Digital Financial Reporting

CompSci had made a free US GAAP Taxonomy search tool available which you can find here. 

This search tool is a sign of things to come: better software! 

One of the things I would like to see, which I will mention to CompSci is that I wish there was more of a focus on differentiating the types of report elements.  What I mean is this.  Take a look at this prototype I created a while back.  Notice the report element categories I am using: Network, Table, Axis, Member, Line Items, Concept.  Those terms are both consistent with the US GAAP Terminology and quite useful in differentiating what you are looking for.

Two interesting searches to try.  Try and a search for Table. Just type the word Table, no brackets as that appears to goof up the search.  Up comes all the tables in the US GAAP Taxonomy.  Now, search on the term Roll Forward.  All the roll fowards show up.  Metadata such as [Table], [Axis], [Roll Forward], [Member], [Line Items] and such is helpful in finding information.

Now, what if you could search on accounting related metadata such as financial statement elements: assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, expense, gain, loss, investments by owners, distributions to owners, comprehensive income?  How helpful would that be?  Take this even farther and what if you could search by financial statement component such as "basis of presentation" and get all the components related to the basis of presentation?  You cannot get that information today because all this search engine understands is the syntax elements and attributes.  But, what if the search tool understood financial reporting and accounting semantics?  Kind of like this which is a prototype which organizes [Table]s organized by accounting topic.  Or maybe this which also shows the financial reporting component.

Nice job CompSci!  Thanks for making this tool available.