XBRL, Journalism, Lawyering, Business, Charlie Hoffman, and the Semanitc Web
Charlie Hoffman just made the most enlightening post I’ve read in a long time. It’s no accident that the best journalism is the most direct: subject, verb, object. Similarly, clarity is essential to good lawyering and to the most successful business.
I’m not sure, but wonder if perhaps part of the challenge facing the “Semantic Web” is its name. When people think of the Web, they naturally think of Web pages, given the popularity of the Web interface over the past 15 years. But the Semantic Web is more of a return to the basic function of the Internet — to connect people, not pages. (See http://cloudinc.org.) The Semantic Web seems to concern people and who they are and what they do — much more than the metaphor of “visiting” Web pages, a metaphor that has infected our culture and distracted a great deal of attention away from content and onto the media itself. Perhaps this is inevitable with the development of any new technology, but recognizing such a phenomena could help the benefits of more connected data overcome popular cultural metaphors.
However, this is merely an aside — perhaps trivial relative to Charlie’s observations, which could be key to economic growth, public welfare, and so many worthy goals of so many people around the world.
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New blog post: XBRL, Journalism, Lawyering, Business, Charlie Hoffman, and the Semanitc Web [link to post]
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In addition to Charlie's recent post, I highly recommend his recent book, XBRL for Dummies. After being referred to this book by Paul, (title indicates I'm indeed in the target market), I came to realize just how dramatic and significant XBRL is. I was under the common misperception that XBRL was simply for financial reporting. When you understand its ability to function as a vital new layer for business information exchanges, one quickly realizes its future is quite significant.
As Paul points out in his post, the Web and the Internet are different, with the Internet being the connections between people, and the Web being a mechanism for viewing and expressing those connections. For Charlie's vision of the Semantic Web and XBRL to fully play themselves out to their full potential, this distinction is important. For as I note in a blog post from last year, there is no "there, there" on the Internet (http://theendoflinearity.com/?p=11). The notion of destinations is a decidedly physical world limitation. The Internet only has destinations because of web sites.
With tools like XBRL and future tools, like CTML from CLOUD, we can break free from the constraints of web pages and make all of our connections truly semantic from "who I am" to "what I am" and beyond…
If I may, I'd like to recommend the posts that have appeared on the Hitachi XBRL blog (hitachidatainteractive.com) concerning XBRL and the Semantic Web, including those by Andy Greener (http://tinyurl.com/baqexf), Ashu Bhatnagar (http://tinyurl.com/p9v4ap), and Kurt Cagle (http://tinyurl.com/lfcmgg).
Bob Schneider
Editor, Data Interactive (the Hitachi XBRL blog)