Representing Financial Reports on the Semantic Web A Faithful Translation from XBRL to OWL

• Published in: Semantic Web Rules pp. 144 - 152
• Main Authors: Bao, Jie, Rong, Graham, Li, Xian, Ding, Li
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2010
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 9783642162886; 3642162886
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-16289-3_13

We discuss a translation of financial reports from the XBRL format into the Semantic Web language OWL. Different from existing approaches that do structural translation from XBRL’s XML schema into OWL, our approach can faithfully preserve the implicit semantics in XBRL and enable the logic model of financial reports. We show that such a translation reduces the risk of redundancy and inconsistency, and enables the quick and useful inference on XBRL based financial reports for better business decisions.