Digital Financial Reporting

Someone pointed out an incredibly useful feature of a tool.  If you click on this link, it will take you directly to the income statement of the June 30, 2011 10-Q of Exxon.

That is similar to a feature in another tool which will take you directly to a concept within a taxonomy.  For example, if you click on this link it takes to you to the concept "Cash and Cash Equivalents, Period Increase (Decrease)"in the US GAAP Taxonomy.

I have always tried to build my web pages in that manner.  For example, if you click on this link it will take you to a rendering of the Exxon taxonomy.

The really interesting thing is the ability to string all of this information together, say in some sort of mashup, which provides new information.

What neither of those links really does is make it easy to generate from a computer software application the URLs which you need.  The reason you would want to do this is that you can avoid having to manually create links.