Financial reporting is a system that is comprised of many interconnected parts. Today, many of these interconnections are missed because too many people look at financial reporting systems as silos of functionality. Understanding Digital helps readers understand these interconnections, describes those interconnections, and explains how to use XBRL formatted information to physically represent those interconnections in machine-readable form.
This is a small example of a financial report. Notice that everything is connected to other things:
(Click image for larger view)Using the information above, software can transform the information into something more useful to humans that looks like this:
(Click image)No magic. Everything is driven by carefully crafted machine-readable information like this.