Monthly Archives: March 2007

Closing time

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It’s just one of those times in your life as a student this week: the final week is neigh so the professors are or have been contemplating the final deliverables and our professor for the seminar is no exception to this rule.
In today’s session, which has been held plenary with all groups.
Yes, all three of them.

The deliverables have been announced, and actually span all work we’ve done so far plus a little bit more. We have to come up with a report concerning the following topics:

  • XML
  • XBRL
  • OWL & Ontologies
  • Transforming XBRL into a Ontology
  • The NTP architecture (optional)

With this document we will also have to bundle the ontology we’ve created, in our case we will possibly bundle the two ontologies we’ve created as we’ve based our transformation-paper almost entirely on the couple of ontologies instead of on just one.

Our professor likes to see, in contradiction to what he has told us before, an ontology in a hierarchical way instead of the linear fashion XBRL-taxonomies are created in. Luckily for us, we’ve been quite hard minded since the beginning of the seminar, so we’ve gone the opposite way from the start: our ontology is built in a completely hierarchical way so this requisite is no problem for us. Tomorrow we will focus on the creation of a paper for MC&I, the seminar will have to wait several days as it’s not thát much work anymore. Most of it is luckily done, so that’s quite a big burden gone for us.

To continue

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Yesterday was our session with our professor, and although one of my teammembers had to be somewhere else, it turned out to be a pretty useful session after all.
To get back to my previous post: the professor was slightly disturbed by our questions, and I felt like we offended him as he asked us whether we questioned not only the method we were to have been using but also the seminar’s objective itself. Ofcourse we didn’t so we assured him we weren’t out to mock the seminar in any way, we just had doubts about the path to follow to come to the desired outcome, as neither the path nor the outcome was clear to us.

After handling the slightly awkward situation, we could start talking about the progress we made in enhancing our ontology and the rationale behind all of it. When we were busy explaining it to him, he comes up with some of the creative solutions another group had to a problem we also ran into, so this solution will be taken into account when constructing our next ontology which is quite similar to the one we already created yet far more difficult.
Last time we worked from a very simple ontology based on a very small part of a taxonomy and the accompanying instance-document.
This time we will be working with an official taxonomy, namely a business-report as specified by the NTP. The taxonomy is a balance-report which has to be submitted with a KvK.

This week we have quite a lot deliverables so we’ll be busy for quite a while I guess as we have to create yet another guide, this time a guide to the complete NTP-taxonomy which consists of an entire myriad of sub-taxonomies. I’ll post it when it’s done. Also, we will have to conjure up a new ontology as specified above, and documentation as to how we created the previous ontology specifying the how, when, why and what.
Next week, we will be discussing the final deliverables so it’s make or break time for the entire group. Wish us luck!