Electronic Disclosure and Financial Knowledge Management

In this paper we report the benefits of using eXtended Markup Language (XML) to support financial knowledge management, which include indexing, organizing, association generation, cross-referencing, and retrieval of financial information to support the generation of knowledge. The current searching engines cannot provide sufficient performance, such as, recall, precision, extensibility, etc, to support users of financial information. XML is able to partially solve such problem by providing tags to create structures. XML provides a vendor-neutral approach to structure and organize contents. XML authors are allowed to create arbitrary tags to describe the format or structure of data, rather than restricted to a specific number of tags given in the specification of HTML. A prototype of XML-based ELectronic Financial Filing System (ELFFS-XML) has been developed to illustrate how to apply XML to model and add value to traditional HTML-based financial information by cross-linking related information from different data sources, which is an important step in moving from traditional information management to knowledge management. We compared the functionality of XML-based ELFFS with the original HTML-based ELFFS and SEDAR, an electronic filing system used in Canada, and recommended some directions for future development of similar electronic filing systems.