The Timeless Way of Building REA Enterprise Systems

In a continuously changing business environment, the need for enterprise systems that are more adaptable has been recognized by many. Several solutions are being suggested to improve the adaptability of enterprise systems, including service‐oriented architectures, model‐driven architectures, and reflective architectures. In this paper, we propose a timeless way of building enterprise systems that employs a reflective architecture with integrated Resource‐Event‐Agent (REA) enterprise ontology specifications. We show how the explicit recording of enterprise schema descriptions results in enterprise systems with increased adaptability. In addition, we demonstrate how explicitly recorded ontological specifications can further increase application reusability. We validate our research with a prototype system.