Financial Reporting by a Shared Ledger

Among models and information about economic phenomena which help to understand how enterprises produce value, Accounting and Financial Reporting still play a leading and regulative role. The regulative role is established by enforceable International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Ontology engineering methods, which have proven to cope with difficult standardization issues, are seldom used in developing the abovementioned standards. Furthermore, the standard setting should more increasingly account for the influence of advanced information technologies for capturing and reporting financial information, such as [blockchain-based] shared ledgers and data analytics. This paper proposes an initial version of the Core Ontology of Financial Reporting Information Systems for a Shared Ledger Environment (COFRIS) grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) network, and a preliminary analysis of the IFRS.