Semantic approach to financial data integration for enabling new insights

Financial regulators around the world are following in the footsteps of the US SEC by mandating businesses to share their financial information in an XML based business reporting standard called XBRL. Businesses are periodically reporting on their finances, hence there is a wealth of financial data waiting to be explored. The structural complexities in the XBRL format and the spread of data across many files pose a hurdle in exploiting the data. This paper presents a semantic approach to integrate, process and query the financial information embedded in the XBRL to allow for new insights into the financial ecosystem.