eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)

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Discussion

eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) provides a global standard for digital business reporting. XBRL makes business reporting computer-readable by tagging reported facts with concepts, contexts, units, dimensions, and taxonomy-defined meanings.

XBRL supports report exchange, validation, comparison, analysis, and regulatory processing. XBRL reports use taxonomies to define reporting concepts and the relationships among them. XBRL instances provide the reported facts that conform to those taxonomies.

XBRL differs from Standard Business Report Model (SBRM). SBRM provides a model for business report structure, report facts, dimensions, calculations, and validation logic. XBRL provides a standards-based reporting technology used to exchange and process business report information.

XBRL also differs from Report Semantics. Report semantics defines the meaning of reported facts, dimensions, reporting contexts, report structures, rules, and interpretation constraints. XBRL expresses selected report semantics in a machine-readable reporting format.

Definition

standard for machine-readable business reporting that represents reported facts using taxonomy-defined concepts, contexts, units, dimensions, and relationships

Source

XBRL International XBRL standard descriptions, specialised for use in the FX Demo Reference Architecture.

Note

XBRL is not equivalent to a report. XBRL provides a representation technology for machine-readable business reporting. The report consists of the reported information, facts, dimensions, contexts, and the governing report model.

Example

An FX regulatory report expressed in XBRL identifies a reported fact such as notionalAmount, associates the fact with a reporting entity, reporting period, currency unit, jurisdictional context, and taxonomy-defined concept, and supports automated validation and comparison.

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