ELECTRONIC DISCLOSURE AND FINANCIAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

1. Introduction Majority of financial information are disseminated through the Internet, every day, huge amount of financial information are generated but the utilization is not good enough: according to the 10th WWW User Survey by the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Centre (GVU 1998), more than 45 percent of the respondents felt that they were not able to find the information they needed. A study of the Internet demography showed that searching, retrieving, and utilizing the avail…

Electronic disclosure and financial knowledge management

In this paper, we reported the benefits of using eXtended Markup Language (XML) to support financial knowledge management and discussed number of issues associated with developing an XML-based financial knowledge management system. Current searching engines do not provide sufficient performance in terms of recall, precision, and extensibility for financial knowledge management, because the data represented in HTML format cannot support financial knowledge management effectively. On the other hand, XML provides a vendor-neutral approach to structure and organize contents as XML authors are allowed to create arbitrary tags to describe the format or structure of data. A prototype of XML-based ELectronic Financial Filing System (ELFFS-XML) is developed, and value-added services such as automatic tag generation and cross-linking related information from different data sources are provided to enable knowledge representation and knowledge generation. We compared the XML-based ELFFS with the original HTML-based ELFFS and SEDAR — an electronic filing system used in Canada, and we found that ELFFS-XML is able to provide much more functionalities to support knowledge management. We also compared our automatic tag generation result with the experts’ and investors’ choices, and recommended some directions for future development of similar electronic filing systems. Jerome Yen received his Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering and Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona in 1992. Before joining CUHK, he has taught at HKU, HKUST, and University of Arizona. His major research interests include next generation Internet (NGI), electronic commerce, digital library and information retrieval, and information markets. He has published more than twenty journal articles in leading journals, such as, IEEE Computer. He was the recipient of the best paper award at the HICSS-28 and the Co-Program Chair of the First Asia Digital Library Workshop. Percy Yuen received his M.Phil degree in Systems Engineering and Engineering Management from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2001. His research interest is financial knowledge management. Belinna Bai received her M.Phil degree in Systems Engineering and Engineering Management from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2005, and she is pursuing her Ph.D degree in the same department. Her research interest is financial risk management.