Business Process Management (BPM) - Seminars

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XBRL: The Relational Model Strikes Back

David Edmond

Abstract

XBRL is an "international standard for the communication of corporate financial and performance data". In 2004, its effects were forecast to be pervasive and positive, but now it is in the very trough of the Gartner hype cycle. So, now is also the time to see what it really has to offer.

An XBRL report is an XML document typically consisting of a set of simple numeric facts. Each fact measures an entity (e.g. QUT), at a certain point in time (e.g. Dec 2006), and with regard to some accounting concept (e.g. property, plant and equipment). The concepts that may appear in a given report are described in XML Schema documents called taxonomies.

XBRL has been described as an "Attack of the killer accountants", but it might also be termed the "Revenge of the Relational Model". XBRL has been designed to achieve extensibility by ripping apart the hiearchical structures of the XML data model, and replacing these with simple "flat" structures, albeit still tagged in XML format. The connectivity that is lost in this process is reinstated by extensive use of XLink. The resulting collection of XML Schema files and XLink linkbases is called a Discoverable Taxonomy Set.

In this talk, we will examine some of the motivating factors behind XBRL, and analyse a simple XBRL report and its associated taxonomies.