I pose the question above because I stumbled across an
interesting claim about OpenLink Software and its representatives
expressed in the ReadWriteWeb post titled: XBRL: Mashing Up Financial Statements,
where the following claim is made:
"..There is evidence that they promote LINKED DATA at any expense without
understanding the rationale behind other
approaches...".
To answer the question above, Linked Data is always relevant as
long as we are actually talking about "Data"
which is simply the case all of the time, irrespective of
interaction medium.
If XBRL can be disconnected in anyway from Linked Data, I
desperately would like to be enlightened (as per my comments to the
post). Why wouldn't anyone desire the ability to navigate the
linked data inherent in any financial report? Every entity in an XBRL instance document is an
entity, directly or indirectly related to other entities. Why
"Mash" the data when you can harmonize XBRL data via a Generic
Financial Dictionary (schema or ontology) such that descriptions of
Balance Sheet, P&L, and other entities are navigable via their
attributes and relationships? In short, why "Mash" (code based
brute force joining across disparately shaped data) when you can
"Mesh" (natural joining of structured data entities)?
"Linked Data" is about the ability to connect all our
observations (data)? , perceptions (information), and inferences / conclusions
(knowledge) across a spectrum of interaction
media. And it just so happens that the RDF data model (Entity-Attribute-Vaue + Class Relationships +
HTTP based Object Identifiers), a range of RDF data model
serialization formats, and SPARQL (Query Language and Web Service combo) actually make this
possible, in a manner consistent with the essence of the global
space we know as the World Wide Web.
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