I've just re-read an article penned by Dan Brickley in 1999 titled: The WWW Proposal and RDF: Then and Now, that retains its prescience to this very day. Ironically I stumbled across this timeless piece while revisiting the RSS name imbroglio that gave us a simple syndication format (RSS 2.0) that will ultimately implode (IMHO) since "Simple" is ultimately short lived when dealing with attention challenged end-users that are always assumed to be dumb when in fact they are simply ambivalent.

I was compelled to go back to the RSS 2.0 imbroglio when I came across Dave Winer's comments re. "the SEC attempting to reinvent RSS 2.0..." response to Jon Udell's recent XBRL article.

Although I don't believe in complex entry points into complex technology realms, I do subscribe to the approach where developers deal with the complexity associated with a problem domain while hiding said complexity from ambivalent end-users via coherent interfaces -- which does not always imply User Interface.

XBRL is a great piece of work that addresses the complex problem domain of Financial Reporting. The only thing it's missing right now is an Ontology that facilitates RDF Data Model based XBRL Schema and Instance Data which ultimately makes XBRL data available to RDF query languages such as SPARQL. This line of thought implies, for instance, an XML Schema to OWL Ontology Mapping for Schema Data (as explained in a white paper by the VSIS Group at the university of Hamburg) leaving the Instance Data to be generated in a myriad of ways that includes XML to RDF and/or XML->SQL->RDF.

As I stated in an earlier post: we should not mistake ambivalence to lack of intelligence. Assuming "Simple" is always right at all times is another way of subscribing to this profound misconception. You know, assuming the world was flat (as opposed to geoid) was quite palatable at some point in the history of mankind, I wonder what would have happened if we held on to this point of view to this day because of its "Simplicity"?