Linked data for financial reporting

Recently, uncertainty has dominated global financial markets. Companies are struggling with their balance sheets while merges and acquisitions (M&A) happens on a more frequent basis. This calls for highly accurate corporate performance data, which serve as the ground truth for M&A decisions. Conventional financial reporting approach has drawn criticism from both investors and analysts, attribute to the inherent complexity, lack of timeliness, and inadequacy of scope. In this paper, we try to address these shortcomings with a Linked Data approach. We showcase a system for enriching corporate financial reporting with other types of proprietary and public data, the latter are part of the Linked Open Data cloud or harvested from social media sites. Our motivation is to 1) source in a variety of data so as to portray a comprehensive image of a company and 2) render tedious financial figures through an intuitive and comparative perspective. We introduce the architecture of the Linked Financial Data for Reporting framework (LFDr) and outline the details of its implementation. We also propose methodologies for the evaluation of the whole framework.