Try talking to an astronomer, who has to locate objects in space-time. The mind boggles as I sit here at ESIP.

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.

Needless to say, I was shocked and amazed when I saw this statement on Microsoft’s new Interoperability Principles this weekend. To summarize, they are committing to make open and public the protocols and APIs for their major products, including Vista, Exchange, SQL Server, and Office. And, wait for this, access to those documents will be free. Is your mind blown yet? How about reading on and seeing that they plan to embrace non-Microsoft standards, and “increase interoperability with open source solutions”? I’m going to take all this at face value and say, “Bravo Microsoft!” I hope it all plays out according to this plan. The IT world will be a much better place if it does.