Track and trace future, present, and past product and money flows with a resource-event-agent model

In this article the authors present a reference model for the registration of economic data that enables the tracking and tracing of product and money flows in the registered data. The model is grounded in the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology, which has its origin in accounting and provides the conceptual foundation for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) open-edi transaction standard. The use of the reference model is illustrated with an example database that demonstrates the different usage scenarios covered by the model