SKOS, XBRL, and SBRM

The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a standard way to describe concepts and the relationships between those concepts so computers and humans can understand and share knowledge consistently. SKOS is a lightweight semantic vocabulary for building controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, and classification schemes. SKOS is a standard specification for constructing knowledge organization systems.

SKOS provides four essential building blocks to construct a knowledge organization system: (a) Define Concepts; (b) Group Concepts (a.k.a. Types, Classes); (c) Define Labels; (d) Connect Concepts.

Concepts are the things you want to organize.  Labels are the different ways you want to be able to refer to those Concepts. For example, you might have a "preferred label", and "alternative label", and maybe other such labels. Relationships and associations, how concepts are connected, might be "broader" or "narrower" or some other relationship or association.

The Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) also provides standard ways to  describe concepts and the relations between those concepts so that computers and humans can understand and share knowledge consistently.  XBRL has additional capabilities, constructing knowledge and organizing that knowledge is just one of those capabilities.
A financial reporting framework (a.k.a. financial reporting scheme) has concepts, those concepts are organized into groups, those concepts have labels, and those concepts are connected. In XBRL lingo, those financial reporting schemes or general business reporting schemes are referred to as an XBRL Taxonomy.

The XBRL technical syntax provides many of the same capabilities as SKOS in terms of organizing knowledge, but SKOS is more robust and SKOS is more of an accepted standard for organizing knowledge.

XBRL International's Open Information Model (OIM) provides a conceptualization of a business report. OIM defines the semantics of a digital business report.  Note that a financial report is a specialized type of the more general business report.  Object Management Group's Standard Business Report Model (SBRM) also defines a conceptualization of business and regulatory reports.  OIM and SBRM are well aligned; I am reconciling their meaning to make sure that is the case.

To tie all these together as to not reinvent the wheel; I have created a working proof of concept set of XBRL arcroles that can be used to represent the semantics of relationships consistent with SKOS.  Wikidata had one good idea which I have also referenced.  Here is that working proof of concept: skos-arcroles.xsd.



Additional Information:




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Professional Study Group for Digital Financial Reporting

Image
Digital financial reporting is a thing.  The IFRS Foundation explains digital financial reporting  in an article, Digital Financial Reporting - Facilitating digital comparability and analysis of financial reports . OFFICIAL VERSION : The IFRS Foundation publishes an XBRL taxonomy for IFRS for SMEs (2024).  You can find official information about that XBRL taxonomy here on this web page, IFRS for SMEs as Published by IFRS Foundation (2024) . (Also see this PDF, IFRS Taxonomy Illustrated .) Since that official XBRL taxonomy is effectively a "pick list" created from the perspective of standards setters (i.e. not very practical, easy to use, and intended for ease of use by reporting economic entities);  ENHANCED VERSION : I have created an enhanced version of that same XBRL taxonomy, see  IFRS for SMEs 2024) - ENHANCED (Work in Progress) . The enhancements make the IFRS for SMEs XBRL taxonomy more useful in many different ways.  The enhancements are driven...
Read more

Big Idea for 2025: Semantic Accounting and Audit Working Papers

Image
I began my career in accounting in 1982 as an auditor with Price Waterhouse when accounting and audit working papers and schedules were 100% paper.  But within three months, I was creating many of those same working papers and schedules first in VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3.  I would create those schedules and working papers electronically, then print them out, and tape them into the bundle of paper that supported our audits. The Compaq luggable computer was invented and electronic spreadsheets where even more compelling. Today, accounting and audit working papers tend to be 100% electronic proxies for those paper documents created in Excel or some other electronic spreadsheet, Word or some other word processing document, PDF generated from some word processing document, and maybe HTML.  All of these are presentation oriented proxies for documents and none of them is truly understandable by a computer based process. The next step in the evolution of accounting and audi...
Read more

PLATINUM Business Use Cases, Test Cases, Conformance Suite

Image
A brick wall is made of exactly two things: bricks, mortar. But a brick wall created by a master craftsman, or mason, and a brick wall created by a “weekend warrior” with no knowledge of masonry will be very different. Master craftsmen are created and that process takes time and effort. This blog post is a first prototype that brings several things together into one useful resource for business professionals.  It pulls together the human readable information of the Showcase of Reports   and the machine readable information of the Conformance Suite of XBRL-based Financial Reports Prepared using the Seattle Method .  Then, I want to incorporate the information found in these PLATINUM XBRL-based Financial Report Examples . The three resources can be useful and used independently; but they are even more useful when used together.  Business professionals really could not care a less about the technical details of getting some result that they want.  But technical pro...
Read more