Digital Financial Reporting

Before radio newspapers where how most people received the news.  When radio was introduced, one of the early uses was to read the newspaper over the radio.  This was because the people using the new medium did not yet understand how to use the new features offered by the new medium of radio.  Subsequently, producers of radio programs learned to use the medium of radio.

Ralf Frank, chair of XBRL International's Best Practices Board and managing director of DVFA, the Society of Investment Professionals in Germany discusses XBRL, transparency, and shares his ideas on how XBRL can be used to improve financial reporting in a "XBRL - the Medium is the Message."

ABSTRACT: This paper demonstrates how XBRL eXtensible Business Reporting Language can make a contribution to enhancing business reporting. It looks at transparency, the role which is commonly assigned to it and how it is implemented. By looking at traditional vehicles of corporate business reporting such as annual reports and examining common examples of non-transparent reporting patterns, it seeks to point out how adopting XBRL to reporting processes can result in a higher order of transparency.

I mentioned in another post a few months back that a good example of how business reporting could be improved is to look at the CIA World Fact Book.  You can go read that post and see why I say the CIA should not make the data available in HTML, but rather in some machine readable XML format; perhaps even XBRL.

Well, guess what.  Now you can SEE why providing this information, and other information, might be a good idea.  Someone wrote a parser or something, took all that CIA World Fact Book data and put the data into a Semantic Web-type database.  You really have to check this out.

There is more.  Check out the elastic lists here.  Or, there is lots of other stuff here.

Now, use your imagination.  Imagine putting a similar type of interface on top of the SEC IDEA system when it gets up and running.  Imagine navigating the database in that manner.  Imagine navigating the information in the fillings in a similar, or even better, manner.