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XBRL use cases: better late than never
Last year the FDIC required banks to submit call reports in
XBRL format. In September, the SEC awarded $54 million in contracts to
convert its legacy EDGAR system to XBRL, and to complete the
taxonomies that will enable all US companies to file their required
disclosures in XBRL.
But where are the XBRL use cases? Nowhere in particular. You can find
scattered examples on websites run by XBRL International, the
International Accounting Standards Board, or XBRL vendors. But
there's nothing like XQuery's canonical set. As a result, a vast
chasm stretches between accountants, who know about
corporate earnings reports and SEC filings, and XML technologists, who
know about XML Schema and XLink. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
In response to this column, Gus
Bjorklund, who is a tech VP and wizard with Progress Software,
wrote (email used with permission):
The situation is much worse than you describe.
All sorts of standards are being developed without use cases, without
sufficient clarity of purpose, and without anyone having created a working
implementation to demonstrate feasibility, composability, or /usability/.
What a mess.
The worst offenders in recent times are the ones producing the WS-*
specifications.
Contrast that to the way the IETF operates. They won't consider a new
standard without it having been implemented and proven /first/.
It's a fair comment. Jonathan Robie, an XQuery prime mover whose
conversation
with me I cited in that column, said pointedly:
I would never do anything of this size without doing use cases. When you write down requirements, they're so abstract that you can get it wrong and just never notice. The use cases wind up being the requirements from the perspective of the user.
At the same time, in the W3C, there were activities going on that I could look at and have no idea, concretely, what was happening there. I wish there were more use cases for the semantic web, for instance.
In principle, XBRL's use cases are utterly concrete. We can point to
zillions of SEC filings, earnings reports, and
other financial documents. In practice, though, I'm hard pressed to
find good examples of what the XBRLized versons of those documents
look like, and how their anatomies relate to the benefits described in Charlie
Hoffman's excellent overview, The Business
Case for XBRL.
This week's column concludes:
Would up-front use cases have made XBRL simpler and better? We'll
never know; that's water under the bridge. If the XBRL examples arrive
late, that's better than never. But here's hoping that future projects
will heed Jonathan Robie's advice and write the use cases first.
I'm reiterating that here because, while the title and lead of the
column focus on XQuery, I hope the takeaway will be that even at this
late data a canonical set of XBRL use cases would be a great resource.
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