Using SEC's EDGAR database?

[Nick Arnett]

I've been quiet on this list for the last year or so, but the insights and 
challenges people have expressed here have been valuable in my previous 
work at Verity and in my present job at Invisible Worlds.  I'm posting 
today to see if there's anyone here who would be interested in help us 
decide what capabilities we should add to EDGARspace, our enhanced EDGAR 
database (see http://www.invisible.net).  I'm particularly interested in 
the insights of people who either search EDGAR themselves or assist patrons 
in doing so.

By way of background, the founder of Invisible Worlds is the person who 
persuaded the SEC to put EDGAR on the Internet in the first place (his code 
is what's still running the WAIS search on the SEC site).  At Invisible 
Worlds, we're working on what we think is next-generation, distributed 
Internet information retrieval, integrating a standard meta-information 
layer on top of existing search engines and databases.  EDGARspace, which 
is in alpha test (free to anyone at the moment) is our first application of 
this technology; we plan to add many others quickly, and we'll be opening 
up our architecture and protocols as a proposed open standard for 
meta-information.  The people developing and defining this include the 
inventors and implementors of the standards for DNS, e-mail, SNMP and other 
key standards, so we think we have a shot at it.  In fact, the chairman of 
our protocol advisory board was the Internet's original chief architect.

I'm happy to have discussions of functionality for EDGARspace here, though 
it's probably better off the list... but I'll let others choose, of course, 
not being a librarian myself!  However, since we're not ready yet to unveil 
the proposed protocols to the public, I don't want to even begin to debate 
such matters here.  If you'd like to be kept apprised of our work in that 
area, feel free to drop me a note and I'll make sure you receive notice of 
the key events.  Please rest assured that we are building this with an 
awareness of related efforts in the library community, such as those at 
OCLC.  We think we have something that could tie many of them together.

Nick Arnett