Someone pointed me to Yahoo Pipes which is one of the most clever and interesting things I have seen in a while. The general overview is that you can use pre-built widgets to string together sets of data, do things like filter the data, and end up with some resulting output set. There is a bit of an explanation on Wikipedia. But, the best way to understand it is to watch this video which shows you how to build a pipe, or go grab an existing pipe and reverse engineer it to see what it is doing.
It would be great if there were an XBRL widget so you can easily add XBRL instances and XBRL taxonomies to your data sets.