An Ontological Approach to XBRL Financial Statement Reporting

As a standard for the exchange, transmission, and reporting of accounting and financial data, XRBL goes a long way toward standardization. However, as the extent of contemporary financial markets is now global, XBRL reporting must transcend or accommodate differences in reporting standards. While XBRL has been of great help in standardizing the presentation of the U.S. GAAP and IASB standards, reconciling meaning between these standards is still a manual and error-prone affair. As a wide variety of stakeholders, spanning countries and cultures, will likely take part in digesting XBRL-formatted financial reports; how will they participate at an appropriate level that is meaningful for them? This paper focuses on an ontological approach towards solving this problem by offering an XBRL ontology architecture for translation between XBRL formats. The architecture is explained, evaluation criteria offered, and future research towards realizing artifacts which use this architecture are proffered.