Economic and Financial Information Management and the Semantic Web

Economic and financial information has critical value for all kinds of institutions. An effective generation, gathering, integration and analysis of such information is a key success factor for any business and, therefore, requires techniques that reduce the current burden of dealing with big volumes of rich information. While the information integration problem is common to all business areas, it becomes apparent in the financial area, where information coming from multiple sources has to be homogenized in order to facilitate analysis and to provide a uniform view of the business e.g. via a balance scorecard. In addition, financial information is subject to official supervision e.g. by central banks. As a consequence, the required information has to be obtained, homogenized following the supervisor rules, and validated, guaranteeing its quality. In this paper, we present part of our experience in the use of semantic Web technologies for the management of economic and financial information and the problems encountered. In addition, we briefly introduce XBRL, a language that has gained a big momentum for business reporting, and compare the paths followed by the XBRL community and the semantic Web community.