Re: "Behold the Renaissance: The End of The Dark Ages in Financial Analysis"

The above article, written by Elias-John Kies, CFA, provides good background information on how data is retrieved for use in financial analysis today via "manual extraction" or by a "data vendor." Then, he describes how XBRL allows for direct, accurate, and granular data acquisition without the possible shortcomings of the old data retrieval practices. You can see this 11/1/07 article which appeared in www.cpaB2biz.com here: "Behold the Renaissance:...."

Also, Kies wrote a follow-up article on 4/3/08 entitled "XBRL's Path to Adoption."

There seem to be overwhelming value to the XBRL proposition of data delivered directly from the corporate issuer to the analyst (from the CFO to the CFA) without intermediaries handling the data or stipulating their own definitions for data elements. XBRL not only adds transparency to reports but also allows analysts to get the exact granular data they want on a near-real time basis.