Several UFO grounded economic exchange ontologies have been developed in the last decade, notably COFRIS, OntoREA, REA2, and ATE. An important question is whether they have reached a level to support financial reporting standard setters. This article first describes the foundational assumptions for exchange conceptualization and consolidates the latest developments in COFRIS - a core ontology for financial reporting information systems, within the most recent versions of the UFO theories and the OntoUML tool. The ontology is evaluated based on competency questions. Furthermore, it is confronted with the conceptual frameworks and standards for accounting and financial reporting and compared with other UFO grounded exchange ontologies. The results show both the maturity level of current exchange ontologies and their applicability to standard setting.

From a design science perspective, information systems and their components are viewed as artifacts. However, not much has been written yet on the ontological status of artifacts or their structure. After March & Smith’s (1995) initial classification of artifacts in terms of models, constructs, methods and instantiations, there have been only a few attempts to come up with a more systematic approach. This conceptual paper provides an ontological analysis of the notion of artifact grounded in the foundational ontology UFO. Its core is an ontological characterization of artifacts, and technical objects in general from a Design Science Research perspective, developed in conversation with other approaches. This general artifact ontology is applied in a systematic classification of IS artifacts. We include practical implications for Design Science Research.

A main problem for electronic commerce, particularly for business-to-business applications, lies in the need for the involved information systems to meaningfully exchange information. Domain-specific standards may be used to define the semantics of common terms. However, in practice it is not easy to find those domain-specific standards that are detailed and stable enough to allow for real interoperability. Therefore, we propose an architecture that allows for incremental construction of a shared repository including a multilingual thesaurus, which is used in a business communication language. Communicating information systems then refer to the common thesaurus while exchanging messages. Our emphasis is be on separating semantics (in the thesaurus) and syntax (in XML). Therefore, our extensibility is not only that of XML, but also the extensibility of the semantics that is modeled in the shared repository. The business communication language XLBC is presented and how it can be used in electronic commerce applications. XLBC message patterns and conversation protocols are stored in the shared repository as well.

The specification of communication behavior is fundamental in developing interoperable transactions. In particular, the temporal ordering of messages exchanged between different communicating agents must be declaratively specified and verified in order to guarantee consistency of data in the various component systems. This paper shows that by expressing communication constraints in propositional temporal logic, the tableau method can be applied to construct a dependency graph. If the specification is correct, this method guarantees that all possible execution paths satisfying the specification will be generated. The declarative specification and verification of communication constraints in interoperable transactions is demonstrated using the classic business trip. It is argued that the specification formalism provides an improvement over the Flexible Transaction Model.