Time Dimension for Business News in the Knowledge Warehouse

This paper proposes a data structure to support the integration of business news and data in the knowledge warehouse using the Temporal Document Retrieval Model (TDRM). Temporal document retrieval takes into account the time context expressed as temporal phrases in the document content. The maintenance and scalability of the proposed data cluster is discussed. The results of temporal document retrieval experiments based on typical and ad-hoc time constraints, performed on a large corpus of business news are reported. The experiments showed that the instantaneous TDRM-based retrieval using the proposed cluster is possible with the currently available database technology and confirmed the highly constraining character of the temporal context

Metaphysics of Internal Controls

A quality internal control system has been seen as a remedy for various corporate governance issues. Two pieces of legislation, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) deal with very different corporate governance issues, but each argue for a similar remedy. Both the FCPA and the SOX legislation argue that improved (or proper) internal controls are necessary to root out bribery of foreign officials, in the case of the FCPA, and (in the case of SOX) to support the accurate preparation of financial statements. An issue that has yet to be resolved is that the quality of internal control systems is subject to subjective assessments of the internal control deficiencies and their impact. This paper presents a mathematical model of internal controls based on Gӧdel number of axioms. This results in the representation of quality internal controls in terms of an integer. This approach also allows for inferences about financial statements and various auditing judgements

An algebraic representation of calendars.

This paper uses an algebraic approach to define temporal granularities and calendars. All the granularities in a calendar are expressed as algebraic expressions based on a single "bottom" granularity. The operations used in the algebra directly reflect the ways with which people construct new granularities from existing ones, and hence yield more natural and compact granularities definitions. Calendar is formalized on the basis of the algebraic operations, and properties of calendars are studied. As a step towards practical applications, the paper also presents algorithms for granule conversions between granularities in a calendar