PROLOG Implementation of XBRL-based Report Verification
Friday, August 7, 2020 at 09:33AM
Charlie in Digital Financial Reporting

PROLOG (PROgramming in LOGic) is a declarative logic programming language that was created almost 50 years ago.  SWI-Prolog is a robust and free implementation of PROLOG that was created starting in 1987, so it is quite mature.  It can run locally or in the cloud. Note that there is an ISO Standard PROLOG. (i.e. there is a core set of notation which tends to be provided by most Prolog systems and there is now an ISO standard for the language)

Logical Contracts, a company that specializes in PROLOG (Robert Kowalski, a co-designer of PROLOG, is a partner) which has created a PROLOG implementation of XBRL-based report verification. This short video and this short video walk you through how to run the implementation.

I am testing the PROLOG impelementation to be sure it deals with everything in my SBRM PROOF which exercizes all that you would ever see in an XBRL-based financial report.

Here is additional information about PROLOG: 

What is of particular interest is the short time that it took to put together the PROLOG implementation.  Now, the person has 30+ years of experience with PROLOG.  The first prototype took about 50 hours with ZERO knowledge of XBRL by the programmer.  The second, which is commercial quality, took about another 30 hours.

More information coming soon, so stay tuned!  If you don't understand why this is a very good thing, you will want to read the four documents here.

####################################

Prolog Business Case

Prolog Tutorial (Video playlist) (SWI Prolog)

Prolog Tutorial (Video) (GNU Prolog)

Comparison of SWI Prolog and RDF

An Introduction to Prolog and RDF

Building Expert Systems in Prolog

PROLOG Cheat Sheet

SWI-Prolog Semantic Web Libraries

Power of Prolog

PROLOG Facts, Rules, Queries

Full Prolog

Article originally appeared on XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting (http://xbrl.squarespace.com/).
See website for complete article licensing information.