VerbalDescription.txt

[From: Georg Vogeler: The Content of Accounts and Registers in their Digital Edition. XML/TEI, Spreadsheets, and Semantic Web Technologies. In: Edition von Rechnungen und  Amtsbüchern, ed. by Jürgen Sarnowsky, forthcoming (2016)]

Transactionography has developed a simple ontology for accounting facts: a /transaction/ between two /parties/ or /accounts/ /consists of/ at least one /transfer/ from one to the other. It /transfers/ a /measurable/ and can be /attested/ by text. The transfer /occurs at/ a place and /happens at/ a time. Booking a transfer into an account can create /liabilities/ held by a party and owed to another.  From the XBRL taxonomy one can add the specialization of measurables as /monetary values/. XBRL-GL offers additional data types applicable to the encoding of historical accounting documents: The /entry/ is an information fragment of a transfer often only naming one party as the other can be deduced from the textual context of the entry. When writing it down into the ledger, /debit/ and /credit/ are coded e.g. by using the appropriate columns in a table. Accounts can be compared in a /balance/. XBRL in general adds the concept of calculated values like /totals/. This is in particular useful when encoding historical accounting document. They usually convey these calculated values (e.g. per page, per rubric, per accounting period) which could be compared to values calculated by the computer and thus show transcription or encoding errors viz. calculation errors of the clerks.
Following the TEI model measurements have at least three properties: /what/ is measured, what kind of /unit/ is used, and in which /quantity/ it is measured. In RDF the type of measurement would better be a description of the unit used not of the individual measurement.
Economic history often is not only interested in the accounting practice and the original accounting structure but in economic facts reported in the accounts. Prices, wages and currency conversion rates are good examples for this research interest. The model should therefore contain entities to describe the relationship between two measurable as /prices/ and should identify measurable not only as monetary item but as /commodities/ or /services/ as well. Prices can be considered as a special case of /conversions/ of measurements.
All of this can be expressed in RDF-Schema (RDFs)  and here is not the place to explain this formalisation further. An advantage of using RDF for the modelling can be shown with the concept account. It is a problematic term in the vocabulary because it can have different meanings: In accounting theory an account can be "/personal/", "/real/", or "/nominal/". It therefore can represent a relationship between two partners, an aggregation of items of value, or a temporary evaluation of the economic status of business. But accounts can also be considered as a list of bookkeeping entries.  In accounting on paper they could be expressed in single pages or dedicated ledgers and they are identified by a heading. In final fair copies of bookkeeping documents in particular in the context of single entry bookkeeping they are just lists of entries under a heading which could be called "/rubrics/", referencing the medieval method of marking headings with red ink. Fortunately there is a common abstraction in the two concepts when you consider "account" as method to organize a group of single facts. In the XBRL scheme this is considered a /dimension/ of the data.  Modelling this in RDFs allows organising the information in a hierarchy of abstractions: Both account and rubric can be described as special case of dimension. The account is an abstraction of personal account, real account and nominal account.