken by students has a significant effect on task performance. The number of accounting courses completed before the experiment did not affect the understanding of business process models. The paper concludes by discussing some implications for Accounting Information Systems

Systems Analysis and Design is a core component of an education in information systems. To appeal to a wider range of constituents and facilitate the learning process, the content of a traditional Systems Analysis and Design course has been supplemented with an alternative modeling approach. This paper presents an instructional design that incorporates a model from accounting literature (REA) with traditional Systems Analysis and Design methods in introducing the topic of data modeling. Detailed instructions for deriving data elements and relationships are presented. Feedback from students indicates increased satisfaction with the learning process and retention of material.