Updated Metapatterns, Business Use Cases, Examples

Sunday, August 1, 2010 at 01:24PM
Charlie in Business Reporting Logical Model, Business use cases, Creating Investor Friendly SEC XBRL Filings, General Information, Metapatterns, Modeling Business Information Using XBRL, XBRL General Information, XBRLS, basic example, comprehensive example, patterns

I have created an updated set of metapatterns, business use cases (i.e. patterns), comprehensive example, and basic example of using XBRL. I have nurtured these examples over the years and have not adjusted them to comply with the Business Reporting Logical Model created by the XBRL International's Taxonomy Architecture (TA) working group, of which I am a member.  These examples are constructed to help come up with that Business Reporting Logical Model and to prove that model.

You can find this information here in various stages of completion. If anyone has ideas on things they might like to see, please contact me directly and I will see what I can do to add what you feel you might need if it makes sense.

Creating these ultra-high quality (my opinion, I can back it up) examples has been a long process. Over the years I have had a lot of help from a lot of people. While I created these examples and take full responsibility for any errors (although I have validated each of these using three different XBRL processors), I would like to thank those who have helped in the past, these could not exist without their help. At this stage, I would particularly like to thank Herman Fisher and Frederic Chapus, both of UBmatrix, for their help with XBRL Formulas. I would also like to thank Cliff Binstock of XBRL Cloud for his help in generating his fact tables and getting those converted to the Business Reporting Logical Model. I would also like to thank those who are members of the XBRL International Taxonomy Architecture working group for their efforts to create and drum up support for this work. (We still need more members.)

• Metapatterns: Basic building blocks from which the Business Use Cases were built. All of the business use cases can be distilled down to these metapatterns. (Complete.)
• Business Use Cases: Follow the metapatterns. Contributed to figuring out what the metapatterns were. (At this point I have 11 of about 30 business use cases completed.)
• Basic Example: Takes the metapatterns and puts them all into one basic XBRL taxonomy which is quite simple, but shows how the metapatterns relate to one another. Tests the relations between the metapatterns. (Complete except for detailed documentation.)
• Comprehensive Example: Puts each of the business use cases into one XBRL taxonomy and XBRL instance, testing the interrelation of the business use cases.  Also, intended to look like a financial report; but not as complex as a real financial report. (Still have a ways to go on this, I want to finish the business use cases first.)

Keep checking back if you are interested in this sort of thing.  XBRL is not going away any time soon. While this information is quite detailed, I contend that it is worth diving in. Investing in understanding these details pays dividends in many different ways. Also, again, feedback is welcomed. Good ideas to make it even easier to use in particular.

If you are familiar with XBRLS, this new set of examples is intended to replace XBRLS.  Use this stuff instead.

Article originally appeared on XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting (http://xbrl.squarespace.com/).