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Astract: The most prominent business ontology for accounting information systems is the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology developed by McCarthy, Geerts and others. REA is a widely accepted framework for the design of a conceptual model of the accountability infrastructure of enterprise information systems. Originally, REA targeted the resource flows within and between companies describing what is currently occurring and what has occurred in the past. This is known as the operational layer. Later it was extended by a planning layer and a policy layer capturing what should, could, or must be occurring sometime in the future. Today, REA may be considered as a powerful business ontology capturing all relevant data to generate the conceptual design of an Accounting Information System (AIS). However, we feel that it does not deliver an appropriate representation of the business model which can be understood not only by the IT expert, but also by the business expert. Thus, the use of REA in the design of AIS does not yet reach its full potential. We argue, that an easy-to-understand REA notation will accelerate, streamline, and reduce the costs of the AIS development process. Consequently, we have developed a domain specific modeling language for the REA concepts called the REA-DSL which aims at both (i) delivering an intuitive REA notation and (ii) retaining the full expressiveness of the REA concepts. The step we are conducting right now and covering in this paper is the incorporation of properties and primary keys into our REA-DSL and the final automatic generation of an Entity-Relationship-Diagram (ERD) for an AIS from the REA-DSL using our tool.

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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.