caleb.doxsey.net | Blog | XBRL

Not too long ago the SEC announced that they are going to start requiring companies to file in XBRL. XBRL is a technology with a lot of potential - albeit mostly unrealized potential. I was lucky enough to work on the Financial Explorer which was an automated viewer of the data. It appears to now be mostly abandoned (I couldn't find an active link on the SEC's site anymore) but I've probably not heard the last of the technology.

XBRL is actually kind of difficult to work with. It has a decent spec, but its very open-ended. We kept running into serious problems trying to interpret the data in meaningful ways (trying to fit the data into nice tables, graphics, etc...) The project had a fairly unique atomic visualization which is worth taking a look at. It was definitely not your typical financial chart. (As a web developer I live in a world of boxes and straight lines not circles)

I wrote an open source C# xbrl processor for it. I never had time to persue it any further, but I thought the biggest win might be the mutual fund risk return filings. They seem to lend themselves much better toward this kind of visual representation.