EDGAR, short for electronic data gathering, analysis and retrieval system, handles more than 500,000 financial statements every year from public companies and other entities. The current EDGAR system has been online since 1996 and accepting both ASCII and HTML documents. (read more)

IDEA, short for Interactive Data Electronic Applications, will give investors faster, more accurate and more useful information about public companies and mutual funds. The SEC has spent tens of millions of dollars to develop the new IDEA system, which will use interactive data technology known as XBRL, or extensible business reporting language.

XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language and is the global standard for business reporting that enables companies to mark and transform financial data into a format that can be easily transmitted and shared electronically. IDEA Filings in XBRL provide major benefits in the preparation, analysis and communication of business information. (read more)

XML at its simplest, structures data so that it is platform independent. While this structured data/XML is text it isn’t meant to be read like a web page. The SEC’s announcement confirming that IDEA will replace the legacy EDGAR system has spurred the advancement and development of data manipulation tools and projects that can convert data into XBRL (a sub-set of XML) using a taxonomy without a great deal of human intervention. (read more on XML)

XML Taxonomies are lexicons or dictionaries created in order to provide a common language to use in the exchange of information. Industry groups, governmental agencies and other organizations drive the development of these taxonomies with the intent of creating the most efficient method for publishing financial information to the web.