Looking for some new data for your next mash-up? How about playing with real money? The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Interactive Data Initiative has an RSS feed of company financial filings; not just the text, but in a highly-structured XML format called XBRL. I glance at the feed this morning and see data from ADP, Dow Chemical, Molina Healthcare, Xerox, GE, Infosys, 3M, Bristol Myers Squibb, and lots more. XBRL isn’t the world’s easiest format to grok; that’s partly because the formalisms that govern accounting are non-trivial in the extreme. But I’m quite sure there are fortunes to be made by people who combine hacking chops with financial savvy, and figure out how to automate digging insight out of this data. Of course, in most gold rushes, the best business angle is selling tools and entertainment to the miners; so there is obviously more than one way to work this territory. And a great big tip of the hat to the SEC for getting this stuff on the air.
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From: Gordon Weakliem (Oct 06 2006, at 08:46)
Since you've apparently been evangelizing to the SEC, maybe you could convince them to either switch to the <guid> element, or switch to Atom?
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