The Use of a Formal Representation of Accounting Standards

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the model we built to represent financial information in an efficient way. This kind of information shows an unquestionable delay on the field of knowledge management, and this issue is more and more crucial as the requirements on financial reporting increase. We will describe the particular nature of laws as a knowledge source, and amongst other, the nature of accounting standards. We will explain the consequences of these particularities on the technical choices we made when we started to build our model, and what is the structure of our model. Then, we will sum up the issues we faced during the modelling process. This paper ends with a description of the applications we build to illustrate the possibilities of such a model for various financial information users, especially financial auditors.