Achieving High Expressiveness on the Ontology Spectrum with XBRL
Thursday, May 9, 2019 at 08:31AM
Charlie in Digital Financial Reporting

I have mentioned the ontology spectrum. I have mentioned that "AI is taxonomies and ontologies coming to life", meaning that artificial intelligence will only work to the extent that you have high-quality and extensive set of metadata.  For example, this framework.

But, can you provide this high-quality and extensive set of metadata using XBRL?  If so, how the heck do you do that?  Well, here is the answer to this question: Yes you can and here is how you do it.

First, have a look a this graphic.  In particular, look at the gray boxes at the bottom.  I will show you how to achieve each of those items on the ontology spectrum using XBRL by providing an existing example that works.  (I am going to take as many examples as possible from my IPSAS prototype.)

If you cannot express what you need to express using the basic parts of XBRL 2.1, XBRL Dimensions, and XBRL Formula; there is one additional option.  That option is XBRL Generic Links.  With XBRL Generic Links you can define pretty much anything you want. Generic Links, like XBRL itself, uses XLink to define functionality.

Also, I would point out that XBRL complies with ISO Standards since XBRL is based on the W3C XML 1.0 technical syntax and XML is SGML:  (ISO 8879:1986 Information processing -- Text and office systems -- Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)

Further, XBRL is complies with W3C standards because XBRL uses the W3C standards: XML, XML Schema, XLink, XPath, XPointer, XML Base, and XML Names.

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