Research into XBRL — Old and New Challenges

The XBRL 1.0 specification, or more accurately XFRML 1.0 specification, was released in 2000. This was only some two years only after the proposals by Charlie Hoffman to the AICPA and the first serious academic discussion of applying XML technologies to business and financial reporting (Debreceny et al. 1998; Hoffman 1999; Lymer et al. 1999). In the intervening period, we have seen a rapidly increasing level of interest in the policy implications of XBRL. A search of XBRL on Google.com returns an extraordinary 1.4m links. Similarly, a search on bibliographic databases such as ABI/Inform discloses more than five hundred papers from the academic and professional literature. In what is a relatively short period of technology adoption, the XBRL world has also seen significant maturing of specifications, architectures, taxonomies and software tools. In an important third dimension of adoption, the XBRL organization itself has matured significantly over this period. XBRL International and its national jurisdictions are comprised of more than four hundred corporations, agencies and not-for-profit organizations. These foundational elements have clearly been vital for the observed adoption of XBRL in important information supply chains. Whilst not at the rate that early proponents might have suggested (e.g. Coffin 2001a, Coffin 2001b; Hannon 2000), the use of XBRL within areas such as credit monitoring of financial institutions and in reporting corporate performance to a variety of securities markets does signal that XBRL has become a core enabling technology in business reporting.