XBRL Taxonomies and OWL Ontologies for Investment Funds

The analysis of investment funds information requires the availability of homogeneous, both up-to-date and historical information of the funds considered, which is usually generated and provisioned by different parties and in heterogeneous formats. In this context, the gathering and integration of information from disparate, heterogeneous sources becomes a key task that can be considerably eased by the availability of explicit and shared information models. Furthermore, the analysis process leads to the generation of analytic, added-value information, whose consumption by other parties can also benefit from the existence of agreed information models. In this paper, we present our work on building explicit information models for investment funds in the Spanish market. In particular, we present an XBRL taxonomy for investment funds and a generic translation process of XBRL taxonomies into OWL ontologies that has been applied to the investment funds taxonomy in order to obtain an OWL ontology of funds. Furthermore, we discuss the relative benefits of using OWL ontologies or XBRL taxonomies for the exchange and analysis of investment funds information.