Formalization of REA Ontology

Current Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are based on double entry bookkeeping. This technique has several disadvantages concerning application neutral financial data storage. Therefore, the Resource Event Agent (REA) ontology was introduced to negotiate the current drawbacks. It describes concepts and its relationships semantically. Nevertheless, there exist a set of different REA models that reveal several lacks in context of formalization and specification. Although several REA approaches use formalized languages like the Unified Modeling Language (UML), they are too general to fulfill the Guidelines of Modeling. Due to these reasons, the paper adapts the SEManticbased Planning Approach (SEMPA) for a formalized REA modeling. By annotating process activities semantically, the approach emphasizes on business control. Furthermore, process activities are linked together representing all valid solutions of a process flow representing behavioral aspects of REA. The goal is to present a formalized approach that enables the integration of diverse REA models.