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By Nathan Statz

Month Date, 2007: Microsoft are hailing it as a world first, though it’s more aptly labeled an interesting first as the software giant uses new interactive data tags on their financial statements.

Form 8-K doesn’t sound very appealing, nor should it as it’s basically a financial information sheet which company’s fill out. The interesting thing is that Microsoft has submitted its 8-K form in an interactive data format.

The data format being used is the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) which besides being challenging to say three times in a row, is a form of taxonomy. Taxonomy refers to the process of classification, in business terms this relates to the mapping and retrieval of unstructured data.

For Microsoft this project has the side benefit of being a public display of support for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) desire to drive the usage of XBRL.

The SEC has actually invested significant funding into speeding up US taxonomy development, and there has been persistent speculation that XBRL usage will become mandatory sooner rather then later.

IDM interviewed Dave Clarke, global taxonomy director at Dow Jones who believed that taxonomy usage would be on the rise. Microsoft’s usage of taxonomy seems to be a semantic step in the direction of confirming that trend prediction.

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