My colleague Ted Stavropolous over at The Daily Extension is doing a great job focusing attention on what the availability of (eventually) millions of datapoints gathered from XBRL eventstreams (e.g. S.E.C. filing events) will mean in terms of providing a foundation for new financial information and greater transparency. While it’s grand to have all this data available and some means to search and render it like Crossview, the real value comes from visualizing it in interesting ways – like this spending dashboard from the UK”s Where Does My Money Go?

Where Does My Money Go, from the Open Knowledge Foundation, aims to promote transparency and citizen engagement through the analysis and visualization of information about UK public spending – in other words act as a visual watchdog. The site offers a great visual public spending dashboard, as shown in the image below:

coins

The point is that visualizations like this are ideal to help make sense of large datasets  - like the millions of items in the COINS dataset recently released by the UK Government. We don’t really have anything like this to analyze the S.E.C. XBRL dataset but we should have. It could be called “Where Does Their Money” go with the net worth of the filing corporations in that big circle in the middle and all the satellite circles telling us where all that money they earned actually went.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 6th, 2010 at 4:45 am and is filed under Analytics, Communication. 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.