Digital Financial Reporting

Here are two very good FREE resources for understanding knowledge graphs and graph databases.  O'Reilly is publishing a book, Graph Databases, which can be downloaded for free.  It has a few ads from Neo4j at the very beginning.

Neo4j provides the Neo4j Sandbox which is a cloud-based graph database implementation that you can spin up in your web browser.  To get started with Neo4j you can watch this video (about 15 minutes) and/or work through this Neo4j tutorial.

There are plenty of other graph databases such as TigerGraph and Grakn.  Each has pros and cons.  I will use Neo4j to provide some examples for you.

The Neo4j syntax is Cypher.  Here is a Cypher example that you can load into Neo4j for the FASB's SFAC 6 Elements of Financial Statements. When you load the Cypher example, it will look something like this in Neo4j: (Click image for larger view)

As I pointed out, accounting is an area of knowledge that can be organized into a knowledge graph. There are principles for using knowledge graphs properly. The Cypher syntax is one approach to organizing and using this information.  XBRL is another.  Prolog is another.  You can convert bidirectionally between Cypher, XBRL, Prolog, and RDF+OWL+SHACL.

Here is my Logical Theory Describing Financial Report.  Here is the essence of that theory represented in Cypher syntax. When you put the Cypher into the Neo4j graph database sandbox, it will look like this: (click image for larger view)

Another view of the same information is this representation in Javascript. Here is that same information in the XBRL syntax. This is a human readable rendering of the XBRL.

XBRL is both machine-readable and can be easily converted to machine-readable.  XBRL syntax can be converted to the technical syntax of your choice.  What is consistent between all of these representations is the logic that is represented.

If you distill accounting down to its essence the importance and potential ramifications of all this becomes quite clear.  If you want to learn how to represent information using XBRL, here are the essentials. Here are a bunch of really good accounting related examples. Here is what you need to master XBRL-based digital financial reporting.

Don't be left behind.