Thursday, October 28, 2010

What is XBRL filing? (Part 1)

A user-friendly way to understand the concept of what is being reported is to think of the filing as consisting of your facts and values (the Instance file), the company specific taxonomy with all of its various attributes (the Extension Taxonomy) and the relationships between the two (the “Tags”). Technically speaking, your SEC filing consists of six electronic files. Each of these files has a specific role in defining your data. Here are the filenames and their roles.

XBRL Filename (1)
File Type
Purpose of file
xxx-yyyymmdd.xml:
Instance file
Contains the actual facts and values in your filing. Each fact in the instance document is related to an element in your company’s Extension Taxonomy.
xxx-yyyymmdd.xsd: 
Schema file
Defines the actual concepts of an XBRL based markup language. It gives their names, their data types, whether you can report about them. I like to think of the Schema file like a traffic cap for the other XBRL files.
xxx-yyyymmdd_cal.xml
Calculation linkbase 
Defines how values of concepts should sum up from one to another
xxx-yyyymmdd_def.xml
Definition linkbase
Allows users to define relationships between elements. For example a relationship can be defined that the occurrence of one concept within an XBRL instance mandates the occurrence of other concepts
xxx-yyyymmdd_lab.xml
Label linkbase
Allows the user to attach labels to a given concept
xxx-yyyymmdd_pre.xml
Presentation linkbase
Defines how concepts are ordered and nested

(1) The naming convention for these files is as follows: xxx = company specific identifier (like ticker symbol), yyymmdd = the report date and the remainder of the file name specifies the type and role of that XBRL data file

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