A Domain Specific Modeling Language for REA

The Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology has its roots in the accounting discipline and was originally developed as a reference framework to conceptualize economic phenomena in an enterprise. In its proposal in 1982, McCarthy already had the vision to facilitate the design of data structures of accounting information systems by means of REA. Since this time the REA model has been further extended and evolved into a domain ontology. All REA concepts are based on well established concepts of the literature in economic theory - which is certainly one of the strengths of REA. However, REA has no dedicated representation format and, consequently, no graphical syntax. Thus, users may struggle when describing the REA models leading to the impression that REA is a rather heavy-weight approach. A dedicated graphical syntax - such as it exists for e3-value - may help in overcoming this problem and may lead to a much more significant adoption of REA. Accordingly, we have started the endeavor of developing a domain specific modeling language for REA.