Tech Topics: What is XBRL?
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Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is an XML-based vocabulary for electronic transmission of business and financial data. Currently in version 2.1, XBRL is an open standard that is maintained by XBRL International, a global non-profit consortium of over 550 major companies, organizations, and government agencies.
XBRL was developed to facilitate business intelligence (BI) automation by enabling machine-to-machine communication and data processing for financial information with an eye towards cost reduction through the elimination of time consuming and error-prone human interaction.
Drawing upon the power and flexibility of the XML family of standards, XBRL utilizes familiar W3C specifications such as XML Namespaces, XML Schema, XPath, and XLink to offer a growing set of taxonomies for defining semantics, syntax, and relationships for single source financial reporting, helping to overcome data redundancy and quality issues in addition to offering instantaneous delivery to a variety of different output formats.