One of the most interesting presentations I saw at ETech was on credit risk data. Here’s a summary from: http://en.oreilly.com/et2009/public/schedule/detail/7513

With our latest project, FreeRisk, we aggregate accurate, accredited risk data, enabling users to generate crowd-sourced algorithms to analyze credit risk and allowing anyone to view the results of these algorithms. FreeRisk aggregates both all standardized XBRL data and public-domain financial data, as well as user-generated content incorporating unstructured data released in financial reports like footnotes, critical to accurate risk assessment. This system allows credit evaluators to focus exclusively on creating and applying risk analytics, instead of working through the complex data management tasks traditionally required to solve these problems or relying on black-box credit ratings.

These guys are extremely smart and have spent a lot of time working with XBRL, and yet one of their main conclusions was that XBRL was too complicated and therefore didn’t have a bright future. Thought that was very interesting.