Application of Digital Rights Management to Accounting Information Processing in the Semantic Web Environment

Abstract

The communication between Accounting Information (AI) producers (namely, company or enterprise) and consumers (stakeholder, revenue, auditor, and etc.) is more convenient than before, due to the benefits of XBRL implementation; however it is difficult to apply XBRL into more in-depth and daily accounting applications, since XBRL doesn't have a concrete access control mechanism to describe different AI access permissions for different types of AI consumers. Concretely speaking, accounting information processing is different from general information processing, in that, AI producers have different obligations to different types of AI consumers; and vise versa, different AI consumers have different access rights to information from producers. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce Digital Rights Management (DRM) idea and mechanism into XBRL implementation. So we can use the benefits of XBRL to publish AI for AI producers and AI consumers more conveniently. Moreover, by introducing the DRM mechanism, AI consumers can obtain abundant AI from daily accounting records (namely, the daily transaction actions recodes from AI Data Base) according to accounting principles.