Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The REA-DSL: A Domain Specific Modeling
Language for Business Models
Christian Sonnenberg
2
, Christian Huemer
1
, Birgit Hofreiter
2
,
Dieter Mayrhofer
1
, and Alessio Braccini
3
1
TU Vienna
last@big.tuwien.ac.at
2
University of Liechtenstein
{
first.last
}
@uni.li
3
LUISS University
abraccini@luiss.it
Abstract.
In the discipline of accounting, the resource-event-agent
(REA) ontology is a well accepted conceptual accounting framework to
analyze the economic phenomena within and across enterprises. Accord-
ingly, it seems to be appropriate to use REA in the requirements elicita-
tion to develop an information architecture of accounting and enterprise
information systems. However, REA has received comparatively less at-
tention in the field of business informatics and computer science. Some of
the reasons may be that the REA ontology despite of its well grounded
core concepts is (1) sometimes vague in the definition of the relationships
between these core concepts, (2) misses a precise language to describe
the models, and (3) does not come with an easy to understand graphical
notation. Accordingly, we have started developing a domain specific mod-
eling language specifically dedicated to REA models and corresponding
tool support to overcome these limitations. In this paper we present our
REA DSL which supports the basic set of REA concepts.
Keywords:
Domain Specific Languages, Conceptual Modeling, Business
Models, Accounting Information Systems.
1
Introduction
Analyzing the economic phenomena on which companies base their business
may serve as a good starting point in the requirements elicitation phase when
developing enterprise information systems. Business models specify - amongst
other things - the main actors, their relationships and the values exchanged
between them (cf. [1]).
We see three main ontologies to conceptualize business models: the Business
Model Ontology (BMO) [2], the e3-value ontology [3], and the Resource-Event-
Agent ontology (REA) [4]. BMO is easy to use by the domain expert because
it focuses mainly on the categorization of aspects relevant for the delivery of
products and services to fulfill customers' requests. It helps the domain expert
to ask herself the right questions when developing a business model, but has
