An XBRL taxonomy provides a definition of a set of financial terms and metrics, together with how these are calculated, labeled and arrayed for presentation within a prescribed set of statements, disclosures, and notes -- artifacts that constitute the reporting requirements under a given regulatory regime (e.g., SEC, Taxation).
As might be expected, XBRL taxonomies capture rich and voluminous amounts of content. Diverse formalisms are used which help represent content compactly within modular structures. However they do not make for easy reading.
We aim to bridge the wide gap that exists between taxonomy development tools on the one hand, and instance document viewers on the other. The former are, quite rightly, focused on the "how" of taxonomy content entry and structure; the latter on the presentation of business "facts" with little to no explaination offered.
Our guides mine all available information provided by taxonomy developers. Our goal is Taxonomy Transparency, that is to say the presentation of financial accounting concepts and inter-relationships in a manner that contains complexity and lends itself to ready understanding, intermixing text, hypertext and diagrammatic representations as appropriate.
All information pertaining to a given concept is gathered from the XBRL taxonomy and its many modules into an associated Concept Page. For ease of reference, pages are indexed by:
A built-in search engine returns a ranked list of concept pages the labels or reference citations of which match any/all keywords of a search query.
As a taxonomy permits, each concept is related to other concepts by means of embedded diagrams that convey the meaning of the relationships involved. Thus, for example, a concept corresponding to a line item of the Balance Sheet Statement embeds diagrams of the potentially many formulas by which it is computed from antecedent line items. As shown in the diagram to the left, each antecedent line item is represented by an associated button providing input to a summation operator. Line items to which the subject concept serves as input are represented by their respective buttons.
Similarly, the position of a line item within the Balance Sheet presentation hierarchy is depicted by one or more presentation diagrams, an example of which is shown above right. By pressing buttons it is possible to navigate up and down a chain of related concepts easily, along a multitude of dimensions.
A typical financial statement may encompass a hundred or more inputs, and seemingly as many roll-ups, or intermediate calculations. The full sweep of the calculations involved is lost to most amidst the minutia of individual line item calculations. In recognition of this difficulty, all calculations underlying financial statements are rendered via large-scale, navigable and interactive Financial Schematics. A thumbnail rendering of just such a schematic is depicted here.
Equivalent schematics are provided for every presentation hierarchy, hypercube, the Discoved Taxonomy Set (DTS), and more. PDF versions of every schematic are available in black and white and also color, for output to large-format printers and plotters.
All information pertaining to a given concept is gathered from the XBRL taxonomy and its many modules into an associated Concept Page. For ease of reference, pages are indexed by:
A built-in search engine returns a ranked list of concept pages the labels or reference citations of which match any/all keywords of a search query.
As a taxonomy permits, each concept is related to other concepts by means of embedded diagrams that convey the meaning of the relationships involved. Thus, for example, a concept corresponding to a line item of the Balance Sheet Statement embeds diagrams of the potentially many formulas by which it is computed from antecedent line items. As shown in the diagram to the left, each antecedent line item is represented by an associated button providing input to a summation operator. Line items to which the subject concept serves as input are represented by their respective buttons.
Similarly, the position of a line item within the Balance Sheet presentation hierarchy is depicted by one or more presentation diagrams, an example of which is shown above right. By pressing buttons it is possible to navigate up and down a chain of related concepts easily, along a multitude of dimensions.
A typical financial statement may encompass a hundred or more inputs, and seemingly as many roll-ups, or intermediate calculations. The full sweep of the calculations involved is lost to most amidst the minutia of individual line item calculations. In recognition of this difficulty, all calculations underlying financial statements are rendered via large-scale, navigable and interactive Financial Schematics. A thumbnail rendering of just such a schematic is depicted here.
Equivalent schematics are provided for every presentation hierarchy, hypercube, the Discoved Taxonomy Set (DTS), and more. PDF versions of every schematic are available in black and white and also color, for output to large-format printers and plotters.
As a taxonomy permits, each concept is related to other concepts by means of embedded diagrams that convey the meaning of the relationships involved. Thus, for example, a concept corresponding to a line item of the Balance Sheet Statement embeds diagrams of the potentially many formulas by which it is computed from antecedent line items. As shown in the diagram to the left, each antecedent line item is represented by an associated button providing input to a summation operator. Line items to which the subject concept serves as input are represented by their respective buttons.
Similarly, the position of a line item within the Balance Sheet presentation hierarchy is depicted by one or more presentation diagrams, an example of which is shown above right. By pressing buttons it is possible to navigate up and down a chain of related concepts easily, along a multitude of dimensions.
A typical financial statement may encompass a hundred or more inputs, and seemingly as many roll-ups, or intermediate calculations. The full sweep of the calculations involved is lost to most amidst the minutia of individual line item calculations. In recognition of this difficulty, all calculations underlying financial statements are rendered via large-scale, navigable and interactive Financial Schematics. A thumbnail rendering of just such a schematic is depicted here.
Equivalent schematics are provided for every presentation hierarchy, hypercube, the Discoved Taxonomy Set (DTS), and more. PDF versions of every schematic are available in black and white and also color, for output to large-format printers and plotters.
A typical financial statement may encompass a hundred or more inputs, and seemingly as many roll-ups, or intermediate calculations. The full sweep of the calculations involved is lost to most amidst the minutia of individual line item calculations. In recognition of this difficulty, all calculations underlying financial statements are rendered via large-scale, navigable and interactive Financial Schematics. A thumbnail rendering of just such a schematic is depicted here.
Equivalent schematics are provided for every presentation hierarchy, hypercube, the Discoved Taxonomy Set (DTS), and more. PDF versions of every schematic are available in black and white and also color, for output to large-format printers and plotters.
Each taxonomy guide is implemented as a separate Rich Internet Application [RIA] that relies on proven and ubiquitous Flex/Flash/PDF technologies from Adobe. As such guides can be activated from any PC endowed with network access and a web browser, and do not require software installation. By virtue of their structure, guides lend themselves to integration with a variety of other DHTML, RIA or desktop applications (e.g. XBRL instance document viewers).
Guide pages and schematics are obtained on-the-fly from servers residing within the "Internet Cloud", in accordance with the increasingly popular "software-as-a-Service [SaaS] model. Alternatively, as warranted, a guide may be deployed on enterprise servers secured behind corporate firewalls.
Guide pages and schematics are obtained on-the-fly from servers residing within the "Internet Cloud", in accordance with the increasingly popular "software-as-a-Service [SaaS] model. Alternatively, as warranted, a guide may be deployed on enterprise servers secured behind corporate firewalls.
XBRL taxonomies are complex artifacts assembled by multi-disciplinary teams that include financial domain experts, computer scientists, taxonomy architects, localization experts, and so on. Sophisticated taxonomy development tools are available to assist them in their work. These are tools focused on the "how" of taxonomy construction, tools that lay bare the taxonomy building blocks that must be manipulated during taxonomy construction, and that can perform syntactic as well as some level of semantic validation of the resulting XML artifacts.
A taxonomy under development will typically undergo some level of "internal" review at selected development milestones. Prior to introduction, to gain the acceptance of its intended user community, a taxonomy must undergo review by a much larger peer group of experts. The constitution of the review teams, which may be open to outsiders, is now strongly biased in favor of domain experts, who must look for omissions, errors and inconsistencies at a semantic level. Such experts typically prefer to operate at a conceptual level far removed from the minutia of complex xml markup and xbrl structures about which that may know little, and wish to know less. Accordingly these reviewers require tools that present the concepts and relationships the taxonomy aims to define at a high conceptual level -- in our case one that contains complexity by leveraging modern RIA interface technologies harnessed to the evocative power of diagrams and other visualizations.
Consider engaging our services during taxonomy development and review, so that we may provide your experts with timely and useful renderings and visualizations of the taxonomy's semantic payload, at selected intermediate milestones, and also during the final review iterations. By empowering experts with tools best suited to the task at hand, the review process will converge more quickly and confidently toward acceptance. Finally, the agencies sponsoring development will appreciate receiving live, interactive and accurate documentation in addition to the traditional "faceless" deliverables of XML schemas and linkbases.
A taxonomy under development will typically undergo some level of "internal" review at selected development milestones. Prior to introduction, to gain the acceptance of its intended user community, a taxonomy must undergo review by a much larger peer group of experts. The constitution of the review teams, which may be open to outsiders, is now strongly biased in favor of domain experts, who must look for omissions, errors and inconsistencies at a semantic level. Such experts typically prefer to operate at a conceptual level far removed from the minutia of complex xml markup and xbrl structures about which that may know little, and wish to know less. Accordingly these reviewers require tools that present the concepts and relationships the taxonomy aims to define at a high conceptual level -- in our case one that contains complexity by leveraging modern RIA interface technologies harnessed to the evocative power of diagrams and other visualizations.
Consider engaging our services during taxonomy development and review, so that we may provide your experts with timely and useful renderings and visualizations of the taxonomy's semantic payload, at selected intermediate milestones, and also during the final review iterations. By empowering experts with tools best suited to the task at hand, the review process will converge more quickly and confidently toward acceptance. Finally, the agencies sponsoring development will appreciate receiving live, interactive and accurate documentation in addition to the traditional "faceless" deliverables of XML schemas and linkbases.
Consider engaging our services during taxonomy development and review, so that we may provide your experts with timely and useful renderings and visualizations of the taxonomy's semantic payload, at selected intermediate milestones, and also during the final review iterations. By empowering experts with tools best suited to the task at hand, the review process will converge more quickly and confidently toward acceptance. Finally, the agencies sponsoring development will appreciate receiving live, interactive and accurate documentation in addition to the traditional "faceless" deliverables of XML schemas and linkbases.
The adoption of XBRL is fast becoming a global phenomenon. Still, the world is a big place, and societies remain divided by language, alphabet, iconographies, and business practices. For these reasons we welcome integration partners and resellers who can help us negotiate these cultural differences in order to better serve regional or industry needs. Partners such as:
Partners are welcome to leverage our existing web and e-commerce infrastructure, or use their own. Guides are skinnable. Consequently their look and feel can be altered for branding purposes, and in order to suit the differing tastes of diverse user communities.
Sponsors agree to pay a yearly subsidy. In exchange, the sponsor is prominently acknowledged, and provided with screen real-estate to place a logo and messages promoting its interests, services, or products
Sponsors agree to pay a yearly subsidy. In exchange, the sponsor is prominently acknowledged, and provided with screen real-estate to place a logo and messages promoting its interests, services, or products