XBRL Taxonomy Engineering. Definition of XBRL Taxonomy Development Process Model

The growing number of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) projects around the world and strong interest from bodies such as Security Exchange Commission in the United States (SEC), Central European Banking Supervisors in the European Union (CEBS) or International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) in building XBRL taxonomies demonstrate the need for formalisation and methodical approach to the process of the XBRL taxonomy development. Although many approaches exist in favour of software engineering and knowledge engineering, building an XBRL taxonomy is not about creating a software product or a knowledge-based system. It is creating a standardised taxonomy for a particular domain in order to enable standardised exchange of business reports. Nevertheless experiences learned from software and knowledge engineering areas are very useful for what can be called XBRL taxonomy engineering. On the other hand a clear parallel with the ontology engineering appears treating XBRL taxonomies as ontologies. The ontology development process could resemble in many aspects the way that XBRL taxonomies are created. The development process models presented in the literature are either project or software driven. Hence it is difficult to apply them as a generic and formal taxonomy development process model. This paper presents an approach to define a taxonomy development process model. The definition of the model is preceded with the status quo analysis of the existing development models known from software engineering and ontology engineering domains. The model definition itself is also based on empirical analysis of taxonomy development projects.