As the W3C Team lead for financial data and the Semantic Web, I am looking at how the Web is changing the way investors assess the value of companies.

Public companies worldwide are required to file regular reports setting out the financial health of the company. These are available from corporate investor relations websites and from regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). If you want to analyze this data, you have to re-key it, which involves a lot of work and introduces errors. That is all about to change.

The SEC and kindred agencies around the world are starting to require companies to file reports in XBRL (the extensible business reporting language). XBRL ties each reported item of data to the reporting concept used to collect it, and moreover, does so in a way that computers can make sense of, avoiding the need for re-keying data.

Read more here.