On the design of an XML-schema based application for business reporting : an XBRL schema perspective

Abstract

A markup language for business reporting must satisfy many demanding criteria: readable by novices, extendable by users, minimum payload overheads, and a uniform graph structure to enable validation of document instance with minimal programming effort. To be elegant and robust it must be based on a model that reflects the intricacies of business reporting, and to be efficient in terms of maintenance it must be modular in structure. We suggest the skeleton of a derivative of the XBRL that exhibits most of the criteria stated above which uses the basic semantic structure provided in its specification and the associated C&I taxonomy. Our proposal provides domain-specific tags so that even the source documents are very readable. We provide a proof-of-concept schema for the Balance Sheet (using the XBRL C&I taxonomy) as an instance of a canonical generic labeled graph model for any financial statement. We also provide an algorithm for the validation of such labeled directed graph representation of a financial statement and its implementation in the programming language Java.