XBRL News

XBRL Lab: IFRS-GP Versioning Project, Phase II Release

08 May 2007

The IASC Foundation XBRL Team is pleased to announce the release of its latest project  - phase two of our taxonomy versioning development.

Background
Our versioning project aims to help not only IFRS taxonomy users, but all XBRL users,  to better understand and track changes made to new versions of a taxonomy, including 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 project) and our phase I differencing mechanism released last year at the XBRL International Conference in Philadelphia conference.  The team has been working on this difficult phase II versioning project since the beginning of this year, with development led by Timo Philipp.

Project Phases
Our 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 second phase has been completed and is available on our website.  To view the project, click here.

Note that the differencing (“diffing”) and versioning mechanism provided is a prototype.  We are now undergoing a rigorous period of testing and feedback in order to enhance the mechanisms and to ensure that they capture a complete set of relevant differences and versioning changes to meet user needs.  Therefore, we are interested in feedback.

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 two project is currently being used to capture a full audit trail of changes made to the 2007 IFRS taxonomy, as we complete the versioning of it for the 2007 release. Look out for the release of the work on our 2007 IFRS taxonomy version in the next weeks.  The versioning mechanism will also be prototyped by the European Committee of Central balance Sheet Data Offices third working group XBRL project and in particular, by the National Bank of Belgium.  This release is a draft and will be presented to the XII Versioning working group meeting today in Munich.

XBRL Research and Development at the IASC Foundation
This project is part of the 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 and to contribute this knowledge back into the XBRL International Consortium.
Click here to see a list of our current R&D projects