On the design of an XML-Schema based application for business reporting: An XBRL Schema Perspective1

A markup language for business reporting must satisfy many demanding criteria:readable by novices, extendable by users, minimum payload overheads, and a uniform graphstructure to enable validation of document instance with minimal programming effort. To beelegant and robust it must be based on a model that reflects the intricacies of business reporting,and to be efficient in terms of maintenance it must be modular in structure. We suggest theskeleton of a derivative of the XBRL that exhibits most of the criteria stated above which usesthe basic semantic structure provided in its specification and the associated C&I taxonomy. Ourproposal provides domain-specific tags so that even the source documents are very readable. Weprovide a proof-of-concept schema for the Balance Sheet (using the XBRL C&I taxonomy) as aninstance of a canonical generic labeled graph model for any financial statement. We also providean algorithm for the validation of such labeled directed graph representation of a financialstatement and its implementation in the programming language Java.