What ‘good’ looks like: Understanding records ontologically in the context of the global financial crisis

This paper explores the internal components (semantics) of financial electronic records. The authors adopt a view of records as representations of perceptions about a specific domain that belong to classes of representations at the centre of which are archetypal ‘good’ records (records that most faithfully represent their domains). The paper proposes a static modelling language that illustrates how the ontological concepts of Bunge and Searle can be integrated to achieve a richer grammatical explanatory tool for use in modelling the internal structure of archetypal records in the context of domains of financial crisis and contagion such as the failure of Lehman Brothers.