use cases driving development of this ontology?

[bobdc]

Are there any use cases driving the building of the XBRL ontology?
That is, specific ideas for things we'll be able to do with XBRL data
once we have this ontology that we can't do until then?

Public posting of such use cases should inspire more people to get
involved.

Bob

[kidehen]

Bob,

First off, thank you very much for dropping a poignant question that
could reignite the effort that lead to the creation of this space.

Here is one use case.

Situation Analysis:
The U.S. government is about to pass legistation that basically values
the opportunity cost of finanial linked data at: $700 Billion .

As you know, the big mystery associated with the current financial
debacle comes down to nobody being a in position (so it seems) to
"connect the dots" accross their financial systems.

To substantiate the position above, I decided to put on my old
accountant hat (yes, once worked full time as an accountant in the
late 80's) and attemtp to reconcile the situation at AIG. Right off
the bat, AIG's financials weren't even available in XBRL form, so I
didn't even have a semi-structured variant of their financial. Then I
looked deeper into the Balance Sheet to see if any of the Liabilities
would reveal exposure to "mortgage backed securities" or insurance
risk associated with "mortgaged backed securities" nothing.

Linked Data and Dots:
If decision makers can get at financial data in structured form, such
that each of the financial data items are financial data objects
endowed with HTTP based Object IDs (Linked Data), they would have been
able to do the following:

1. Assess risk (e.g., general state of their balance sheet items) by
combining internal and external financial data without publishing
internal data to the public Web)
2. Perform better extrapolation and projection of financial data from
a plethora of sources

The SEC should have realized at some point:
1. Financial data report structucture and granulaity was out of sync
with the link density and reality of the global Financial Arbitrage
Web
2. Realized that it's own systems weren't providing the Government
with the kind of data required for holistic oversight

Everything is Linked! Unfortunately the value of "Open World" and
"Closed World" cross-boundary linkage at the applications level via
linked data remains esoteric :-(

Kingsley