Last Saturday morning, before getting on a plane from Frankfurt to Charlotte, North Carolina with a book that I knew wouldn't last that far, I went into a newsstand to find a big, glossy, British Formula One magazine to supplement my reading. I didn't find one, but I bought something else glossy and British: a special New Year edition of The Economist called "The World in 2007" with summaries of where various countries and industries are now and where they may go in the coming year.

This special edition included lots of single-page essays from government and industry leaders such as Angela Merkel John McCain, Eric Schmidt, and Pedro Lamy. All of the essays that I started were predictable enough that I didn't finish them, until I got to the last page of the magazine, which had an essay with something I hadn't expected to see: a parenthesized list of of the three acronyms RDF, OWL, and SPARQL.

Huh? In a special edition of The Economist? The essay was called "Welcome to the Semantic Web," and of course the tech leadership figure that wrote it was Tim Berners-Lee. While some of us think that bnodes, reification, and traction for competing alternatives to RDF/XML are Big Issues to worry about, his essay made for a nice pep talk on the real big issues that form the grand vision of the Semantic Web.

You've probably read most of the essay's main points in other pieces he's written, but a newer one caught my eye:

Consider the financial services industry. Successful investment strategies are based on finding patterns and trends in an increasingly diverse set of information sources... Leading-edge providers of financial information are now developing services that allow users easily to integrate the data they have themselves—about their own portfolios or from their in-house market models—with the data delivered by the information service. The unique value creation lies in the integration service itself, not in the raw data on its own or even in the software tools, most of which will be built on open-source components.

The key to this integration is to use common data formats that link the information with identifiable vocabularies...

If you follow Planet RDF, I'm sure you can imagine where this discussion led, but the part quoted above reminded me of something that I've been thinking about. The financial community certainly has a lot of data. I've noticed that much of the effort in the use of the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) goes into careful development of machine-readable taxonomies, and I've wondered whether RDF/OWL technology can take advantage of these taxonomies to do something worthwhile. While it's a cliche that metadata is data about data, lots of RDF/OWL ontology metadata isn't about anything—"Ontologies for the sake of ontologies," as Dan Connolly put it—but financial metadata has plenty of data to go with it, so there should be lots of room for interesting new metadata applications.

Has anyone heard of any use of semantic web technology with financial data, with or without building on XBRL work?