Way.

Who would have thought that somebody could produce a compelling drama about SOX?

Not only is this thing about Sarbanes Oxley, it’s actually CALLED “Sarbane’s Oxley”.

The trailer gives you a sense of the professional quality of this independent film, but gives the false impression that it’s all about the romantic relationships. It’s not. In fact, the racy stuff takes a big back seat to the business-related subtleties woven in to the plot. CPAs will actually get more out of this film than than the general public (but there’s plenty of intrigue for everybody).

What’s also terrific about the film is the messaging. We all know it can be a dog-eat-dog world out there, but the CFO and the CPA are two characters in the movie that display the kind of integrity that the profession works hard to cultivate.

Sarbanes’ Oxley will be shown at the San Francisco Black Film Festival on June 8th.

The conference is over, and there as expected, there is still no consensus as to what “semantic web technologies” actually mean not to mention their utility. However, what is universally agreed is that applications that engage web-based information will continue to grow in sophistication. Who would have predicted that “computational linguistics” would become, as one pundit put it, “the new black).

Implications for CalCPA (and the Interchange session)
Currently, CalCPA is not nearly complicated enough for a full blown semantic technology solution. It operates on four or five systems: AM4, CMS, two other servers, a host of spreadsheets that our Business Services Manager is folding in to AM4; The PR manager’s media file. The way these systems have been exchanging data should meet our needs. Semantics are currently best suited to

Now, if we were to branch out in terms of the kinds of data we collect from our members, that assessment might change. There are unused modules in AM4 for things like client referrals which could open the door to a level of complexity where semantics might help.

Until then, what SHOULD be on the to-do list is:

1. exploring the more consumer-based tools like microformats, Zemanta, Twine, Gnosis, BlueOrganizer that can enhance our burgeoning web 2.0 efforts; textdigger, informa, etc. for SEO
2. use what I’ve learned about taxonomies and ontologies to enhance our existing strategic planning efforts. A taxonomy is a great way to take a snapshot of the organization, and since it is generated by input from the whole organization, it is comprehensive. The resulting ontology, if done correctly, can be translated into something called “OWL” that makes it much easier not only to represent what you do and your value proposition on the web but to represent it in such a way that the data becomes portable, scalable, and free from dependency on a central relational database.

I made a lot of great contacts who can help us get to a point when the time comes to do that.

The day began at a session titled: The Future of Social Networks: The Need for Semantics. Unfortunately, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I understand SNSs, and I understand that they don’t talk to each other, and I understand that people get tired of logging on to multiple places with multiple passwords. The stuff that was interesting was interesting for the developers because it demonstrated the workings of a doohickey called “SIOC” (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities). That is what the presenters were pushing, and I will eagerly add it to the list of things to check out.

I left this one at the break in favor of something that promised to be less technically taxing. Web 3.0 / Semantic Wave Market Outlook; it did not give me much to take away other than “The semantic web is coming; there’s lots of opportunities coming your way. Are you ready?” No. I’m not. I need a “How To Take Advantage of Those Opportunities.”

The afternoon session was great, especially for a State CPA Society employee. The ins and outs of XBRL.

While not too sure how to incorporate this into a website, there were lots of tools presented and contacts made that can be leveraged to get CalCPA member more in tuned with the XBRL revolution.

For example, the SEC places examples of XBRL usage on its site: http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/xbrl/xbrlwebapp.shtm.

One of the session leaders was a representative of the XBRL International Consortium (Eric Cohen), a tremendous speaker, and a great contact. I also met Brand Niemann, who with MSU’s Bill McCarthy has been working on what they’re calling an “Accounting Ontology.” This is what I’ve been talking about since I got on board with Semantics, so I’m very excited to see where this leads and how CalCPA can get more involved.

The day finished with a very philosophical session on categorization and prototypes and hierarchies of knowledge systems. Basically, What goes in to calling something what it is? It makes more sense for the lecturer, whose business it is to catalog screws, paint, and office supplies, but what if you catalog educational courses. A horse is a horse of course, but a 4-hour CPE class on subtrusts is many other things. I found his answer unsatisfactory (academically sound, but not particularly helpful to simply label my courses “courses”), but it led to a contact from http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk whom I will seek out tomorrow).

The first session of the conference consisted of two over-arching descriptions of what the Semantic Web is – not an easy question as there are many different perspectives and, according to one presenter, more than 10 million documents about semantic web on the internet today.

The sweeping overview included various approaches to data management, integration, and representation on the web.

Dave McComb, from Semantic Arts, talked about the history of data management and how semantic technologies are a natural progression and the world is in a similar situation as where relational database technologies were 25 years ago.

I do appreciate the value behind finding structure in apparently structure-less data, as well as the value of being able to mesh multiple databases on the fly, but the examples he chose to demonstrate the power of the “enhanced search” functionality didn’t impress me. Yes, if you’re looking for the Hilton Hotel in Paris and you type “Paris Hilton” into Google, you’re not going to get what you want. Apparently semantic technology will eliminate the need to use your common sense to type “Paris Hilton hotel” into Google.

But they gave us all a free beer.

Significance for CalCPA
When undergoing the radical change in the way our data is managed, integrated and displayed, we need to consider a number of other models including
Model-Driven Development
Service Oriented Architecture

The session also confirmed what I already knew, that adoption of semantic bells and whistles is far bigger than CalCPA alone. This stuff is most valuable to the entire profession, or at least a collective effort of all the state societies

I must assume that the world will continue to exist in much its present form for the foreseeable future.