Digital Financial Reporting

I think that I have definitive proof that SEC XBRL can be made vastly easier than it is today. So what is the proof? OK, here you go:

• SEC XBRL Logical Model:  The SEC has no real official logical model of the business semantics used in XBRL filings.  But, that does not mean that a model cannot be created. In fact, anyone desiring to make XBRL easier for business uses to make use of will implement a logical model. Creating or extending XBRL taxonomies and building your SEC XBRL filings at the XBRL syntax level in your application? That is because your software vendor has not implemented a logical model.
• SEC Semantics and Business Reporting Logical Model Semantics Mapping to the XBRL Syntax: This is a mapping of the semantics of SEC XBRL filings (cross referenced to the Business Reporting Logical Model) to the XBRL syntax implemented by the SEC.
• Straw man Implementation of the Business Reporting Logical Model: This may be hard for people to grasp, but let me do my best to explain.  This straw man implementation of the Business Reporting Logical Model basically implements the "stuff in the boxes" of that logical model.  I made the straw man implementation work the way I would expect to work in my prototypes.  The SEC XBRL Logical Model simply changes two things: the names of the boxes and the XBRL syntax used to implement it.

Truthfully, I don't know if most people will see what I am getting at here.  I am going to go one final step. That step is to modify my hypercube viewer application (see the straw man implementation) and then run one or two of the better SEC XBRL filings (i.e. they are building [Table]s correctly) and see what it looks like in my hypercube viewer.  I may not even need to modify the hypercube viewer.

The only problem with this is that now each vendor who implements a logical model to make XBRL easier for business users will do so in a proprietary manner because there is no global standard business reporting logical model yet. Well, it just may be that this is part of the evolution XBRL will need to go through.