XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting - Blog: Digital Financial Reporting (using XBRL)

The taxonomies published by SEC filers are a wealth of information, if you can somehow look at them. Well, in that spirit, I have created a number of ways to look at these taxonomies for the purpose of learning more about taxonomies.

Here are several ways I have created to look at these XBRL taxonomies. All these focus on the presentation linkbase information (for comparison purposes, here is a link to the best way that I know of viewing the entire Commercial and Industrial Companies entry point of the US GAAP Taxonomy):

Excel-based Taxonomy viewer: This Excel file has macros which read the XML file (see below) of presentation linkbase information. (Coming soon is a version of this which allows you to compare two taxonomies side-by-side.
HTML treeview: If you go to this web page and click on the links in the column titled "Link to Taxonomy Presentation HTML (XBRL Site)" you can see a tree view of an SEC filers taxonomy. Here is one example file so you know what you are looking for.
XAML treeview: This web page lets you quickly browser through a list of XBRL taxonomies. You have to be using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or 8 to use this as it is done using XAML.
XML file: If you go to this web page and click on the links in the column titled "Link to Taxonomy Presentation XML (XBRL Site)" you can access the information in a taxonomy programmatically. The Excel-based tool above uses this XML file. Here is one example file so you know what to look for.
Compare extension concepts: This web page lets you compare the extension concepts added by SEC filers.
Summary of Statistics: Here is an Excel file which has some statistics about the filings and taxonomy extensions.

More ways to look at this to come. You can write some really interesting Excel macros to sumarize, slice, dice, and otherwise dig into this information.