Disclosures (Working Prototype)

This resource provides both human-readable and machine-readable information about the disclosures contained in a financial report. This resource ONLY INCLUDES disclosures applicable to commercial and industrial companies. It excludeds disclosures of depository and lending institutions, insurance companies, brokers and dealers in securities, REITs, or other such industries or accounting activities.

For more information please contact Charles.Hoffman@me.com. To keep informed about work on this ontology, please subscribe to http://xbrl.squarespace.com or follow me on Twitter.

Frequently Asked Questions

The following is a set of frequently asked questions which will help you understand and make use of this resource:

  1. Start Here: Start by browsing the list of disclosures on the left.
  2. Important Background Information: Be sure you are familiar with the first 10 chapters of Digital Financial Reporting. This is critical. If you don't understand this, what you are looking at might not make much sense.
  3. Working Prototype: This is a working prototype. This is work-in-progress. There are generally three categories of machine-readable information provided: (a) All available information so that you can get a sense for the ontology; (b) Test information which are basically incremental leaps toward completion. (c) Completed information. Basically, this information will evolve over time. This can be made use of now.
  4. Objective/Goal: The intension of this information is to help professional accountants understand digital financial reporting. If you are a profesional accountant, you understand financial reporting but you problaby don't realize what computers can be made to do if they are provided the correct metadata. If you are a professional software developer, you understand how to build software, but you really have no idea what professional acccountants need from that software. If you are rare and have both strong accounting knowledge and an ability to make computers do things, you can help bridge this gap. The intension is to help professional accountants and software engineers communicate effectively, to bridge the communications gap. This is important because professional accountants need to create digital financial reporting in ways that work best for them. This is a challenging proposition. It is better to have knowledge rather than to be ignorant of the moving pieces. Working prototypes are the best way to acquire knowledge. Working prototypes are excellent communications tools.
  5. Open Source, Freely Available: The resources made available here are completely free for anyone to make use of, steal any good ideas that you find. It is hoped that others will improve upon this base. This metadata serves as a 'starter kit'. Following the open source model, additional support is available for a fee. For more information about these premium services, please contact Charles.Hoffman@me.com. Further, other professional accountants who are interested in creating metadata for commercial and industrial companies or other industries, please contact me. (The market for such machine-readable metadata will ondoubtedly increase over time.)
  6. Financial Report Semantics and Dynamics Theory: This human-readable and machine-readable information is grounded in the Financial Report Semantics and Dynamics Theory. That theory was created by observing the XBRL-based financial filings of public companies to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
  7. US GAAP: The human-readable and machine-readable information is created for US GAAP. However, these same ideas would work for IFRS.

*

*

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.