ORSO: The Organizational Structure Ontology

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Geerts, Guido L.; O'Leary, Daniel E.
• 署名单位: University of Delaware; University of Southern California
• 刊物名称: ACCOUNTING REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0001-4826
• DOI: 10.2308/TAR-2020-0101
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 261-290
• 关键词: design science research; systems; events

摘要

Organizational structure information is deeply embedded in the different functional activities of accounting. This paper presents ORSO (ORganizational Structure Ontology), an ontology for describing organizational structures that can be reasoned with as part of accounting applications, developed following the principles and guidelines of design science research. ORSO allows the representation of key organizational constructs to meet internal and external accounting needs, including financial reporting requirements, analysis of an organization's governance structure, economic analysis of agent and group performance, the definition and monitoring of controls, and responding to political and social inquiries about agents and other needs. A prototype is presented that demonstrates three possible types of applications of ORSO systems: (1) analysis of organizational structures, (2) accounting analysis through the integrated use of Resource-Event-Agent (REA) transaction data and ORSO specifications, and (3) constraint definition and monitoring.