An XML Schema Design Framework to Simplify Financial Statement Validation

Financial statements share a common directed tree model. This common structuresimplifies validation of financial statement instance documents and has important implicationsfor the design of business reporting markup languages. Exploiting this a common structureenables different financial statements to share the same validation routine, thereby realizingconsiderable savings in development and maintenance of validation applications. This paperderives a common schema for financial statements based on a standard directed tree model,and demonstrates its contributions towards standardizing and simplifying validation of financialstatements. This efficient framework of taxonomy development can be applied to other domainsbecause many non-financial business documents also have a hierarchical structure expressibleas a directed tree.