Description:
While there are efforts to establish a single international accounting standard, there are
strong current and future needs to handle heterogeneous accounting methods and
systems. We advocate a context-based approach to dealing with multiple accounting
standards and equational ontological conflicts. In this paper we first define what we
mean by equational ontological conflicts and then describe a new approach, using
Constraint Logic Programming and abductive reasoning, to reconcile such conflicts
among disparate information systems. In particular, we focus on the use of Constraint
Handling Rules as a simultaneous symbolic equation solver, which is a powerful way to
combine, invert and simplify multiple conversion functions that translate between
different contexts. Finally, we demonstrate a sample application using our prototype
implementation that demonstrates the viability of our approach