Digital Financial Reporting

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.