XBRL Spain is looking for IT Architectural proposals suitable to be potentially developed as Open Source deliverables by way of Public Fundraising.

The goal is facilitate the capture, analysis, creation and viewing of XBRL reports, to be used by citizens, small investors, IT SMEs and academia, as well as a help for implementing XBRL within supply chains while rcing regulatory burden. This is an initiative to plement and llaborate with existing solutions in the areas in which the current offerings are limited or inexistent, especially on dimensional taxonomies.
The rrect IT architecture is a critical suess factor in any IT development. Therefore, XBRL Spain, via this Inaugural IT Architectural petition, invites XBRL IT experts worldwide to propose IT architectures to be potentially used as basis for future developments. ntact point: info@openfiling.info

Call for proposals: Submissions by August 25th, 2011, 08:00 UTC, in the following five categories:

1.IT architecture to develop an open source nverter from legacy formats to XBRL reports. It must be customizable for each XBRL taxonomy.

2.IT architecture to develop an open source downloader from XBRL instance documents into a relational database. It must be easily customizable for each XBRL taxonomy.

3.IT architecture to develop a generic open source human-puter interface for viewing XBRL reports. Proposed interfaces: HTML and Spreadsheet.

4.IT architecture for guidance to Supervisors and Reporting Entities on XBRL implementation for Primary Reporting.

5.Free choice: Any other IT relevant ic related with the business case described in the role of XBRL solutions.

Call for sponsors: Sponsors are warmly invited to enhance the awards, or suggest additional categories.

Call for volunteers to join the Adjudication Panel.

IT architects are warmly invited to join the adjudication panel, -chaired by Prof. Dr. Enrique Bonsón, XBRL Spain Vice-President, IJDAR editor, and Herm Fischer, XBRL Standards Board, XBRL Formulae WG Chair. Volunteers are also sought to help with the ancillary documentation for those proposals that will go forward for development with Public Funding.

Intellectual property:

As all the proposals are to be posted in full for public domain, a Creative mons BY ( BY) license or equivalent is a mandatory requirement.

anization

These Open Awards are anized by the non-for-profit anization XBRL Spain with the help of the non-for-profit anization OpenFiling.

Rules

All the rules and other relevant information will be published in www.xbrl.es and www.openfiling.info. Questions to info@openfiling.info

The proposals should be submitted identified with a keyword, but on an anonymous basis to info@openfiling.info

The authors should send an independent e-mail with the keyword and identification of the authors (or with instructions of not be identified) to info@xbrl.es

The decision of the Adjudication Panel is final. Some categories may be declared as having no submissions of value by the Adjudication Panel.

All the proposals with merit (as decided by the Adjudication Panel) will be published in www.xbrl.es and www.openfiling.info for public domain with BY license or equivalent

Disclaimer:

The anizers are not responsible for lost, late or misdirected entries and reserve the right to cancel this petition at any time. The anizers will assume no responsibility for any damages incurred by your participation at this event. Your participation at such event is voluntary and will in no way hold the anizers responsible for any claim arising from your participation. The anizers may change the rules in any moment. The interpretation of the rules by the anizers is final.

The role of XBRL: eXtensible Business Reporting Language

Regulators and Authorities in Financial and Acunting fields around the world have engaged in a huge effort harmonising, implementing and developing methods for the reporting and disclosure of Business Reports by using the open standard XBRL. This standard is based on two kinds of documents, instance documents (with actual data) and taxonomies (data model). Instance documents are the business reports, to be interpreted using taxonomies as a guide. Taxonomies are defined by regulators, such as the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, the USA Securities and Exchange mission or the European Banking Authority.

Taxonomies are the guidelines which capture the hierarchy of ncepts, their meanings, dimensional interrelations and validation rules. Many of the reports filed to the regulators are available to the public on the Web, in XBRL format.

The method in which each national supervisory authority or regulator receives, validates, and aepts the regulatory information is quite similar untry to untry. As the functionality is basically the same, the IT solutions in place are not very different. The formats, however, are as variable as human nature. Each programmer feels superb reinventing the wheel of Digital ntent format. Basically, the objective of the XBRL harmonisation is creating a “lingua franca” in financial business reporting to avoid that each Digital ntent will be transmitted using a difference format.

However, there are two speeds, thus creating a Digital Divide. Some financial sectors are more advanced than others, for instance, the European Banking Regulators already started the XBRL initiative in 2005 while the European Business Register is quite incipient. But the main Digital divide is among untries. The empirical evidence demonstrates that a untry with higher GDP (in absolute or relative terms) obtains benefits from XBRL in different supply chains, such as enhanced financial reporting or improved regulatory reporting. Some sectors and less favoured untries are still out of the XBRL initiative for Digital ntent. The implementation of the XBRL standard for harmonisation in Digital ntent for regulatory reporting requires a vision extending beyond the mercial vendors alone, as the IT llaboration and help from the public sector clearly mitigates risks. The llaboration between the private sector improving the existing advanced solutions and creating new ones, oriented to advanced sectors and untries shall be pensated with a public initiative oriented to mitigate the Digital Divide and provide equal opportunities, pensating less favoured sectors and untries.

It will also be studied how to include XBRL teaching in Financial Management curriculums both at Universities and Business Schools and how to create and disseminate openly XBRL knowledge in an effective way, using easily aessible XBRL IT tools.

The last, but not the least, ic is an open question about XBRL: how to lower the barrier to entry in providing advanced services via XBRL to citizens and SMEs?

Open Source as facilitator and plement of XBRL solutions

In recent years, Free / Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) have developed as a novel form of llaborative production. Since its origin as llaboration between individual volunteers, it has seen tremendous suess, both in terms of the mercial and technical strengths of the produced software itself, but also as a model of anisation and development. In particular, it has received much attention for two reasons: the software itself may be cheaper to use and support than proprietary software applications; and free software may be a novel, st effective and highly responsive way to develop and sustain applications specific to specific needs. The send point takes advantage of the modifiable nature of free software, which makes it suitable for adaptation to local, regional or nationwide needs.

Building a munity of local ICT sector, users and developers (munity of practice and development) is the best way to disseminate it and achieve project sustainability and evolution around this project. This proposal is oriented to investigate IT architectures as the first step to the creation of a suite of open source XBRL tools and an off the shelf IT skeleton which is easily customizable for help to closing the Digital gap in Primary reporting, from the reporting entity to the supervisor, from the web to the citizen, from the supervisors to the small investor.

Such a solution should be easily customised in different untries, languages, ntext for the National Supervisory Authorities and Regulators as a front-end between the reporting entities and the supervisor. This would create a huge enomy of scale by reusing the same resource, made available by way of taxpayer’s money, in different ntexts. No generic/mercial “off the shelf” solutions are widely available, because each big regulator has their own needs. The small regulators don’t have sometimes the financial resources to develop equivalent modern Digital ntent frameworks.

While big untries or financial sectors with mature markets have an abundant supply of XBRL knowledge and solutions, other untries or sectors lack an equivalent supply. One of the reasons is also the lack of open source XBRL de available for academic investigation. Most of the research is carried out in mercial panies, oriented to create products for the market. The lack of open source proof of ncept material is not ntributing to the investigation of XBRL in academia. This also creates delays in the adoption of XBRL in non-financial sectors and less favoured untries.

By its very nature, the best approach for the development of these tools is an open source research project, as it provides the maximum flexibility as each case is customized via the de being adapted to the particular nditions. Some formal investigations may have a role here to formally describe the transformations needed between the free data formats and the XBRL taxonomies ntaining meta-data. This kind of tools has proved extremely suessful in the implementation of XBRL in several reporting frameworks, and the goal is creating a suite of open source viewers, skeletons and tools to be reused in different scenarios by citizens, entrepreneurs and SMEs.

llaboration as critical suess factor

The llaboration between the private sector improving the existing advanced solutions and creating new ones, oriented to advanced untries shall be pensated with a public initiative oriented to mitigate the Digital Divide and provide equal opportunities, pensating less favoured sectors and untries. An open source IT skeleton for primary reporting infrastructure shall leverage local IT industry for implementation and customisation local requirements. Using this solution as the backbone, the national supervisory authorities shall be in a position to implement harmonised reporting using XBRL standards on time and budget.

The llaboration of IT architects is of the utmost importance in this initiative, with the ultimate goals of improving the transparency in financial markets and a fair aess to the financial information to citizens and SMEs.