Towards paired transactions modeling

Paired transactions or paired transfers have their origin in accountancy systems. The Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology uses paired transactions as a basic building block for business process modeling. A business process (REA model) is composed of two sets of paired transactions. REA itself originates from accountancy systems and has gradually developed into a full-fledged information system framework. REA model used to be depicted by ER diagrams and later by UML class diagrams. However, both these diagrams were not designed to capture conceptual models which are more precise, comprehensible for domain experts and easily to modify. ORM (Object Role Modeling) represents approach to conceptual modeling which fulfils above mentioned requirements. The main goal of the paper is to derive and describe the ORM model of paired transactions which corresponds to REA exchange model and assess this approach.