Software vendors are providing a pretty poor level of functionality when it comes to finding information within an XBRL financial reporting taxonomy. What is the state-of-the-art? Text search.
But I think there is a significantly better way, so I created this prototype to brainstorm and solidify my ideas. I then created this prototype wizard. This is a web service where you provide an element name and it returns information for the requested report element name. This is the same information in machine-readable form.
But this is the best working prototype that I have for now. That is for US GAAP, it does not incorporate the more advanced graph-type searching. But, what this will allow me to do is communicate with software engineers and others better.
This prototype combines a bunch of things together and has a nicer user interface.
Not sure where to put these roll up relations. Ah! I just had an idea.
The idea is that the search would leverage metadata and other information in order to provide a significantly more precise information retrial mechanism.
So the US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy has 17,077 elements. That is a lot to work with. But, you can break that full set into lots of different groupings. For example, those 17,077 elements are comprised of:
Further, some of those groupings are still quite large so you can break them down by data type, period type. balance type, authoritative reference, etc.
If you did a raw text search on say "Cash" (you can try that here) you get 552 hits. Somewhat helpful, but not quite what is needed.
But what if you could do a search and specify:
I think you get the idea. Lots of different ways to specify what you might be looking for. Financial reporting concepts and terms, such as the US GAAP, are filled with a rich set of relations. If you put that information into machine-readable terms, then the machines can perform what seems like magic.