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Astract: The Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology is a powerful and well accepted approach towards the design of accounting information systems (AIS). However, the REA notation - that is currently based on class diagrams - is not very intuitive for business experts. Accordingly, we aim at a REA domain specific modeling language that facilitates the communication between business experts and IT professionals. In previous work we defined the REA-DSL operational layer reflecting actual business events which "have occurred" or "are occurring". In this paper we extend the REA-DSL by the planning layer capturing what future events "are scheduled" or "are planned" by commitments. Now, our REA-DSL covers all basic concepts to describe a full accounting infrastructure. The REA-DSL may serve as a solid basis for generating a conceptual AIS data model - which is subject to future work.

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Astract: An accounting information system (AIS) manages data about a company's financial and economic status. The contribution of this paper is closing the gap between the languages used by business domain experts and IT-experts in analyzing the relevant data. A well accepted approach scrutinizing an accountability infrastructure is the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology. Although REA has been based on well-established concepts of the accounting theory, its representation has not been intuitive to domain experts. In previous work, we developed the REA-DSL, a dedicated and easy-to-understand graphical domain specific modeling language for the REA ontology. Evidently, a model-driven approach requires to transform the REA-DSL artifacts to code. In this paper we present the transformation of the REA-DSL to a relational database for AIS. This approach offers the advantage that a domain expert verifies the relevant data in an "accounting language", whereas the IT expert is able to work with traditional data base structures.

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Astract: In this paper we present the ERPEL approach towards executing on-the-fly e-business transactions between semantically enabled ERP systems. By on-the-fly e-business transactions we understand transactions that are conducted between companies, that are not yet in a partnership and dynamically find each other to engage in e-business transactions. Finding an appropriate business partner requires to know his business capabilities or in other words which products or services he offers. For this purpose, we develop a seamless integration of the product portfolios, held in the ERP systems, into the ERPEL registry. A search in the registry has to disclose the technical capabilities of a potential business partner to ensure interoperability. Overloaded business document standards and a variety of different communication protocols hamper an effective communication between enterprises. Thus, ERPEL follows a bottom-up approach starting from core documents with well-defined extension mechanisms. Furthermore, ERPEL comes with a default communication protocol specifically targeting SMEs. These unambiguous specifications allow the development of business service interfaces (BSI) that are integrated into the ERP systems.

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Astract: Lecture videos are slides enhanced with the audio recording of the lecturer's talk. Such lecture videos offer numerous advantages to the students as well as to the lecturers themselves. The former may organize their studies in a more flexible way by consuming the content of a lecture anytime and at any place as often as they want. The latter do not have to give the same lecture over and over again and may use the saved time for personal contact to the students. In this paper, we report on our experiences with using lecture videos in the course Introduction to Object-Oriented Modeling offered by the Business Informatics Group (BIG) at the Vienna University of Technology. We shortly review the structure of the course and discuss the creation and integration of the lecture videos. For the evaluation of this approach, we performed an online survey where the students could provide feedback. Parts of the results of this survey are discussed and included in the paper.

Keywords: Domain-specific language, DSL, REA, Resource Event Agent ontology, Business model
Astract: Accounting Information Systems (AIS) are essential for companies not only to record and track what events are happening or what events have happened in the past, they are also one of the most important tools for management to predict the financial future of a firm and take according actions. To enable an AIS to precisely record economic data and apply reasoning on them, it is crucial that the data structure of an AIS is built upon the economic phenomenas of a company's business.
Accordingly, it is already important to have a detailed understanding of the company's economic actions at the design time of an AIS.
Like in most software development projects, the dilemma during design time of an IT product is the language barrier between the domain expert, providing vital input for defining the requirements, and the IT professional, designing and developing the IT product. In most cases the domain expert is not capable of understanding IT specific terms, and the IT professional is not capable of completely understanding the specific area of the domain expert. Nevertheless, to successfully complete an IT product, these two groups still need to unambiguously communicate with each other by using a common language.
When designing an AIS, the domain at hand is the accounting/business domain. Thus, a business modeling language describing economic phenomenas of a company can be used as such a common language to define requirements. One powerful business modeling language today is the Resource-Event-Agent ontology (REA). It not only allows describing events of the present and the past, it also allows specification of commitments made for future events. Consequently, it perfectly fits our requirement to capture the economic phenomenas of an AIS. However, REA is somewhat vague in the definition of its concepts and the current representation is merely IT related, which makes it hard to be understood by business experts. Accordingly, REA still cannot be used as a common communication language for the AIS design phase.
Given these limitations, in this thesis we have taken upon the challenge to develop an unambiguous and intuitive graphical domain-specific representation for the REA ontology called the REA-DSL. First, we formalize the REA ontology by providing a REA-DSL meta-model incorporating the REA concepts resources, events, agents, commitments, and types as well as concepts known from database modeling.
Subsequently, we create a graphical notation for the REA-DSL using different shapes for different REA concepts. Additionally, to reduce the complexity of the models, we split the REA-DSL into five interlinked views. A serialization format for the REA-DSL is provided by the REA-XML language. Furthermore, we specify a mapping between the conceptual REA-DSL and a database description language. This enables the semi-automatic generation of database structures for an AIS.
The presented REA-DSL serves as an unambiguous and powerful business modeling language which can be used by IT and business experts for faster designing a robust AIS.