[ Thanks to Tom
Dunlap for this link. ]
“And, when it comes to providing data in an open and
standardized manner so that citizens and agencies can mine it, make
comparisons, and perform analytics across government sectors, the
semantic web needs XML and specifically XBRL for financial data,
says Diane Mueller, vice chair, XBRL International Steering
Committee and VP, XBRL Development, at JustSystems. XBRL provides
the layer and the foundation that lets all parties map to a shared
taxonomy standard, so that disparate sources of financial data can
be mapped against each other without human intervention. “”The
whole possibility of all the mash-ups you can do from all this data
and create interesting new knowledge is pretty phenomenal, and
applications we can’t even imagine yet will be created,”
Mueller says.“But she has some ideas. Mueller, who along with JustSystems’
Dave Raggett, is creating a W3C workshop to be held in June on the
semantic web and XBRL, has been working on the XBRL financial data
standard for ten years, and her interest in semantics and
linguistics goes back to her university days. She imagines, as one
example, how anyone using semantic tools that are already available
today might have an interest in searching XBRL-tagged data
converted to RDF for information in bailout baby AIG’s SEC filings
— say, how much money it’s allocated as bonuses — and then
mashing that up with other government data that might also leverage
the XBRL standard in documents describing what funds have made
available to the insurer.”