XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

Proficiency is the measure of capacity to use something to one’s benefit. Few accountants are literate when it comes to logic and logical reasoning.  Being literate should not really be the goal though; the goal should be fluency and mastery. Logic  and logical reasoning are skills; that skill involves the selection and application of the appropriate rules of logic to specific situations. This blog post was inspired by the article, Elements of Logic .  I have brainstormed how to explain logical systems before; see this early version  which grabs ideas from about 14 different inputs and this revision which starts to simplify things a bit.  The Book of Proof  has a decent explanation and also provides additional details. This was my last best attempt to explain the elements of logic . There tends to be several different sources of explanations of the elements of logic: philosophy, ontology and knowledge engineers, and computer scientists.  These explan...

Irreducible complexity (a.k.a. essential complexity) is a term used to describe a characteristic of complex systems whereby the complex system needs all of its individual component systems in order to effectively function. In other words, it is impossible to reduce the complexity of a system (or to further simplify a system) by removing any of its component parts and still maintain its functionality objective. So for example, consider a simple mechanism such as a mousetrap.   That mousetrap is composed of several different parts each of which is essential to the proper functioning of the mousetrap:  a flat wooden base,  a spring,  a horizontal bar,  a catch bar,  the catch,  and staples that hold the parts to the wooden base. If you have all the parts and the parts are assembled together properly, the mousetrap works as it was designed to work.  You can say that it functions effectively. But say you remove one of the parts of the mousetrap....

In the article published by the Data Foundation,  Implementing the FDTA: From Data Sharing to Meaning Sharing , the authors mention the notion of the "infon" which is an idea that is defined by Situation Theory . Situation Theory treats information as a commodity.  An "infon" is a unit of information.  In my Seattle Method , a " Block " of information is an infon.  This is an "infon", a "block of information": An example is provided by Situation Theory that helps one understand the utility of the theory. Suppose that Alice and Bob were having a conversation.  Alice says to Bob, “My car is dirty.” For communication to take place, a successful flow of information, then Alice and Bob need to have a shared understanding of the concept "car" and the concept "dirty". It is not necessary that Alice and Bob share exactly the same understanding of “car” or of “dirty"; rather, what is necessary is that their understanding...

XBRL International, its members, regulators, and other stakeholders in XBRL and XBRL-based reporting are defining important "stuff" and they are representing that "stuff" in the XBRL technical syntax and putting that "stuff" in the XBRL International Link Role Registry (LRR), Functions Registry , Data Type Registry , Units Registry , and foundational/standard XBRL taxonomies such as those created by the SEC ,  ESMA , and other such regulators. This sort of "silo mentality" needs to be avoided, each party implementing XBRL does their own thing.  Also, this "stuff" needs to be organized into a framework, not be provided as a bunch of individual pieces that may, or may not, work together effectively.  This silo mentality and lack of coordination makes it harder for software vendors to provided consistent functionality, interoperable functionality, and robust functionality and features that take advantage of a coordinated framework. One ex...

Put a tool in the hands of 'someone' with no skill, experience, or knowledge; that 'someone' will very likely produce an output that is clumsy, ugly, and perhaps barely functional.    But put that same tool in the hands of a skilled, experienced craftsmen with the know-how to use that tool; they can produce works of elegance, utility, beauty, and durability. In very general terms, "an accounting" is simply providing the details about something usually as of a point in time or for a period of time. For example, when you go out to dinner with a group of friends and the waiter brings one check and each of your friends throw in some money to pay for your restaurant bill, 'an accounting' is performed to make sure what was contributed by your friends matches the restaurant bill including the amount of the tip the group wishes to be added to the restaurant bill. But in more specific terms, accounting usually relates to the financial accounting of some economi...

Accounting is the universal technology of accountability .  A general purpose financial report is a tool or artifact used by that universal technology of accountability.   The graphic below shows the XBRL stack of technologies (DRAFT) that is used for XBRL-based digital financial reporting . This borrows from the idea of the Semantic Web Stack or "layer cake" . I am sure  I don't have this 100% correct yet...but I am working to get it correct by soliciting feedback and incrementally improving this to get it dialed in. This provides details of what is shown in the graphic above: Identifiers : URL  (Universal Resource Locator, more information ) URI (Universal Resource Identifier, more information ) Namespaces  (xml:names) Identifiers  (xml:id) GLEI LEI Character Set : Unicode ( more information ) Syntax : ISO 8879:1986 Information processing — Text and office systems — Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) XML  ( more information ) JSON (...