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Read/Write Rendering

Much of the activity around gaining value from the XBRL datastream has focused on reading or visualizing data rendered from XBRL (or iXBRL) instance documents. This is, for example, what our free Crossview tool does very well. But what about writing data? What if you want to write back to the instance document while you are viewing it? For example to create your own customized ‘version’ of the document – perhaps with comments or post-it type notes, colour highlights, links or other numeric data that you want to ‘tag’ into the document for reference purposes.

The point of this post is to solicit a little crowdsourced help as I’m really posing this as a question to both ourselves and to readers of this blog. Is this easy or hard to do? What are the compelling use cases? Does anyone do this already with a commercially available product?



This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 5:10 am and is filed under Usability, XBRL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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  • Daniel Roberts

    Stewart,

    Very interesting issue you raise. Does this confirm the idea that XBRL is a “boundary standard” in as much as it comes from a source, passes through a boundary for consumption, wtihout backward changes.

    Could this be the DVD for Data?

    • Stewart McKie

      Daniel – Thanks for checking in. That's one thing I'd like to understand too. Boundaries naturally imply some kind of ownership or limits of/on the data. But if an instance document (e.g. an SEC filing) can, in effect, become a collaborative working space we could see a whole new paradigm emerging for how you analyze financial data and present that analysis, in-context as it were.