OMCCAAF conceptualizing AF taxonomy and Thesaurus construction.

Anica-Popa, Liana-Elena

Abstract: This paper contains a synthesized scientific study concerning the Accounting & Financial Taxonomies and/or Thesaurus construction steps and their importance for an Organizational Memory modeling approach. The research was conducted during a running research project, financed by The National Research Council (CNCS), Romania, aiming to define a new methodological framework for the capitalization of the cognitive acquis in the accounting and financial area--OMCCAAF.

Key words: OMCCAAF, organizational memory, knowledge management, accounting & financial taxonomy and/or thesaurus, conceptual framework

1. INTRODUCTION

Technological advance, competitors and competences dissemination increase the strategic value of knowledge patrimony and the organizations interest into experiment different theoretical and practical capitalization processes concerning the intellectual capital.

Knowledge was defined like an intellectual effort result including the experience (GFII, 2004). Our research is developed with respect to the accounting & financial (AF) field and has the initial idea that a way for capitalizing and reusing knowledge could be the Organizational Memory (OM) and associate technologies, confirmed by careful analyses of the literature and good practice. Although there is some "dark sides", revealed by specialists (Chua, 2009), on the KM initiatives (for examples, diminished problem-solving ability and dogmatism, pitfalls in the use of digital repository, opportunistic behaviors and ethically-questionable practices, etc.), capitalizing AF cognitive acquis it seems to remains a necessity and a worthy organizational objective to battle for. The purpose of this paper is to shed further light on the OMCCAAF stage by revising and validating the conceptual steps of AF taxonomy and/or thesaurus' construction and their roles in the OM for leveraging the AF cognitive acquis.

Hepp and de Bruijn (2007) delimited, in ontology research literature, the terms thesaurus and taxonomy. The thesaurus was viewed as "a collection of concepts that are augmented by three types of relations: 'broader term', 'narrower term', and 'related term'. They considered taxonomy different from a thesaurus discussing about a subsumption hierarchy with many transitive inheritance relationships between elements. The concept of classification is also clarified as the process of "grouping entities by similarity" for some stated purpose. In the same time, the ontology engineering was defined as an approach of modeling specified parts of the economic world. It seems the context of usage influences a given collection being considered taxonomy, thesaurus, or hierarchical classification.

Our approach envisaged providing a framework allowing its users to build AF taxonomies, AF thesaurus, and finally, in future research work, to reuse both for building an AF domain ontology.

2. METHODOLOGY

Our approach was based on literature investigation and practice observation and aims to draw conceptual directions of AF Taxonomy and/or Thesaurus construction. We argue for conceptual frameworks conceived accordingly to this particular context of the economic activity.

AF well-conceived taxonomies and/or thesaurus for Knowledge Capitalization and Organizational Memory processes could offer the basis for the design of AF domain ontology. Our basic position, the work premises and paper objectives was established and validated after analysis of data provided by empirical researches realized in the Romanian economic environment (Vrincianu et al., 2009; Anica-Popa et al, 2010), by literature review, direct observation, AF experts' interviews, web sites analysis, e-mail correspondences, and introspection referring to OM, knowledge capitalization technology, taxonomy, thesaurus, domain ontology concepts.

Conclusions, proposals and future research orientation are formulated at the final of paper.

3. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

3.1 Main steps

The conceptual view of knowledge capitalization is three axes--oriented: normative, scientific and practical and reaches three synergic dimensions of the Knowledge Management (KM) processes: human, organizational and technological (GFII, 2004).

In the economic world, the time results to be the most important resource and knowledge must be quickly available to its consumers. At this point, an element of our framework seems to be building a granular indexation language conducting to a specific taxonomy.

The AF environment is populated with categories of regulations, employees, stakeholders, social groups, documents, concepts, knowledge, activities, operations, feelings, places, times, relations, etc. It seems that in KM, the difficulty of a taxonomist work consists on identifying and interpreting the varying information perspectives of different groups in an organization, detecting their specific communication ways, and helping them reach a common and well-structured language. Modeling taxonomies implies being cognizant of requirements for its use: the taxonomy resulted should be "understood pragmatically, adopted consistently, applied productively and managed sustainably" (Lambe, 2007).

Good taxonomies must be simple, reflecting their users' knowledge world, and built on principles of consistency and predictability. Building AF taxonomy involves an iterative process, trying to combine and correlate possible competing needs and perspectives or different visions about concepts. The AF taxonomies should offer standard definitions for much contextual knowledge. A taxonomy object, indexed, becomes searchable for different combinations of its proprieties. The vast area of AF notions contains many cases of inconsistency,

contradiction and ambiguity, lying in the discrepancy between the context producing them and those using these concepts. These aspects engendered difficulties in our research approach.

Based on taxonomies, tracing each procedure and the recommended solution (HIT, 2010), an AF thesaurus could be elaborated, structured in micro--thesauri applying a set of criteria issued from AF activities and professional tasks' typology.

3.2 Discussing framework elements

To obtain an AF thesaurus, the specific knowledge should be structured into specific taxonomies. In order to provide AF taxonomies, knowledge should be collected from the professional contexts. Information which resides in documents or other artifacts apart from people must be organized into categories in correlation with the future purpose of possible users; each identified category should be labeled.

Building an AF taxonomy implies establishing criteria for the knowledge organization, to counteract ambiguity, deviations and clarify polysemantic issues, also simplifying and connecting different knowledge trees or hierarchies. On that purpose, it can be used extant AF glossaries, AF ontologies, AF courses, AF texts, AF experts, AF documents and enactments etc. One possible representation of the taxonomy model could be a semantic network, having the main categories of AF knowledge as nodes and relations between them--as arcs.

Starting from the initial structure, by semantic--based processes of generalization and specialization, it can be elaborated the taxonomy and then, developed into AF thesaurus. Around the main nodes, depending on the real organizational context, it could be formed cores of main AF micro-thesauri (i.e. Financial Accounting, Controlling, etc.).

To be used effectively, the taxonomists should implement the taxonomy, after observing carefully actors, relations, actions, information need.

A pragmatic way to capture information from the OM components' users seems to be creating the possibility and encouraging the adding of annotations. Considering a specific AF concept, there are many related resources for it; the annotations represent captures of experience and expertise of AF specialists guiding thereby the seeker/learner of new knowledge in selecting the most appropriate one. In the literature, there are identified annotations: formal (specific conventional metadata) and informal, explicit (for others) and tacit (for personal use, telegraphic, and maybe incomplete), permanent and transient, published and private (Abel et al., 2004, citing Marshall, 1998). For AF thesaurus, annotations could complete and support the resources selection work in processes of acquiring new knowledge and might provide some traceability information about the use of concept, regulations, the users' actions and their motivations. The aforementioned annotations could have the text, illustration, graphic, or voice forms. It can be considered a resource and may have its own annotations. To add annotations, a resource must be formalized and represented into OM. We consider that the reusability degree of knowledge capitalized in OM increases in case of annotations practice. The users' ability to locate and share existing knowledge, to experiment it and to create new knowledge could also be improved.

To put into AF taxonomies more knowledge, store and recover them, to navigate through domains' cognitive acquis faster and on a much wider scale, the IC&T instruments could be inventoried and make the object of an argued selection process.

4. CONCLUSIONS

We tried to outline some conceptual elements/activities meant to orient interested specialists in constructing OM components like taxonomies and/or thesaurus. Any AF taxonomy and/or thesaurus--instances of the framework outlined above--should be built in close correlation with and adapted to the specific conditions from the organizational AF environment.

A future attempt of our research will be the elaboration of AF taxonomies and thesaurus, in order to verify and validate the coherence of the proposed OMCCAAF framework excerpt. The results could be useful for the students, young researchers or employees in AF field, but also for experimented specialists during their learning and/or documentation processes. Instruments for the terminological access to the micro thesauri' elements, aiming to determine and extract semantics trees containing generic, specific and associated AF concepts, could complete the research activities, preparing the "ground" for conceptualizing elements designed to develop an AF domain ontology. The central goal is the capitalization of the AF cognitive acquis, a better AF knowledge valorization during the organizational problem solving and decision-making processes.

5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The study was conducted within the scientifically research project, currently running, financed by The National University Research Council (CNCS), Romania, into the framework of National Plan of Research, Development and Innovation--PN II, Ideas Program, 2008 Competition. The title is "Research regarding the modeling of the organizational memory: OMCCAAF, a new methodological framework for the capitalization of the cognitive acquis in the financial and accounting area". This work was supported by CNCSIS--UEFISCSU, project number PNII-- IDEI Id_1866/2008, Contract no. 766/2009.

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