As promised, we’re kicking off our blog series showcasing some of the great open source work being done by Magenic consultants. Jeff Ferguson, a principal consultant, will be the focus of this initial post. He has an awesome project he created called Gepsio.
Jeff has long been interested in looking at specifications for various protocols and file formats and wanted to see if he could implement the specification by writing code. After someone had mentioned eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) to him, Jeff’s interest to see how .NET worked with XML data drove him to begin an implementation, and Gepsio was born.
Gepsio takes in an XML document marked up using the XBRL specification, validates the document, and presents the document’s data as an easy-to-use set of objects and properties that can be read from any .NET environment, including PowerShell. It allows developers to work with data in XBRL documents without needing to know about the low-level details and validation requirements of XBRL itself. Additionally, Jeff is already looking into Windows 8 and WinRT and how the code should best migrate to the new WinRT/Metro environment.
The XBRL specification is designed to present information in financial documents, such as financial statements describing corporate assets and liabilities. XBRL is found in the financial sector and is used by companies who need to report financial statements, such as a quarterly 10-Q filing or an annual 10-K filing, to other organizations. Government agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) are also prepared to work with financial statement data marked up in the XBRL format.
Jeff is very happy with how far Gepsio has come. After open sourcing his work on Codeplex without any idea what would come of it, Gepsio has since been mentioned in many publications. The wiki for XBRL, XBRL for Dummies, and Stack Overflow answers are just some of the places Gepsio has been noted for its ability to simplify XBRL. Jeff has found it quite rewarding to know that something he created is being used by others to make their development work easier.
For access to Gepsio, the source code and pre-built assembly is available on Codeplex. The assembly is also available as a NuGet package. Jeff also maintains a blog describing Gepsio development and XBRL issues at http://gepsio.blogspot.com.