Financial Concept Element Mapper (FinCEM) for XBRL interoperability: Utilizing the M3 Plus method

Abstract

The use of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) to represent financial reports (particularly 10-K and 10-Q filings) is a requirement of all public companies in the United States. The intention of the XBRL mandate is to streamline the financial reporting pipeline by providing full automaticity with respect to the collection, collation and analysis of financial information on the Web. However, the current lack of acceptable XBRL interoperability prevents the realization of the mandate's potential. This paper reports on a comprehensive solution to this problematic situation. The proposed design artifact, called FinCEM, is undergirded by channel theory and seeks to capture and leverage the semantics of XBRL calculation linkbases towards improved XBRL interoperability. The design artifact is instantiated and evaluated against XBRL filings from companies included in the S&P 100. The artifact, which operates automatically and without human intervention, is shown to provide significant improvements over alternative approaches as it attains high accuracy with respect to its core information retrieval task.