XBRL releases a range of technical requirements documents

21 June 2005

XBRL International has released a range of technical requirements documents in an important step towards defining specification modules to handle key areas of functionality.

The requirements statements can be found on http://www.xbrl.org/SpecRequirements/ and are:

Formula Requirements (Candidate Recommendation status)

This document sets out requirements for handling formulas in XBRL which would enable applications to perform validation on data types and values, apply consistency checks, test data quality, augment the data with calculated values and possibly corrections, and provide feedback to the producing application that indicates the nature and severity of problems encountered.

Function Requirements (Candidate Recommendation status)

This document sets out requirements for functions to aid in processing XBRL facts and contexts appearing in XBRL instances. The aim is to standardise the inputs and outputs of common operations to support future XBRL specifications.

Dimensional Taxonomy Requirements (Public Working Draft status)

This document sets out the business requirements for taxonomy authors to define and restrict the dimensional information which instance authors may use in the segment and scenario elements of the context element of XBRL instance documents. Examples of such dimensional information include financial data provided by country or by industry sector.

Comments on these requirements statements are welcome and should be directed to the chair of the International Specification Working Group at spec@xbrl.org. Members of XBRL can submit comments direct to the Spec Working Group discussion forum and are encouraged to participate fully in the group.

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