The W3C and XBRL International are co-hosting a workshop on improving access to financial data.


Participation
The Workshop is free of charge and open to anyone, subject to review of their statement of interest, and is not restricted to members of W3C and XBRL International. The Workshop materials will be made publically available, including statements of interest and presentations provided by the participants.

See the requirements for participation.


Background
The current global crisis spotlights the need for greater transparency in both corporate and government financial reporting supply chains along with accurate and timely linked data. W3C and XBRL International invite you to attend a workshop to facilitate a discussion about improving access to financial data on the Web.

Workshop participants will collectively help to identify opportunities and challenges for interactive access to business and financial data expressed in XBRL and related languages. The extensible business reporting language (XBRL), is being widely adopted all around the world, and is set to become the standard way of recording, storing and transmitting business financial information. The creation, distribution, and consumption of Financial Content across the web touch millions of users and affects business decisions that have global implications.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has mandated that US public companies file reports in XBRL, starting with the largest companies in mid-2009. Other countries have similar plans, e.g. in the UK, thousands of companies already report in XBRL, which will be mandatory in 2011. In Asia, XBRL has gained early adoption in capital markets with Stock Exchanges in China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea all mandating the use of XBRL. Governments in Australia, the Netherlands and New Zealand, have made commitments to reduce corporate compliance burden using XBRL as part of Standard Business Reporting efforts.

Much of the effort on XBRL so far has gone into developing the standards and taxonomies of reporting concepts, and on helping companies with preparing filings. Comparatively little effort has been spent on how to exploit the expected flood of data. It is now time to take a good look at the opportunities and challenges for interactive access to XBRL data at all stages of the reporting pipeline.

The US Transparency in Government Act of 2008 seeks to make the work of Congress and the executive branch more transparent by creating laws and regulations that would bring more information online and available to the public in a timely manner. XBRL and broader semantic-based technologies have great potential in realizing the opportunities for public access to information about government operations. The raw data needs to be supplemented with bindings to the semantics as a basis for comparability.

What data architectures are required to support this and to realize the goals of transparency? What is needed to create an ecosystem of value-added services around this flood of data? What lessons can be learned for creating shared vocabularies for this data? How can the costs for preparing data be kept in line with the value of the benefits?


Workshop Goals
The goal of this workshop is to identify opportunities and challenges for interactive access to financial data expressed in XBRL and related languages, and the broader opportunities for semantic technologies. What are the use cases? Who are the stakeholders? What are the potential roadblocks and how can they be addressed? How can new applications be created based upon integrating XBRL with other sources of information?

The main outcome of the workshop will be the publication of a report that will serve as a guide for further work in both W3C and XBRL International.



Scope of the Workshop
The workshop is aimed at people with an involvement in managing financial data in one way or another, or who have an academic interest in how this is done. The workshop will combine a mix of business and technical topics relevant to the above goals.