No – not a band (you’re thinking of Atomic Rooster) – but a way of describing the smallest amount of meaningful data that an information container contains. A recent missive from our esteemed Chairman has prompted me to blog about what atomic data means in an XBRL context. It turns out that ‘Atomicity’ is quite important when it comes to efficiency of data analysis. The more atomic the data the more you can do with it and the less you need to manually ‘re-process’ data sources – like S.E.C. filings – so information consumers can benefit from the data.
In the pre-electronic age of printing there used to be a job called a ‘Compositor’. This was the guy who manually typeset the document by laying out the metal letters in racks. The guy sometimes known to his colleagues as a ‘dingbat’. Electronic document production killed compositors. Although the term ‘dingbat’ lives on to describe anyone with a space between their ears. It’s my middle name.
In the pre-XBRL days of regulatory filing, a new job appeared – the ‘decompositor’. This was the person who took documents (NB lowest level of atomicity, the page) and retyped the data into a database so it could be analyzed more effectively by computer software. PDF and other kinds of document decomposition probably involves about the same amount of effort as the old metal type composition. But without the tactile satisfaction and inky fingers. Or dingbats.
Now, with data tagged in XBRL it ‘s pretty easy to repurpose this data into all kinds of information formats, including, for those of you who miss them, documents. When the atomicity of all financial data moves to the tagged data element level, rather than the document page level, we will finally have the atomic data we need to ensure that what Atomic Rooster would call ‘The Devil’s Answer’ to financial analysis, document decomposition, also goes the way of the Dodo.
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