Semantic Modeling in Accounting Education, Practice, and Research: Some Progress and Impediments

Abstract

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, 1982).

This paper is an expansion of a speech given to the 1997 Conference on Entity-Relationship Modeling at UCLA where Peter Chen arranged a special session for some of those researchers who were presenters at the first conference (also at UCLA) in 1979. 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.