Remember the movie The Graduate?
I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Yes, sir.
Are you listening?
Yes, I am.
Mashups.
Just how do you mean that, sir?
Actually Mr. McGuire said ‘plastics’ but my point is that ‘mashups’ was the word that came to mind as I read the Financial Reporting Model Task Force report to the FASAB.
Their recommendation 10 is what triggered this morphing of ‘plastics’ to ‘mashups’:
Recommendation 10: Establish a Federal Financial Information Web Site and Raise Awareness of Federal Financial Information
Establish a central Web site for federal financial information and inform the public of its availability. Ultimately, the success of the previous recommendations requires raising public awareness of federal financial reports and the information they provide…
This kind of site is vital to provide the ‘rich context’ data that will power the next generation of financial content management applications. What the task force does not mention in their report, and perhaps should have, is that it’s not just important to publish online but to provide an open, free API to get at the data – so other applications can consume it, not just traditional human ‘readers’.
The Task Force could do a lot worse than take a look at the UK’s recent effort in this direction, which is well on the way to becoming an ‘appstore’ for accessing various kinds of Governmental information and statistics. By providing this centrally collected data through a web service (e.g. the UK’s based on SPARQL), Governments can deliver a genuinely useful service that enables interesting and useful mashups to be created semi-automatically from combinations of XBRL filings, internally sourced data and wider-world external data.
Or at least that’s my perspective. But then again, like Benjamin in Berkeley, maybe I’m just one of those outside ‘agitators’.
