Advanced Accounting Information Systems Day 28 Introduction to XBRL October 30, 2009

Announcements –First XBRL assignment due 11/2

Objectives Obtain an overview understanding of XBRL and its role in computerized financial and business operations reporting Understand key terms such as taxonomy, instance document, markup, and meta-data Understand key aspects of SEC filing program Understand the XML document foundation Describe differences between XML and UBL

Question for today

Difference between HTML and XML HTML –Tags provide presentation information XML –Extensible – adding meaning to data and storing and processing it as information –As long as you follow the rules, you can extend or add to tags –Markup Surrounding pieces of data with tags that add meaning

XBRL –Emerging technology under the auspices of XBRL International –Used to tag each piece of financial and business operations information in a standard way so that it can be validated, stored, and processed by computerized applications –XBRL specifications Standard taxonomies Instance documents –Metadata Adds meaning to data

Why is XBRL Important?

Brief History of XBRL

Glossary of New Terms – Chapter 1 –EDGAR –FDIC –FFIEC –Instance documents –Meta-data –XBRL –XBRL Specifications 2.1 –XBRL taxonomies –XML

XML Document Foundation XML vocabularies discussed in class –Universal Business Language (UBL) –XBRL Design goals of XML –Usable over the Internet –Support a variety of applications –Be human-readable XML documents –Contain tagged items of data and conform to specific rules and syntax that make them processable by all XML-enabled software applications –Well-formed XML documents contain tags and data items in a nested hierarchy Element –Tag set and its contents –Matching beginning and ending tag name along with its content Root element –Parent of the entire XML document

Rules for Well-formed XML Documents An XML document can have one and only one root element. All elements must have matching beginning and ending names, and XML is case sensitive Elements can contain attributes that add information about a specific element and appear following the beginning element name All elements must be properly nested

Purpose of Basic Rules for XML Documents Provide foundation for the creation of humanly- understandable tags (element names) to ‘markup’ data items with descriptive metadata (data about data) Provide structure that enforces a strict hierarchy that results in very efficient computer processing

UBL Catalogue Open-soruce software standards for e-business and Web services Created by OASIS Provides complete XML-based library of business documents to be used in e-business transactions Reusable data components Like all XML vocabularies, UBL has its own rules and guiding principles Prolog –All XML documents start with a prolog –Processing instructions to be used by an XML processor and additional information such as documentation and structure information

Rules for UBL documents Each has unique root element chosen to correspond to document’s purpose Each has required ID element to uniquely identify document and IssueDate element to fix it in time Each has two party elements appropriately named for purpose of document to identify provider/supplier and customer/buyer parties to document Each has at least one line element appropriately named for purpose of document. Each line element is required to have ID element and appropriate item information

XML Attributes All XML elements can have one or more attributes Contained within the beginning element name brackets (<>) and further explain the meaning of an individual element Have their own name and a value in the following format: AttributeName = “attribute Value”

XML and UBL in Business

Glossary of New Terms Attributes Electronic data interchange Element OASIS Open-source software standards Prolog Reusable data component Root element UBL vocabulary Valid XML documents Well-formed XML documents XML web services

Questions for Monday What is the purpose of UBL? How does UBL differ from XBRL?