Conclusion
Financial information on the web is already ubiquitous. It has been brought to the Internet without the involvement of the accounting profession, accounting standard setters, or securities. The inconsistent presentation of financial information by corporations, the vast scale of the internet, and the inherent limitations of html combine to mean that financial information on the web is very difficult to find and almost impossible to automatically retrieve even the most common of financial attributes. The paper has demonstrated that current problems of resource discovery and attribute identification effectively prohibit the use of intelligent software agents in acting upon financial information on the web. Yet, the prospect of automated retrieval and processing of financial information is clearly attractive to a wide range of stakeholders.
The paper discussed a suite of technologies that when combined may raise the confidence levels of discovery of financial reporting pages and identification of attributes to a point that intelligent software agents could be trusted to act upon Web-based financial statements. The suite is based upon Web standards, most notably the W3 Consortium’s XML and RDF and the metadata community’s DC metadata container framework.
The paper then canvassed the XBRL initiative. It concluded that the standards provided a comprehensive mechanism to report relatively traditional information sets on the Internet. XBRL should be seen then as an incremental step and not a revolutionary one. XBRL seems to have well and thoroughly addressed the issue of attribute recognition we set out in Section 1. Question were raised, however, on the issue of resource discovery. It remains to be seen how users are to find particular XBRL pages.
XML and XBRL arguably bring far-reaching implications for the dissemination of business performance information in general and financial reporting information in particular to the global business community. It does so at a time that is seeing financial reporting standards coalescing around two primary sets of financial reporting standards in the form of U.S. and IAS GAAP. Providing mechanisms to transparently map the result of a company reporting under one GAAP to a peer reporting under one GAAP to a peer reporting under another GAAP may serve to markedly improve the value of financial reporting for stakeholders.