Digital Financial Reporting

I have created a prototype SBRM representation using XBRL.  There are many different ways to represent ontology-like things.  I am using XBRL for this representation.  Others will likely use OWL.

My prototype is based on this informal representation of a framework for a financial report.

The the first prototypes created by the OMG working group for SBRM were represented using UML (see page 38 of my Logical Theory Describing a Business Report). What will become very, very clear if the SBRM is represented using both XBRL and OWL is the expressive power of XBRL, the expressive power of OWL, and the real differences between the two representation approaches.  What it is looking like to me is that in order for XBRL to match the expressive power of OWL, XBRL has to re-invent a lot of which already exists in OWL. Whether that makes sense is to be determined.

Here is what I have so far: (note that this is not properly modularized as of yet; this connection approach is optimized for editing of the XBRL taxonomy not using it)

• Arcroles: First, I defined arcroles using XBRL that will be used to represent relations.
• Terms: Second, I defined terms. Here are those terms in human-readable form (i.e. this includes relations)
• Relations: Third, I defined relations. Here is a close approximation of those relations in human readable form.
• Assertions: It is unclear to me right now if the SBRM will have assertions.  I think that it will not; assertions are defined within an implementation of the SBRM.
• Instance: The SBRM will not have an instance.
• Narrative of Conceptulization: Human-readable narrative that describes a financial report in terms a business professional can understand.

Here is an implementation of the SBRM, used to represent a reporting scheme and several reports prepared using that reporting scheme.  I am using the IPSAS reporting scheme.  I am using the method that I documented.  And this is the resulting implementation, the XBRL taxonomy, the XBRL Formulas, all of the other assertions and the XBRL instance of the report.

I will tie all of these pieces together better using the document Illustrating the Benefits of a Best Practice Method for Creating XBRL-based Financial Reports.

For reference purposes, here is a prototype of SBRM represented in OWL (this is a work in progress). You can download and install Protege which will load this.  This is a screen shot of what it looks like thus far in Protege.

That is it for now.  Stay tuned!