Invitation to mment

This discussion paper invites mments on the preliminary views of the XBRL Standards Board (XSB) regarding the technical evolution of the XBRL specifcation over the forthming decade.

This nsultation exercise is designed to help the XSB evaluate the technical direction and related resource requirements of the XBRL International, Inc nsortium (XII) over the next decade. These nversations will be carried out in a deliberate, professional and nsultative manner. The exercise is being undertaken to ensure that the pace of XBRL adoption is sustained and, as far as possible, aelerated.

These activities imply no uncertainty about the stability of the XBRL standard. XBRL works well, and is used suessfully in dozens of untries and by millions of mpanies. This paper is all about the future, the reality that technology must evolve, and our desire to make the XBRL specifcation a lasting and sustainable suess.

In the urse of these initial discussions with existing project teams the XSB has nsidered many options to enhance market implementations by addressing opportunities within XBRL; examples are described in this discussion paper. The XSB is seeking feedback on whether any or all of the options identifed would meet the broader market goals of:

■  making the standard easier for developers

■  making XBRL information more mparable across taxonomies

■  making XBRL information easier to nsume alone or in mbination with information expressed in other standards

The XSB invites mments on all matters addressed in this discussion paper. 

ments are most helpful if they:

■  respond to the issues as stated and indicate the specifc paragraph or paragraphs to which the mments relate

■  ntain a clear rationale

■  include alternatives the XSB should nsider

To facilitate responses the discussion paper includes specifc questions in an appendix. Some of the questions address the broad goals outlined above and seek to assess their impact on end users of XBRL information, future users and project managers. Others are more technical and are principally directed to developers. The XSB seeks answers to both types of question and invites stakeholder anisations to engage both technical and business personnel in formulating their responses. Further, the XSB is interested in mments that address the benefts of acting or not acting along the lines proposed, alternative remmendations and resource implications.

The XSB is particularly interested in the mmitment that members of the XBRL mmunity are prepared to make in executing a development plan by providing personnel or fnancial resources. The XSB will use the responses received during this nsultation to remmend to XII an XBRL Strategic Development Plan for measured and staged implementation over the next 5–10 years.

Please submit your mments in writing either online via or by letter addressed to Mr. Hugh Wallis, Technical Director, XBRL International, 2010TechDiscussion@xbrl.,  by 19^th March 2010. ments headed ‘nfdential’ will be restricted to the staff of XBRL International and members of the XSB. The Board will retain the right to publish excerpts from mments that have not been so marked.

Intended Audience

This document is addressed to all stakeholders in XBRL. This includes both developers and users, including end users, future users and project managers. Even if you feel that your main role as a stakeholder in XBRL is not addressed by a particular point, please nsider how the targeted audience might view the material in a way that would best support your role.

Executive summary

The XBRL Standards Board (XSB) has examined the highly suessful development and adoption of the standard over the past decade, taking acunt of lessons, feedback and trends from major projects and the market. It ncludes that in order to increase its momentum and capitalize on the opportunities to enhance business information processes in the decade to me, technical enhancements to the standard are desirable. It has formulated three goals:  

This document includes a list of proposed technical development projects with objectives that individually and llectively meet these goals. The XSB now seeks responses from the XBRL mmunity to its proposals. The implementation of any or all of these proposals will be nditional on their meeting with broad support, both in principle and in practice, from those who have the greatest interest in seeing the standard grow and prosper.

This nsultation exercise is designed to help the XSB to nsider the future technical direction of XBRL International, Inc. (XII). These nversations will be carried out in a deliberate, professional and nsultative manner. The exercise is being undertaken to ensure that the pace of XBRL adoption is sustained and, as far as possible, aelerated.

These activities imply no uncertainty about the stability of the XBRL standard. XBRL works well, and is used suessfully in dozens of untries and by millions of mpanies. This paper is all about the future, the reality that technology must evolve and our desire to make the XBRL specifcation a lasting and sustainable suess.

1. Purpose of this document

The XBRL standard is now deployed around the world to report fnancial and performance information in an extremely diverse set of environments. Its widespread adoption is a testament to the utility and interoperability of the specifcations that together make up the standard. XBRL has taken the ‘paper paradigm’, based on the centuries-old practice of individual entities mpiling acunts periodically, and made it machine-interpretable. This has obvious advantages for enhancing business information processes.

XBRL can do more: its design ntains the potential to move towards a mplementary paradigm that is dynamic, on demand, in real time and mprehensive. However, in order to realise this potential, the standard needs to be easier to use, even more interoperable and simpler to nsume. The XBRL Standards Board (XSB), the group responsible for managing the technical activities of XBRL International Inc (XII), has reviewed a range of technical options that they believe the nsortium and its market mmunity should nsider.

Foremost in the minds of the XSB is the knowledge that XBRL underpins business information and reporting supply chains across six ntinents and is in use within hundreds of different reporting mmunities. It is endorsed, promoted or has been adopted by many bodies, including the technical working group of the International anization of Securities missions (IOS); the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telemmunication (SWIFT); the Fédération des Experts ptables Européens (FEE); the Institute of Management Acuntants (IMA); the American Institute of Certifed Public Acuntants (AICPA); the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI); the World Intellectual Capital Institute (WICI); the MicroFinance Exchange (MIX); Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS); and the International Acunting Standards Board (IASB).

It is essential to uphold and maintain this suess. Any enhancements must provide a clear beneft while avoiding, as far as possible, negative impacts on the current program of adoption. The XSB nsiders that any changes that the nsortium makes must:

■  be the subject of extensive nsultation

■  add substantial value to the standard

■  be backward mpatible as far as possible: in cases where backward mpatibility is not feasible, there has to be an obvious and st effective path for migration to a revised standard

■  be developed over an extended period (5 years or more)

■  be produced in a highly professional manner and be aessible to all XBRL stakeholders

The XSB has prepared this document as a frst step in the process of nsultation. It sketches out the manner in which XBRL has evolved and has been adopted, highlights some areas in which the standard has room for improvement and outlines some goals that would enhance the standard and expand its adoption. Each goal has a number of subsidiary projects that would help achieve desired objectives.

The XSB needs input from the widest possible group of market nstituents to help refne its objectives, and is seeking responses not only from those who are using XBRL to report information (such as flings to regulators), but also from analysts, investors and others who might wish to nsume it. Using the acmpanying questionnaire as a guide, you are invited to submit your mments on these proposals.

2. Origins of XBRL

In 1998 Charles Hoffman, a CPA with Knight Vale and Gregory in Tama, Washington, USA, began to explore how XML uld be used to report fnancial information electronically. After two years of incubation within the American Institute of CPAs, the XBRL brand was launched in April 2000. By July of the same year XII, an international not-for-proft nsortium, had released the XBRL 1.0 specifcation for use by mmercial and fnancial mpanies around the world. On the basis of experience with the standard, and developments in technology, XII released XBRL 2.1 in December 2003. This has stood the test of time and so remains the remmended base standard today.

XBRL was designed to allow business information to be produced in electronic form, backed by strong metadata that provides defnitions for the terms used as well as the relationships between those terms. The standard provides a way to represent, in human and machine-interpretable form, reporting ncepts defned by acunting standards setters and regulators for fnancial or any other kind of business or performance report. These ncepts are defned in taxonomies that are designed to meet the needs of particular reporting environments, such as US GAAP. XBRL also provides a way to add additional ncepts needed for specifc types of mmunication. This means that anizations can ‘extend’ reporting taxonomies to include terms unique to their own business. It also means that, for example, national standards setters can extend an international set of terms to meet the local market and/or regulatory needs.

This extensibility makes XBRL quite different from most other XML-based standards. XBRL is a framework that can be used to model particular spheres of business information.  The standard itself does not model any particular environment: it is a toolkit for modelling business information. The approach, while relatively mplex, is extremely powerful and fexible.

Since the release of XBRL 2.1, subsequent specifcation work has focused on the development of additional modules that enhance XBRL’s applications.

■  XBRL Dimensions 1.0, which reached remmendation status in September 2006, allows the authors of XBRL taxonomies to defne and restrict dimensional information, such as segments and scenarios, with the beneft of greater reporting nsistency and mparability.

■  In June 2009 XII remmended the Formula 1.0 suite of specifcations, which provides a syntax for performing calculations, defning assertions and expressing business rules using the data in an XBRL report.

■  Work on Inline XBRL, a standard that allows XBRL instance information to be rendered with the formatting intended by the originator of the information, inside a web page, is approaching remmendation.

■  Work ntinues on Versioning, a standard that defnes the syntax and semantics of a versioning report that lists changes between two different taxonomies; and

■  XBRL GL (XBRL Global Ledger), a module (which is actually a taxonomy) that allows a standardised representation of data typically carried in Ledgers (such as in relational tables).

XBRL has rapidly lonised the niche for regulatory and disclosure reporting, with substantial benefts in terms of transparency, effciency and enomy. The standard is suffciently adaptable, however, to be imaginatively exploited in ways that uld offer further valuable opportunities to the business mmunity.

3. XBRL: rapidly expanding adoption

XII has rapidly acquired a global membership through a work of national jurisdictions (19 to date): national and international regulators such as HM Revenue and Customs in the UK; standards setters such as the International Acunting Standards mittee Foundation (IASCF); acuntancy frms; software vendors; and other stakeholders in the XBRL mmunity – a total of more than 600 member mpanies in 2009. Like other standards, XBRL benefts from the work effect. While XBRL is now used extensively in the regulatory sphere around the world, we are still in the relatively early stages of building an esystem in which XBRL information is generated, reported, reused, mbined and analysed throughout the business mmunity and all along the business reporting supply chain.

The primary drivers of XBRL’s adoption as the standard for business information have been regulatory bodies. By 2011 every listed mpany in China, Japan and the US will have to report to its securities regulator, and on to the markets, using XBRL. A very signifcant number of fnancial institutions in EU member states must report in XBRL for supervisory purposes. Stock exchanges around the world are adopting XBRL for mpany disclosures, including those in India and South Africa. Every mpany in Spain, Belgium, Singapore and Denmark either produces its annual acunts in XBRL or will do so by 2011. Within the next 12 months, every business in Australia and the herlands will be able to fle its tax, statistics, and acunting returns in XBRL. In 2011, every UK mpany will fle its fnancial statements to the tax regulator using Inline XBRL. The IASCF has made XBRL taxonomies available for the acunting standards that are approved for use in 110-120 untries.

Many mpanies that fle using XBRL also see its potential for internal purposes, mparing performance in different years or between different sectors, for example. Where disclosure information is reported publicly, as in the US, there are strong prospects for business analysts and other rporate players to make use of XBRL structured disclosures as input to investment decisions and modelling. The availability of public disclosures in a machine-readable format will prove to be of enormous value to the business mmunity. As yet, however, this form of business information analysis is at an early stage.

4. Issues for XBRL users

While XBRL has been extremely suessful in gaining traction in the regulatory, software and business mmunities, users have proposed a number of initiatives to ntinue this suess. The XSB believes that enhancements to implementation, mparison and nsumption are possible, through a carefully planned series of additions and revisions:

4.1 Ease of use

The manner in which XBRL was developed has led to a standard that, while powerful and fexible, can present challenges for software professionals when ming to the technology for the frst time. There are a number of examples of this, including: 

a.  Software requirements were initially written acrding to assumptions about the way that people might use XBRL, as real-life use cases did not then exist. Existing requirements documents uld be enhanced by inrporating actual use-cases that have me to light during the past few years.

b.  The XBRL Specifcations (which in turn require signifcant knowledge of the XML Schema specifcation as well as other XML specifcations such as XLink) are lengthy and mplex documents. They uld beneft from more modularisation, and enhancements to the manner in which they are structured, to promote better understanding.

c.  There are a number of opportunities for technical advances that will ease the task of developers. Examples include clarifying the semantics of mparison for XBRL ncepts; introducing certain types of ordering within works of XBRL information; and strengthening the mechanisms for structuring and interacting with links to authoritative reference literature that is not in XBRL format.

d.  The Dimensions module uld beneft from simplifcation.

e.  For several pragmatic reasons, such as time to market, XBRL was developed directly in its syntax on XML. It evolved instantiated as a syntax rather than being derived from an abstract model. Many developers fnd that an abstract model of a language is easier to learn and implement.

f.  The production of aessible introductory materials, such as tutorials, has not kept pace with the effort to bring new specifcation modules to remmendation status. In some cases the market has moved to fll these gaps, but there remains spe for XII to provide more help to developers and other users.

4.2 Ease of mparison

XBRL provides very few nstraints on the manner in which XBRL taxonomies (the dictionaries of terms that act as metadata for XBRL information documents) are produced and managed. This affects the mparability of XBRL documents when looking across taxonomies. This is, of urse, a problem that already exists in ordinary (paper based) fnancial and performance reporting. However, it should be an area in which XBRL can help. Some areas identifed for improvement include:

a.  The nature of the language means that different taxonomies might use the same name to mean different things or give different names to ncepts that are essentially the same. This places a burden of standardisation across anizations and nsumers that may use XBRL.

b.  Differences in taxonomies from year to year or between one jurisdiction and another mean that the value of a fact in one year (or region) cannot necessarily be straightforwardly mpared with its value in another year (or region) using XBRL. This is not a weakness of XBRL itself, but it remains a limitation on the value of the disclosures for mparative purposes.

4.3 Ease of nsumption

XBRL documents can ntain extremely valuable information about rporate or anizational performance. However, the standard was not designed to make extracting and analysing that information as easy as desirable. For example, the high level of normalisation within instance documents makes it easy to reuse information, but because metadata (such as labels and references) is stored elsewhere, i.e., in the disverable taxonomy set (DTS), it is relatively cumbersome to mbine different facts in a useful manner. There is an opportunity to nsider how intelligent processing of instance information might be possible without DTS processing to retrieve metadata.

5. The changing business and technical environment

Since the launch of XBRL 2.1 both business reporting and technologies have evolved rapidly. In order for XBRL to thrive in this changing environment it is necessary to ensure that it is technically well positioned to meet these challenges and opportunities.

5.1 Business

In an enomic climate that has shown its potential for great volatility, businesses seek to operate more effciently through rcing their administrative burdens, while a goal of investors and regulators is to maximise transparency and ease of analysis of business results and disclosures. The Securities and Exchange mission (SEC) now requires listed mpanies in the US to fle in XBRL, and makes the disclosures publicly available. Standard Business Reporting, which has the potential to increase effciency by massively rcing duplication among the ncepts that have to be captured and submitted to ernment, has been implemented in the herlands and is being implemented in Australia and other untries. Within the EC, the mittee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) has developed the REP (mmon solvency ratio reporting framework) and FINREP (fnancial reporting framework) XBRL projects.

Developments that have taken place in the felds of business intelligence, databases, languages, user interfaces and other standards are fuelling a greater demand for interoperability.

5.2 Technology

The 21st century is witnessing a transition from a world in which humans mmunicate with machines to a world in which machines mmunicate intelligently with each other. The Semantic Web is a development of the World Wide Web nsortium (W3C) that provides defnitions of information and services such that the web itself can use meaning to respond to requests generated either by humans or machines. SemWeb is based on a metadata model known as the Resource Description Framework (RDF); the vocabularies nstructed under this model are written using extensible knowledge representation languages such as RDF Schema and Web Ontology Language (OWL). ncepts are expressed using unique Uniform Resource Identifers (URIs), making it possible to disver and assemble information from different sources.

ncepts in XBRL also use URIs; and a variety of academic and experimental initiatives have shown that it is possible to subsume XBRL information into a broader set of SemWeb resources. It should be possible to optimise such mechanisms, and SemWeb resources themselves uld be used to enrich the semantics of XBRL taxonomies, with the particular advantage of intelligently

uniting numeric and non-numeric information.

While many are attracted by SemWeb and techniques such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) that underpin many Web based applications, a signifcant number of technologists are more likely to be interested in a range of more traditional technologies. The XSB is well aware that acunting software vendors and many end-users of fnancial information interact with performance information via database technologies as well as object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java. There are many large enterprises that, in addition to traditional SQL-based systems, rely on OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP)-based business intelligence systems. Making XBRL more interoperable with a broader set of technologies would lower the barriers to the wider adoption of the standard.

6. A way forward: goals, objectives and projects

Interest in XBRL is growing worldwide. To stimulate its aelerated and ultimately ubiquitous adoption, the XSB has identifed three goals to guide the technical development of XBRL over the next 5-10 years. These are:

Under these three headings, the XSB has drawn up a list of projects that uld be undertaken in pursuit of these goals with objectives that would add value to what XBRL already provides. Most of these are technical and fall squarely within the XSB’s remit; others are broader in spe and might best be pursued in njunction with the XII Best Practices Board (BPB) or other parts of the XII anization. The nature, mplexity, resource requirements and impact of any project that the XSB undertakes must be determined and nstantly reviewed in the light of trends in XBRL’s adoption, market requirements and the critically limiting availability of volunteer and paid resources to support them.

The XSB is currently ntemplating a range of projects across a spectrum of mplexity and impact. Priority among the projects under nsideration has not yet been determined.

The XSB seeks the views of members of the XBRL mmunity on the priority they would give to each of these projects, and the resources they would be prepared to mmit, in order to see them implemented.

We reiterate that this nsultation exercise is designed to help the XSB nsider the future technical direction of the XBRL specifcation through the production of a Strategic Development Plan. The plan will be produced in a deliberate, professional and nsultative manner, showing due regard for the importance of backward mpatibility. The exercise is being undertaken to ensure that the pace of XBRL adoption can be sustained and aelerated. It implies no uncertainty about the stability of the XBRL standard. XBRL works well and is being used in dozens of untries and by millions of mpanies. This paper is all about improving an already suessful and market-tested XBRL.

6.1 Making XBRL easier for developers

The XSB proposes:

To meet this goal, the XSB will nsider a number of projects that demonstrably rce the level of effort and learning that developers need to invest to beme profcient in using XBRL within their systems and applications.

Developers approaching the XBRL family of specifcations for the frst time face a steep learning curve. Options available to the XSB range from production of improved cational materials, enhancements to the existing specifcations and developing new and additional specifcations that provide different technical doorways into the use of XBRL. These objectives can be summarised under the headings of aessibility, real-life requirements and evolution.

■ Objective 1.1 A more aessible XBRL

Several initiatives uld be taken relatively quickly, without in any way altering the specifcation itself. Projects envisaged include:

a.  The development of an ‘XBRL Basics’ tutorial for developers that takes them through the standard’s featuresin a logical and progressive sequence.

b.  Technical support such as lab sessions at nferences, webinars and implementation guides.

c.  XBRL 2.1 is a large specifcation that can be diffcult to grasp in its entirety. For ease of use, it uld be partitioned into modules that can be assimilated one at a time. This effort would either be carried out in itsown right, or as a further piece of work carried out in njunction with one or more of the ‘Enhancement’ projects set out below (Objective 3).

d.  At the same time as c above, and without deprecating any existing features, the suite of specifcations uld be re-factored to make them more user-friendly and mprehensible.

■ Objective 1.2 Real life requirements.

Developers may fnd XBRL more aessible if a high quality requirements document was available that ntained use case examples that were fully traceable, with cross references, to the specifcation documents. This would involve:

a.  Identifcation and development of relevant XBRL use case examples.

b.  The production of a revised and mplete set of functional requirement documents.

c.  The clarifcation of ‘additional’ requirements that may arise in the application of XBRL but which are either out of spe for the specifcation (such as security or entity identifcation models) or currently under nsideration as requirements.

■ Objective 1.3 Evolution towards a well-adapted XBRL.

As discussed above, XBRL lacks a unifying model that can provide a standard reference point for implementations. This uld be addressed,  without affecting the stability of the specifcation, by building a higher-level abstract model in Unifed Modelling Language (UML). This model would provide a description of the ‘nouns and verbs’, or semantic elements, of XBRL.

With such a model it would be possible to develop additional standard representations of XBRL. These would involve other technologies that may be more aessible to a broad range of developers. The XSB envisages that this would be a 5-10 year project, again based upon resource availability that would build on the steps above. The model would inrporate modules that provide instructions for dealing with XBRL using some or all of the following:

■  XBRL native serialisation

■  SQL

■  OWL/RDF

■  API signature

In the XSB’s view this idea has signifcant merit. It would provide for a number of different, but mpletely interoperable, mechanisms for dealing with XBRL. It would require nsiderable planning, vision, and in particular, strong architectural skills that have not hitherto been nsistently available within the voluntary structure of the nsortium. It would, however, meet the initial goal of increasing the aessibility of XBRL to developers. In due urse, and if there were suffcient nsensus, this has the potential to form the basis of a broader and more fexible XBRL specifcation.

6.2 Making XBRL data more mparable across taxonomies

The XSB proposes:

Information represented in XBRL is initially defned in relation to a specifc XBRL taxonomy. The requirement and demand for mparing information between taxonomies is a more recent market realization. The existing specifcation provides limited support to mpare elements defned by different taxonomies, such as those representing acunting requirements within different jurisdictions. Opportunities exist to improve mparability in this ntext.

Acunting standards are designed to enurage nsistent use of ncepts across anizations operating in the same industry and across industries. National, and to a certain extent international acunting standards achieve this through defning disclosure frameworks that allow fnancial reports to be nstructed that use very similar terms, narrowly defned. XBRL taxonomies are models of domain ntent standards, facilitating automated mparison of reported facts from different mpanies wherever the fnancial ncepts nform to the principles and defnitions set out in the originating standards.

For instance, mparability bemes a diffcult and manual exercise as soon as fnancial reports based on different acunting standards need to be mpared. This is one reason the world is gradually moving to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) promulgated by the International Acunting Standards Board (IASB). However, the nvergence and adoption process is a lengthy one. Further, there will always be ‘national’ implementations of IFRS that diverge from the re standards, as well as industry mmon practices that tend to be national or regional in nature. The XSB must nclude that national acunting standards will be around for a decade or more.

XBRL models existing performance reporting ideas and frameworks. It does not change acunting or other performance reporting mechanisms: it allows them to be represented in a structured and re-usable format. XBRL can therefore do little to rectify innsistencies between reporting frameworks. If it merely models the authoritative frameworks, it will perpetuate the

existing ineffciencies associated with mparative analysis.

This problem is not academic: it is readily apparent looking across, for example, the IFRS and US GAAP taxonomies. Within national frameworks, frms of acuntants are working to extend, in a duplicative manner, basic taxonomies produced by ernment agencies for regulatory and securities reporting. The end result is a set of taxonomies, each representing ideas that for many purposes can be treated as identical, but which are silos of ncepts without links between them.

The XSB is interested in enhancing the underlying technology, and developing policies and/or mechanisms that can help foster mparability in XBRL taxonomies. The steps to achieving this include:

■ Objective 2.1 Requirements for mparability

The production of a set of requirements that include examples of the likely ways users will make mparisons between XBRL ncepts and facts. Necessary parts of such a study would include:

a.  clarifying the semantics of the different types of mparison

b.  determining the manner in which different meanings and different versions of ncepts need to interact

c.  examining the problem of anizational naming: anizations (entities) may use more than one name in different regions or change their names over time. parability would be enhanced if XBRL uld either use existing standards to represent the links between names that refer to the same entity, or inrporate such a mechanism natively

■ Objective 2.2 Taxonomy registries

Registry referencing within taxonomies would promote nsistency in the naming of equivalent ncepts across taxonomies, acting as a cross-reference for everyone.

The use of registries is mmon practice in many XML nsortia and ernment standardisation efforts. Their introduction has implications for both technology and process. The use of a registry uld either be relatively simple, emphasising the process aspects of the problem, or involve a new way to reference and maintain much of the metadata that is today ntained in local or web based, taxonomies. These metadata registries would allow, for example, national, or mpany-specifc ncepts to be easily identifed and adopted (via translation and the addition of relevant reference materials) for mparison purposes.

The XSB uld promote the establishment of such registries by:

a.  designing a framework for establishing taxonomy registries: A framework of this sort would need to support inheritance, promotion and extension between different registries, for example, a regulatory registry uld inherit defnitions and cross-references ntained in a national or international registry. The regulatory registry uld host extension elements provided by regulated mpanies. The regulatory registry uld defne links between extensions, asserting, for certain purposes, similarity across these individual pieces of metadata. If desirable, these ncepts and links uld be promoted into the national registry.

b.  working with the BPB to determine a set of processes that would ern the operation of XBRL metadata registries

c.  identifying and instantiating global dimensions, such as those relating to time, units and entity, for example, an XBRL metadata registry would need to ntain ISO representation of untry and currency des, but uld potentially be extended to capture entity identifcation measures used by various authorities

■ Objective 2.3 Namespace nsistency

Determining and supporting ways that XML namespaces can be used nsistently across XBRL taxonomies.

■ Objective 2.4 Profles

Explicitly defning taxonomy profles for specifc purposes, to avoid differences in the architectures of taxonomies that undermine mparability.

6.3 Simplifying XBRL information nsumption

The XSB proposes:

XBRL information is produced in the frst instance to nform to the defned requirements within a particular reporting framework. Where such information is available to others, there is nsiderable potential for it to be analysed in mbination with information of other types, both quantitative and qualitative, and from different sources.

Because of the precise and entity-specifc nature of the metadata referenced in XBRL instance documents, XBRL information may not lend itself easily to such analysis. In principle, it should be possible to map from the native XBRL data model into one that is better suited to the needs of the user and that requires far fewer database queries to assemble mplete defnitions of individual elements. Steps that uld be taken to facilitate this include:

■ Objective 3.1 Sping study

Exploring the requirements of nsumers (and potential nsumers) of XBRL data for as wide a range of uses as possible, documented as UML use cases.

■ Objective 3.2 Abstract model

nstructing an abstract model (or extending the model described in Objective 1.3, above) as a starting point for understanding the issues involved in mbining ntent from both XBRL and non-XBRL sources.

■ Objective 3.3 Metadata in the instance document

Where two or more facts in a document are related, inserting some metadata capturing the relationship into the document, so that languages such as XSLT uld provide a minimal rendering of the data without needing aess to the DTS for tree structure, labels, or data types.

■ Objective 3.4 nsumption object models

a.  To enable XBRL documents to be transformed using XSLT

b.  To enable XBRL documents to be interrogated using query languages such as XQuery, SQL and Sparql

c.  To defne the semantics of mbining multiple XBRL instance documents, where the taxonomies are innsistent.

7. nclusion

This paper has provided an overview of discussions ncerning the potential future technical direction of the XBRL specifcation. The XSB seeks the assistance of the XBRL mmunity in evaluating the goals set out above, prioritizing the projects that might be undertaken in pursuit of them and suggesting other routes toward the stated goals.

The support of the mmunity will also be a decisive factor in determining the level of volunteer and paid resources that the nsortium can mmit to these future endeavours. With your help the XSB intends to retain XBRL as a robust and fexible aid to business reporting and the nsumption of business information that will meet the challenges of the next decade and beyond.

Using the following questionnaire as a guide, please provide us with your thoughts on how these goals might best be achieved or use the ONLINE SURVEY at