Resources

The Seattle Method is a proven, industrial strength, good practices, standards-based pragmatic approach to creating provably high quality XBRL-based general purpose financial reports explained in simple terms. To understand what is going on in the environment and why the Seattle Method is necessary, read this overview.  For more information about the Seattle Method, please see this documentation which includes some posts from my prior blog:


Technical











Popular posts from this blog

Overview

Image
Imagine it.  Freedom from drudgery. Freedom from the toil of tedious, repetitive, mundane, monotonous tasks. This overview is an attempt to take the work that I have done to understand XBRL-based reports and back into a framework for explaining those reports to accountants and software engineers building software for accountants.  I am not referring to this as model-driven reporting .   The sources of the information provided below are my " lab notebook " from December 2007 to October 2022; my Digital Financial Reporting blog from October 2022 until January 2025; Mastering XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting ; and finally my Seattle Method  documentation. What I have tried to do is take the seemingly hundreds of incomplete, far too technical, typically nonstandard explanations that I have come across; take the good/best ideas from each, make improvements to those explanations, and resynthesize the information into a form that is useful to me and perhaps usef...
Read more

Knowledge Representation Approach

Image
Knowledge representation is simply organizing knowledge related to some area of knowledge into some physical form.  A knowledge representation provides an explanation of or description of the nature and structure of something. There are a number of different approaches that a knowledge representation might take, each approach having a different level of expressivity and reasoning capability.  These different knowledge representation approaches form a spectrum.  The following is a graphic which shows the expressivity and reasoning capability of different knowledge representation approaches: The following is a brief description of each of the different knowledge representation approaches which will help you understand the relative expressivity and reasoning capability of each approach: Name authority : A name authority provides what amounts to a dictionary or list which amounts to a flat inventory of terms with no relations expressed between the terms. This can be thought...
Read more

Area of Knowledge

Image
An area of knowledge is a highly organized socially constructed aggregation of shared knowledge (a.k.a. corpus) for a distinct subject matter.  Subject matter experts (SMEs) create, use, and maintain an area of knowledge. An area of knowledge has a specialized insider vocabulary, underlying assumptions (axioms, theorems, constraints, assertions, restrictions), and persistent open questions that have not necessarily been resolved (i.e. flexibility is necessary).  You can think about an area of knowledge as being characterized in a spectrum with two extremes: Kind area of knowledge: clear rules, lots of patterns, lots of rules, repetitive patterns, and unchanging tasks. Wicked area of knowledge: obscure data, few or no rules, constant change, and abstract ideas. Stakeholders of a system need to be in agreement as to an undisputed core knowledge of an area of knowledge. Sensemaking is the process of determining the knowledge, or deeper meaning or significance or essence, of the c...
Read more