Bob Schneider is a Partner in 
Wilson So is the Director of Hitachi America, Ltd. The Name Game: XBRL or Interactive Data?
Written by Bob Schneider Posted December 5, 2006
In our recent post on Tim Bray’s embrace of XBRL, we did not mention the interesting, if less crucial, point he made on nomenclature. Specifically, Tim prefers the four-letter XBRL acronym to the phrase “interactive data” espoused by SEC Commissioner Chris Cox. Although Tim sympathizes with the need to re-brand XBRL for a wider audience, he leaves the impression that interactive data doesn’t quite make it as a synonym.
We sympathize greatly with anyone who attempts to create a compelling brand name for a complex technology like XBRL. Our own attempts at rechristening yielded only eXtremely BRiLliant data, which is hardly descriptive or revealing.
We do have some doubts about interactive data as a synonym for XBRL. Don’t get us wrong. We’re fully on board with the powerful argument for XBRL adoption as a means of making data easier to access, manipulate, and integrate. We believe it will make data more transparent, current, and actionable. But we’re less sure if XBRL is notably more “interactive” than some other data formats, or that interactive data is uniquely descriptive of XBRL.
At the same time, even if interactive data is not completely explanatory, its look and feel seem right. The adjective “interactive” implies integration, actionable, dynamic and other good things that XBRL promises.
The two-word phrase offers other advantages. Unlike the seemingly random four-letter acronym, interactive data is reasonably distinctive. You pretty much have to be a software developer to distinguish XBRL from XBEL and KMEL (in case you’re wondering, the last two represent Bookmark Exchange Language and the call letters of San Francisco’s hip-hop radio station). To the rest of us, XBRL is just four floating letters in the alphabet soup of computer terms.
Moreover, interactive has a positive connotation and associations who doesn’t want to be active, and interactive at that? It’s not the easiest term to remember, but certainly simpler than a seemingly random four-letter text string. Interactive data also sounds appropriate to task and function, if a little geeky and technical.
Advertisers and marketers place enormous emphasis on the power of names, and that certainly goes for the public policy arena as well as the private sector. Examples abound: Would a “death tax” by any other name sound so abominable? Certainly not if it’s called an estate tax. And whatever the pluses and minuses of building a missile defense system, surely its path would be smoother had it not been dubbed Star Wars early on.
The upshot is that interactive data provides in reasonably plain English a useful alternative to another impenetrable four-letter acronym. For anyone schooled in the tradition that you should never repeat the same word twice in a sentence, interactive data is a godsend. If you still hear the voice of your ninth-grade English teacher telling you to vary your language in every sentence, you are deeply appreciative of a widely acknowledged synonym for XBRL. The overriding objective is to make XBRL widely known among financial and business information users, and interactive data is up to the task.