Web 3.0 – challenge or opportunity for accountants? Clive Holtham Cass Business School

Timeline 1951 First Business Computer 1969 Internet 1982 IBM PC 1991 WWW Web 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 Web The Internet of Things M2M Pull

Importance of 3.0 to directors Transformations of information and knowledge Investments and risk Openness and transparency Efficiency Barriers & 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

Cathedral Standards-based Collaborative Taxonomies Bazaar Organic Competitive Natural Language Processing

Physical Object/ Event Human Notes RecordProcess Archive/ Destroy Human Action Records 3200 BC

Physical Object/ Event Machine Data RecordProcess Archive/ Destroy Machine Action Records – machine based

Physical Object/ Event Machine Data 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 BC Limited use until machine tools made mass production possible (18th cent.) Every machine shop and foundry made unique sizes and thread dimensions 1841: 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 on

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.

Physical Object/ Event Machine Data RecordProcess Archive/ Destroy Machine Action Taxonomies Rules to represent the data

XML (Deloitte, 2010)

Acord XML Dictionary

XBRL 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 Conceived 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. XBRL

Taxonomies (Deloitte, 2010)

Semantic Web Stack

Related Technologies Tagging RFID M2M Remote Control Digital to Analogue

M2M

Openness and transparency

Conclusion Techology already exists Not necessarily economic yet Standards are central Conflicting stakeholder interests Vendors will continue to oppose standards Professions will be central to the open standards without which Web 3.0 will be stifled