by Edward Curry, Andreas Harth, Sean O'Riain
Abstract:
Consumers of financial information come in many guises from personal investors looking for that value for money share, to government regulators investigating corporate fraud, to business executives seeking competitive advantage over their competition. While the particular analysis performed by each of these information consumers will vary, they all have to deal with the explosion of information available from multiple sources including, SEC filings, corporate press releases, market press coverage, and expert commentary. Recent economic events have begun to bring sharp focus on the activities and actions of financial markets, institutions and not least regulatory authorities. Calls for enhanced scrutiny will bring increased regulation and information transparency While extracting information from individual filings is relatively easy to perform when a machine readable format is utilized (for example, using XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language), cross comparison of extracted financial information can be problematic as descriptions and accounting terms vary across companies and jurisdictions. Across multiple sources the problem becomes the classical data integration problem where a common data abstraction is necessary before functional data use can begin. Within this paper we discuss the challenges in converging financial data from multiple sources. We concentrate on integrating data from multiple sources in terms of the abstraction, linking, and consolidation activities needed to consolidate data before more sophisticated analysis algorithms can examine the data for the objectives of particular information consumers (for e.g. competitive analysis, regulatory compliance, or investor analysis). We base our discussion on several years researching and deploying data integration systems in both the web and enterprise environments.
Reference:
Edward Curry, Andreas Harth, Sean O'Riain, "Challenges Ahead for Converging Financial Data", In Proceedings of the XBRL/W3C Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web, Arlington, Virginia, pp. 1-5, 2009. [slides]
Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{Curry2009,
abstract = {Consumers of financial information come in many guises from personal investors looking for that value for money share, to government regulators investigating corporate fraud, to business executives seeking competitive advantage over their competition. While the particular analysis performed by each of these information consumers will vary, they all have to deal with the explosion of information available from multiple sources including, SEC filings, corporate press releases, market press coverage, and expert commentary. Recent economic events have begun to bring sharp focus on the activities and actions of financial markets, institutions and not least regulatory authorities. Calls for enhanced scrutiny will bring increased regulation and information transparency While extracting information from individual filings is relatively easy to perform when a machine readable format is utilized (for example, using XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language), cross comparison of extracted financial information can be problematic as descriptions and accounting terms vary across companies and jurisdictions. Across multiple sources the problem becomes the classical data integration problem where a common data abstraction is necessary before functional data use can begin. Within this paper we discuss the challenges in converging financial data from multiple sources. We concentrate on integrating data from multiple sources in terms of the abstraction, linking, and consolidation activities needed to consolidate data before more sophisticated analysis algorithms can examine the data for the objectives of particular information consumers (for e.g. competitive analysis, regulatory compliance, or investor analysis). We base our discussion on several years researching and deploying data integration systems in both the web and enterprise environments.},
address = {Arlington, Virginia},
annote = {<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/edwardcurry/challenges-ahead-for-converging-financial-data">[slides]</a>},
author = {Curry, Edward and Harth, Andreas and O'Riain, Sean},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the XBRL/W3C Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web},
file = {:Users/ed/Library/Application Support/Mendeley Desktop/Downloaded/Curry, Harth, O'Riain - 2009 - Challenges Ahead for Converging Financial Data.pdf:pdf},
keywords = {Data Fusion,Data Integration,XBRL},
mendeley-tags = {Data Fusion,Data Integration,XBRL},
pages = {1--5},
title = {{Challenges Ahead for Converging Financial Data}},
url = {http://www.w3.org/2009/03/xbrl/soi/Curry.pdf},
year = {2009}
}