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June 30th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
It’s easy to forget that the link between semantics and accounting was acknowledged long before the semantic web and XBRL. Back in 1972, accounting academic Andrew A Haried published a paper in the Journal of Accounting Research called The Semantic Dimensions of Financial Statements. As you can see from page 1 of his paper, he hit the nail on the head for the rationale for XBRL. First he quotes Goldberg (from the earlier An Inquiry into the Nature of Accounting – 1964) who says:
It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the problem of communication is the axial problem of accounting.
Then Haried goes on to say that one of the major contributing factors to the problems of external accounting communication is insufficient standardization of the terms used in financial reports. Fast forward to Houghton in 1998, the birth year of XBRL, and you have another perspective that supports the general need for and use of XBRL and the utility of an agreed taxonomy specifically:
…the study of shared meaning between users and producers of accounting information is central to the study of the effectiveness of accounting communication.
So semantics has always had a key role to play in accounting communication, which suggests that the semantic web will only further enhance that role. However, here at Rivet we are more interested in the creation of shared meaning between users and producers of accounting communication and we think that XBRL is one tool to help us as we work to create new apps to support generating this shared meaning.
Tags: semantics
Posted in Communication, XBRL | No Comments »
June 24th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Using XBRL for sustainability reporting just got a shot in the arm via the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI’s) newly announced collaboration with Deloitte in the Netherlands to resurrect the moribund GRI XBRL taxonomy. Hopefully the current taxonomy will be revised and updated to reflect the new demands of so-called ‘integrated reporting’ that expects financial and sustainability (or other non-financial) data to be connected to deliver a more holistic perspective of an organization that encompasses both business performance and behavior.
Posted in Communication, Sustainability, Taxonomies, Transparency, XBRL | No Comments »
May 13th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
Nike just won best sustainability report in the Ceres-ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) North American Awards for Sustainability Reporting.
But as Paul Baier at GreenBiz points out (with a few spelling errors):
When reading traditional annual reports, financial analysis (sic) quickly skim pass (sic) the glossy pictures, platitudes, CEO letter and other marketing fluff and head straight to the financial numbers and footnotes.
Savvy CSR report readers do the same. The value is in the numbers.
So it’s also good to hear that the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) are working even closer together to maintain an explanatory mapping between each other’s sustainability and emissions indicators. That way the text and the numbers in GRI Index reports are more easily compared with those in CDP emissions reports.
Of course what would be even better is if those numbers could be standardized by referencing a single XBRL sustainability taxonomy. Then ‘scope 1′ emissions in a GRI report would always mean the same as ‘scope 1′ emissions in a CDP report – no matter what actual stakeholder report the number ended up in.
Tags: CSR
Posted in Communication, Sustainability, Transparency | No Comments »
May 9th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
As I look for examples of Dare to Share in action, I’m coming across various sites that you may or may not have heard of that are espousing the principles of ‘open accountability’ – so here’s a quick summary… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Transparency | No Comments »
May 9th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
I started looking for other ‘Dare to Shares’ via Google, as you do when you are under the misguided illusion that you thought of it, when I came across this Dare to Share infographic on the Future of Work blog. The graphic includes a quote from Charles Darwin:
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
But what’s interesting about this graphic’s perspective is that it focuses on internal daring to share, rather than external. Even the latest ‘collaboration’ step in the graphic is about enterprises replicating microblogging and activity streams internally. But our perspective on Dare to Share here is less informed by ‘intentional collaboration’ and more by ‘intentional transparency’ – that is daring to share externally. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Communication, XBRL | No Comments »
April 22nd, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
In Dare to Share 3 I referred to the paper by Garcia and Gil about linking XBRL data to the semantic web. Roberto Garcia has another paper covering very similar ground called Triplificating and Linking XBRL Financial Data. Here I just want to comment on some stats from their efforts.
However, just in case anyone is mystified… Triplification does not refer to triple filtered Irish whisky or triple filtered Stella Artois, the Belgian lager with the famously smooth outcome, but converting data into triples, one of the pillars of the semantic web. Personally I find a few lagers and whisky chasers quite useful when trying to get to the grips with anything to do with the semantic web, but then I’m no Roberto Garcia (didn’t someone make a movie called Bring me the head of Roberto Garcia?). Anyway I digress as I sit here among the remains of a Stella six pack and a half-empty bottle of Jameson. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: RDF
Posted in Analytics, Communication, XBRL | 1 Comment »
April 22nd, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
I thought it was about time to catch up on what’s happening with Integrated Reporting (IR) so it was good to see the initiative now has its own website and roadmap. The Federation of European Accountants has already published a factsheet on IR and the ACCA’s Accountancy Futures provides a useful overview of IR – I particularly liked the fact that the word ‘holistic’ is creeping in and the perspective of the ACCA’s Rachel Jackson. But if you want a good place to start catching up on IR, other than the website, try this free PDF download from HBS: The Landscape of Integrated Reporting.
Tags: IR
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Sustainability, Transparency | No Comments »
April 21st, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
In this third Dare to Share post I want to share some more insight I gained from the online book Linking Enterprise Data, edited by David Wood – specifically from the chapter Linking XBRL Financial Data by Garcia and Gil who usefully propose that:
Consequently, our opinion is that the best short term approach in order to get financial and business data to the Semantic Web is not to propose and alternative language based on Semantic Web technologies, but to apply methods to map existing XBRL to semantic metadata. This also seems the best option in the short and midterm to populate the Web of Data with business information.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Transparency | No Comments »
April 21st, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
I wasn’t very familiar with the Linked Data Initiative (LDI) until I came across this online book Linking Enterprise Data, edited by David Wood. As Bernadette Hyland says on p.57 :
The basic assumption of Linked Data is that the usefulness and value of data increases the more readily it can be accessed and recombined with other data
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: LDI
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Transparency | No Comments »
April 19th, 2011 by Stewart McKie - Executive Advisor
On behalf of Rivet, I’m scheduled to be presenting at May XBRL International conference in Brussels on the topic of Dare to Share. Having come up with the idea for this presentation I now have to do the hard work – creating the content. So it was with a sigh of relief that I read this – Issa attacks Visa programs – in which our esteemed President, Patrick Quinlan, is featured. Now I have a hook for my presentation… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Analytics, Communication, Transparency, XBRL | No Comments »
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