During a recent trip to Seattle, I had the pleasure of sitting down for lunch with Charlie Hoffman, father of XBRL. Paul Wilkinson, Chief Strategy Officer for CLOUD and former Sr. Adviser to Chairman Cox at the SEC, had introduced us, and we’ve had a few good phone conversations over the past year about CLOUD and XBRL.
During our lunch, Charlie had an interesting reaction to CLOUD, describing it as the “logical model for the semantic web.” That lunch conversation, plus my reading of his and Liv Watson’s excellent book, “XBRL for Dummies,” have sparked some interesting thoughts about ways in which CLOUD and XBRL might interact in practical ways.
With all the discussion over transparency, open government and “government” data, it seemed like an interesting example could be culled from current places in which XBRL is already being used: public filings. Of course, the very fact that a verb like “filed” is used to describe the process tells me that even without CLOUD, XBRL is not meeting its full potential. If I understand the process for SEC filings in XBRL correctly, a public company still “sends” or “files” their XBRL Instance to the SEC, so as to meet their filing requirements. In the world of the Internet, this makes no sense to me at all. If we had to “send” HTML documents around the Internet, the Web would never have taken off!
That being said, I will move on… The example that follows will highlight how XBRL-wrapped data, further empowered by a contextual set of CLOUD tags, could create a more dynamic and secure process. Read the rest of this entry »
