XBRL
Known by its acronym XBRL, the Extensible Business Reporting Language (extensible business reporting language), stems from a proposal launched in 1998 by Charles Hoffman, an accounting expert and auditor, to simplify the automation of the exchange of financial information through the use of the XML language. The underlying idea behind this initiative was none other than to standardize the format in which financial information is distributed among the different providers and consumers.
The standard is administered by an international, not-for-profit consortium (XBRL International Incorporated) made up of approximately 450 organizations, including regulators, government agencies, consultancies, and software developers.
XBRL International, has been structured into national jurisdictions, which are organizations that are in charge, within their territorial scope, of promoting the adoption of XBRL and the development of those XBRL taxonomies that define the requirements of financial information to be exchanged within of a specific domain.
XBRL aims to standardize the format of business and financial information that circulates digitally. To do this, it is based on the definition of taxonomies, a set of metadata that describes the data to be reported, the format and structure that these have, as well as the relationships between said data. Technically, these taxonomies are XML schemas, which must comply with the standards established by the XBRL specification, published by XBRL International. Version 2.1 of said specification is currently in force.
On the other hand, the data we want to report, that is, the economic facts of an entity and a specific time period, are represented by what we call XBRL reports (Instances in English) which are technically files XML, which will refer to the taxonomy, XML schema, on which they are based.
XBRL Structure
XBRL is a language for documenting and defining data models based on XML and XSD schemas. Each XBRL Concept has a set of properties that include both properties inherited from XSD schemas and properties defined in the XBRL specification.
Semantic structure
The XBRL Infoset document defines a complete object model for XBRL that includes the characteristics and relationships of all objects among themselves. Said document is accessible on the XBRL International website in the section on Public Working Draft and has been created by a Spanish company mentioned below and whose contributions to the development of the XBRL standard include, among others, the specification of Dimensions 1.0...
Syntactic structure
It is made up of a variable number of XML files linked by the W3C XLink standard.
The set of files related by the rules described in the XBRL 2.1 specification is called DTS (Discoverable Taxonomy Set).
XBRL files:
- Label: Tags of each field, in several languages.
- Definition: Definition of the field.
- Presentation: Field presentation rules, precedence.
- Reference: Legal references, comments and notes on each field.
- Calculation: mathematical calculations and relationships between fields.
- Other: Other types of relationships are also allowed as long as they meet XLink.
Finally, an XML file will contain the numeric and non-numeric data of each field and will reference the taxonomy files.