XBRL is very interesting. Today, numerous financial reports are filed electronically with government agencies or business partners. But anyone who has searched Yahoo Finance or EDGAR filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission will agree that making sense of the text-based data is beyond the capabilities of most software -- and few humans besides Wall Street analysts have the time -- to correlate filings from different companies.
XBRL adds digital tags -- metadata -- that will allow different filing formats to be analyzed on a consistent basis. That is, "cost of goods sold", "excess executive compensation" and other characteristics can be extracted into analytical software, including spreadsheets. This will be a big step forward in turning the firehose of data that spews at us into something we can readily manipulate, assimilate, and act on.
- Peter S. Kastner
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