Using SPIN to formalise Accounting Regulations on the Semantic Web

Spohr D, Cimiano P, McCrae J, O'Riain S. Using SPIN to formalise Accounting Regulations on the Semantic Web. Presented at the First International Workshop on Finance and Economics on the Semantic Web in conjunction with the 9th Extended Semantic Web Conference.The eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) has standardised nancial reporting and provide a machine-interpretable for- mat that makes nancial and business reports easier to access and con- sume. Leveraging XBRL with Open Linked Data for purposes such as multi-dimensional regulatory querying and investigation requires XBRL formalisation as RDF. This paper investigates the use of o-the-shelf Se- mantic Web technologies to formalise accounting regulations specied in XBRL jurisdictional taxonomies. Specically the use of the SPARQL In- ferencing Notation (SPIN) with RDF to represent these accounting reg- ulations as rule constraints, not catered for in the RDF abstract model is investigated. We move beyond previous RDF to XBRL transformations and investigate how SPIN enhanced formalisation enables inferencing of nancial statement facts associated with nancial reporting concepts and sophisticated consistency checks, which evaluate the correctness of reported nancial data with respect to the calculation requirements im- posed by accounting regulation. The approach illustrated through two use cases demonstrates the use of SPIN to meet central requirements for nancial data and regulatory modelling