Closing clive holtham

transcript

Web 3.0 – challenge or opportunity for accountants?

Clive HolthamCass Business Schoolc.w.holtham@city.ac.uk

Timeline

1951 First Business Computer1969 Internet1982 IBM PC1991 WWW Web 1.02000 Web 2.0 (social)20?? Web 3.0 (semantic)20?? Web 4.0 (artificial intelligence)

Nova Spivack Roadmap

Tim-Berners Lee, 1999

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Web 3.0 perspectives

Semantic WebThe Internet of ThingsM2MPull

Importance of 3.0 to directors

Transformations of information and knowledge

Investments and riskOpenness and transparencyEfficiencyBarriers & mindsets

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Cathedral: carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time

Bazaar: a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/raymond/ http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

cathedral-bazaar/

Cathedral

Standards-basedCollaborative

Taxonomies

Bazaar

OrganicCompetitive

Natural LanguageProcessing

PhysicalObject/Event

HumanNotes

Record ProcessArchive/Destroy

HumanAction

Records 3200 BC

MachineData

MachineAction

Records – machine based

MachineData

Data on, in, about the object/event

Metadata

Pull – Semantic Web Acid Test

1. Is it semantic?1. Are the terms unambiguous?

2. Are they tagged in a royalty-free format, governed by a non-profit institution, that all software programs can understand?

2. Is it on the web?1. Is it online using a common name space that

makes it easily findable?

2. Is it shared between collaborators and companies?

3. Does it use the information already online to get smarter as more people use the system?

Turn of the screw

Principle discovered around 400 BCLimited use until machine tools made mass production possible

(18th cent.)Every machine shop and foundry made unique sizes and thread

dimensions1841: Joseph Whitworth presented “The Uniform System of

Screw-Threads” to Britain’s Institute of Civil Engineers

1864: William Sellers proposes “On a Uniform System of Screw Threads” to the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia

Enabled interchangeable parts and tooling for mechanization and mass production

1945: British and American standards merged

The Machine Screw

A successful standard

ISO 216 Communications Standard

Globalization starts with getting the details right. Inconsistent use of SI units and international standard paper sizes remain today a primary cause for U.S. businesses failing to meet the expectations of customers worldwide

Marcus Kuhn, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

German standard DIN 476 in 1922, and soon introduced in many other countries, Belgium (1924), Netherlands (1925), Norway (1926), Switzerland (1929), Sweden (1930), Soviet Union (1934), Hungary (1938), Italy (1939), Uruguay (1942), Argentina (1943), Brazil (1943), Spain (1947), Austria (1948), Romania (1949), Japan (1951), Denmark (1953), Czechoslovakia (1953), Israel (1954), Portugal (1954), Yugoslavia (1956), India (1957), Poland (1957), United Kingdom (1959), Venezuela (1962), New Zealand (1963), Iceland (1964), Mexico (1965), South Africa (1966), France (1967), Peru (1967), Turkey (1967), Chile (1968), Greece (1970), Zimbabwe (1970), Singapore (1970), Bangladesh (1972), Thailand (1973), Barbados (1973), Australia (1974), Ecuador (1974), Columbia (1975) and Kuwait (1975). It finally became both an international standard (ISO 216) as well as the official United Nations format in 1975 and it is today used in almost all countries on this planet, leaving North America as the only remaining exception.

MachineData

MachineAction

Taxonomies

Rules to represent the data

XML (Deloitte, 2010)

Acord XML Dictionary

eXtensible Business Reporting Language“a free XML-based specification that uses accepted financial

reporting standards and practices to exchange financial statements across all software and technologies, including the internet”

AICPA led, with 30+ sponsors including Big 5, software vendors, ICAEW, IBM

www.xbrl.orgConceived in April 1998 Charles Hoffman, a CPA with

the firm Knight Vale and Gregory in Tacoma, Washington

October 2, 1998, AICPA agreed to fund the project to create a prototype

.. a standard for the electronic exchange of data between businesses and on the internet. Under XML, identifying tags are applied to items of data so that they can be processed efficiently by computer software.

Taxonomies (Deloitte, 2010)

Semantic Web Stack

Related Technologies

TaggingRFIDM2MRemote ControlDigital to Analogue

Openness and transparency

Conclusion

Techology already existsNot necessarily economic yetStandards are centralConflicting stakeholder interestsVendors will continue to oppose standardsProfessions will be central to the open

standards without which Web 3.0 will be stifled

Closing clive holtham

Economy & Finance