Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

At the recent workshop co-organized by W3C and XBRL International on improving access to financial data on the web, a few key issues related to the semantic web took center stage.

The goal of the workshop was to identify opportunities and challenges for interactive access to financial data expressed in XBRL and related languages, and the broader opportunities for semantic technologies.

The workshop took place against the background of mandates by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for large U.S. public companies to file reports in XBRL, but worldwide XBRL is being adopted as a standard way of recording, storing and transmitting business financial information.

Workshop chair Dianne Mueller, vice chair of XBRL International, provided SemanticWeb.com with insight into some of them in advance of publishing her findings from the workshop in the next couple of weeks.

● With entity identification varying across government agencies, both in the U.S. and in governmental institutions across borders, there needs to be a metadata methodology to streamline mapping these to each other. For example, the U.S. SEC identifies public companies by CIK (common index key) codes, while for tax reasons the IRS may assign another identifier to the same company, and on it goes.

“Everyone flagged as one of the key things getting a global or universal entity identifier or metadata standard around that,” Mueller says, in order to being able to discover the XBRL information and understand it regardless of how it is identified by individual jurisdictions. “From the semantic web point of view, if you think about generating ontologies in mapping between disparate data sources to create RDF triples, it’s one of the lynchpins.”

● Workshop participants want to make sure the mantra across government agencies (both federal here at home and internationally) is that information should be publicly accessible, re-discoverable and searchable.

“If you find it once and go back to the same URI again, it should resolve and retrieve the same data,” Mueller says. The SEC has done a good job there on the first two counts, for example, but you won’t necessarily find the XBRL content of a company’s Q4 10K filing through a Google search, as it uses robots.txt to keep search engines from spidering the web site. That’s not so much a technical limitation as it is a regulatory problem to grapple with, as other government agencies don’t suffer from the same restrictions to impose such blockades.

● Bring on the apps. The market needs to come up with more applications to consume the XBRL data that’s being put out there. Right now some tools exist, including those from Mueller’s company Just Systems for doing analytics on XBRL documents.

“But we want to enhance people’s experience of this data,” she says, noting the demo of an application from Singapore-based WHK Horwath that enables visualization of XBRL content of Singapore corporate filings that went a long way towards making the content understandable and accessible to common investors. It’s a bit more complicated to do that for U.S. filings than for Singapore, where there’s a rigid taxonomy that doesn’t allow for extensions, but it’s a glimmer of where things can go, she says.

“Our expectations as a community is that things like this [WHK Horwath] project – we’ll see lots more of them. That’s where the semantic web folks come in,” she says. “XBRL represents a huge repository of well-tagged metadata that can be easily created into things like RDF that you can apply semantic tools to.”

She noted presentations at the workshop by vendors such as Cambridge Semantics and institutions such as DERI that are already thinking ahead to the next generation of semantic tools and analytics that can be delivered once you have access to these repositories.

That’s where the rubber will meet the road, she thinks.

“It’s one thing to use your wonderful semantic tools to find movie reviews for a movie to go to this week and preferences for restaurants, but the semantic web community has waited a long time to get some real meat to do some really interesting things with.”