Digital Financial Reporting

Harvard University, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, published The History of Artificial Intelligence, which is an excellent overview of AI.

There are a lot of other very interesting articles linked to from that main article.

I have written a simple software application in Microsoft Access that extracts the XBRL calculation relations (i.e. roll ups) of 5,734 10-K financial reports submitted to the SEC.  You can download the database and other tools if you want to analyze the roll up relations:

• Here is the database: This contains 807,924 roll up relations from the 5,734 reports.  It also has a list of the reporting entities.  The database also has the extraction code which should work if you have a Microsoft Access license.
• Documentation: This documentation helps you understand how to use the database.
• Excel extraction tool:  The database has ALL 5,734 reports.  This Excel tool can be used to extract XBRL calculation relations from one report at a time.  It can be modified to do more.

If you make any interesting modifications to the tools or discover any interesting patterns in the information, please be sure to let me know.

Here is more information related to those 5,734 US GAAP financial reports.

I have used the term semantic spreadsheet, cell store, spreadsheet hell, and have pointed out the problems of current approaches to working with spreadsheets.

I was introduced to a new term today, deductive spreadsheet or logical spreadsheet. Here is a set of slides that explain deductive spreadsheets and here is a book on the topic. Finally, here is an article from The Knowledge Engineering Review.  OK, so I found one more really good article about logical spreadsheets. This last article provides this definition of a logical spreadsheet:

A logical spreadsheet is a spreadsheet in which the formula language is composed of logical
expressions.

More to come.