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XBRL News
XBRL Lab: IFRS-GP Versioning Project, Phase I Release
04 December 2006
The IASC Foundation XBRL Team is pleased to announce the release of its latest XBRLLAB project - phase one of our taxonomy versioning development.
Background
Our versioning project aims to help IFRS taxonomy users to better understand and track changes made to new versions of the IFRS-GP taxonomy. We view “versioning” as the most important issue faced by those developing and extending the IFRS taxonomy.
Some of you will already be familiar with our Team’s earlier work on a versioning matrix – used to capture versioning requirements and use cases. Click here to see this XBRLLAB project.
Project Phases
This new versioning project is divided into three phases.
- In this first phase we create a prototype xbrl-based mechanism for recording differences between two taxonomy versions.
- In the second phase we use the differencing mechanism as a base to build a versioning linkbase.
- In the third phase we create tools to support the versioning mechanism developed in the second phase and it application to extension taxonomies and instances.
The first phase has been completed and is available on our website. To view the project, click here.
Note that the differencing (“diffing”) mechanism provided is a prototype. We are now undergoing a rigorous period of testing and feedback in order to enhance the diffing mechanism and to ensure that it captures a complete set of relevant differences to meet user needs. Therefore, we are interested in feedback about the following:
- Is the scope of the diffing mechanism correct, or does it need to be widened to include more syntactic changes e.g. locator-label changes.
- Should the diffing mechanism reflect changes to the presentation and calculation linkbase.
Note also that work has already commenced on the second phase (versioning linkbase) and this will be released as soon as it is completed.
Application
The results of the phase one project is currently being used to capture a full audit trail of changes made to the 2006 IFRS taxonomy, as we begin to version it for the 2007 release. Look out for the release of the preliminary work on our 2007 IFRS taxonomy version later this week.
XBRL Research and Development at the IASC Foundation
This project is part of the XBRLLAB research and development work undertaken by the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) Foundation XBRL Team. Our goal is to develop solutions which improve the application and use of the IFRS GP Taxonomy.
Click here to see a list of our current R& D projects
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IFRS 2008