Miscellaneous Communications in an Age of Structured Data
Having tried and failed for two weeks to find time to give Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
The de facto standard is now to simply hyperlink from an assertion to supporting information. A more effective standard would make it easier to trace the development of an assertion and give users opportunities to validate and contest the assertion. Wikipedia is a good start, but it lacks the capability of a structured standard like XBRL for business reporting, which, as @cybercpa points out on Twitter this morning, is all about “the information supply chain.”
One challenge would be distinguishing fact from opinion, but with an apparent increase in the assertion of opinion as fact as professional journalism becomes democratized (including by professional journalists flailing about to keep up with the Internet technology that’s turned their worlds upside down), a rules-based system for making the distinction usable by and accessible to the general public (as opposed to the almost proprietary professional standard I learned in journalism school 25 years ago) could only help.
This obviously requires much more thought, but suffice it to say — Charlie Hoffman doesn’t know how big a revolution he’s started.
Since posting, I've found David Weinberger's blog, where he discussed XBRL in 2003: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2003/11/10/are-we… "We all like standards that help." he says. "But the supporters of the Semantic Web aren’t saying simply, 'Standards are good!' They are suggesting that when these standards are put together, they will form something more than their parts. …But history has shown us that it’s really hard to get domain-specific metadata to work together. Maybe this time it’ll happen. Maybe. But that it’s happened in this or that domain should not lead us to generalize about it happening generally." I've had nice responses to recent Tweets on potential XBRL use for drug development and for disclosing how Congress spends money on itself. With competition for software to make XBRL data useful across multiple domains, maybe it can happen generally. Maybe. It worked well for short sellers who used XBRL to understand mortgage backed securities risk before the crash–and mortgage backed securities data is by far a different domain than public company financial data.
Twitter Comment
Interesting. RT @pjwilk: New blog post: Miscellaneous Communications in an Age of Structured Data [link to post]
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Twitter Comment
New blog post: Miscellaneous Communications in an Age of Structured Data [link to post]
– Posted using Chat Catcher
Twitter Comment
RT @irwebreport: Interesting. RT @pjwilk: New blog post: Miscellaneous Communications in an Age of Structured Data [link to post]
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