Hey there,
I'm writing a master thesis work and would need a small help about financial data share on public networks/internet.
What ways financial institution can provide data to software developer?
Thanks in advance
Edit: Edited question for logical correctness Suggested so far:
I think you're getting mixed up between "technologies" and "standards".
HTML is a document standard. HTTP is a commuication standard. SOAP is a standard. OFX is a standard. FiXML is a standard (presumably XBRL is a standard too). These standards are no different from the financial institutions agreeing on which stock ticker symbol relates to which traded company. It's just a formalized agreement that is adhered to.
Technology is what is used to create / generate and then deliver those standards to an audience. The technology is largely irrelevant. The fact that one team uses C# while a different team uses Java doesn't matter when they both produce output which is standards compliant. (You will of course find people discussing (ha!) the finer points of how their technology makes things easier or quicker or whatever.)
Which ways can data be provided to an audience on the internet? Data is either pushed to the client or pulled by the client.
You can split "client" into different categories.
The general public who may manually go to a webpage (download) to view the data.
Large organisations which may have large bulk documents pushed to their staging servers for later processing.
Computer programs which may make extensive use of feeds.
From your question, it sounds like you're interested in the different standards and how they are delivered to a specific audience.
The SEC now or in the neat future will require publicly listed companies to product earning reports in a specific XML format (Don't have the name on me).
This means you will have a schema which defines different numbers being reported.
Yahoo finance is callable via restuful based calls. Teh data is returned in csv format. This can give you any information yahoo finance offers via its site (Which is most public information)
A shameless plug: My company, WebServius ( http://www.webservius.com ) specializes in making data available to developers, either for free or for a fee. If the question is still relevant, please get in touch and we can discuss.