XBRL in 2014

a Technical View

Author
Shilpa Dhobale
Senior Manager, XBRL Taxonomy & Consulting Practice, IRIS

In the last newsletter for 2014, XII CEO John Turner presented a neat summary of what
happened during this year and provided exciting insights for the future. As we await the
developments in the coming 2015, here is a technical summary covering the new
specications and documents released by XII in 2014, which everyone in the XBRL
community should take note of.
There have been a couple of specications which became nal recommendation in 2014.
The key ones are 1. Table linkbase specication was released as recommendation in March 2014. This
specication governs the creation of tables as part of taxonomy, which can be used
either for rendering the instance documents or as front end interfaces for creating the
instances. Most of the taxonomies which have table linkbases are probably using the
earlier version of the specication. The ongoing Bank of Mauritius implementation
could be of one the early users of the latest specication.
2. Extensible enumeration was released as recommendation in October 2014. This
specication allows reuse of domain members to work as the nite list which can be
allowed for primary reporting concepts. The use of this specication will enable
dening and subsequently rendering of enumerated values in multiple languages.
The Climate Change Taxonomy 2014 (CDP) has implemented this specication.
There are quite a number of specications which are in public consultation stage or just a
step away from being a nal recommendation. Please provide your feedback and
comments, so that these get the status of recommendation in the coming year. Few of the
specications currently out for review are:
1. XBRL GL Framework has been designed to serve the purpose of handling more
detailed and granular nancial, business and other information of an organisation.
Using XBRL GL any kind of information, be it in chart of accounts, transaction
information, journal entries, etc. can be represented in standardised manner. Update
in the tuple denition model as per XBRL 2.1 and inclusion of Japanese labels are the
main enhancements in the new XBRL GL Framework which is out as candidate
recommendation.
2. The Formula specication is now widely implemented in many taxonomies to dene
the business and validation rules. To specify the importance or the criticality of errors
in the event the business rule is not cleared, a new specication i.e. Assertion
Severity has been included as part of the Formula specication suit. With this
specication it is possible to categorise the rules as ERROR, WARNING or OK. Till
now this classication had to be stored outside taxonomy and hence some custom
development was required in XBRL software or while implementing the taxonomy.

3. The Transformation Rules are required for Inline XBRL documents. These rules are
to be used to convert the content that appears in the Inline XBRL document, as per
types used in XBRL instance documents. The rules thus help in extracting the XBRL
data from an Inline XBRL document. The Transformation Rules Registry 3.0 is
currently out as candidate recommendation.
4. Taxonomy package has been developed so as to provide a standard format for
providing locations, both global and local, of the taxonomy les. The Taxonomy
Package also includes the details of entry-points and hence can be referred by the
applications to identify and process the entry-points. This specication is currently
under public working draft stage.
5. Recently XII published requirements document for ordering of networks in the
taxonomy. This specication is aimed to facilitate ordering multiple independent
networks and within these network, ordering of root level concepts.
It should be noted that apart from the above mentioned specications, there have been a
few more updates. The XBRL 2.1 Conformance suite has been updated. The task forces
of XII have published artefacts and guidance documents which surely would be of use to
stakeholders involved in XBRL implementation. We recommend all our readers to
provide their feedback and comments to the XII and make their initiative a success. Last
but not the least, please take the XII market survey and help XII to prioritise providing
guidance on XBRL Implementation.
Wish you all a very happy and prosperous New Year 2015!