Electronic disclosure and financial knowledge management

Abstract

In this paper, we reported the benefits of using eXtended Markup Language (XML) to support financial knowledge management and discussed number of issues associated with developing an XML-based financial knowledge management system. Current searching engines do not provide sufficient performance in terms of recall, precision, and extensibility for financial knowledge management, because the data represented in HTML format cannot support financial knowledge management effectively. On the other hand, XML provides a vendor-neutral approach to structure and organize contents as XML authors are allowed to create arbitrary tags to describe the format or structure of data. A prototype of XML-based ELectronic Financial Filing System (ELFFS-XML) is developed, and value-added services such as automatic tag generation and cross-linking related information from different data sources are provided to enable knowledge representation and knowledge generation. We compared the XML-based ELFFS with the original HTML-based ELFFS and SEDAR — an electronic filing system used in Canada, and we found that ELFFS-XML is able to provide much more functionalities to support knowledge management. We also compared our automatic tag generation result with the experts’ and investors’ choices, and recommended some directions for future development of similar electronic filing systems.