European XBRL Taxonomy Architecture

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Contents 1 Introduction 2 Targetted audience 3 Area covered 4 Principles 5 Approach 6 Definitions, terminology 7 Localisation (language), extensibility

Introduction

These pages are hosting the guidelines to an European XBRL Taxonomy Architecture. (EXTA, for short)

• European; because this project is funded by the EU commission, but there is no restriction in applying it anywhere else;
• XBRL; because that is the syntax standard that has been chosen to be used in electronic information exchange between national banking supervisors and the European authorities;
• Taxonomy architecture, because creation of different 'dictionaries' or 'reporting frameworks' in XBRL have such a wide variety of options it would cause incompatability between the different XBRL taxonomies which would lead to increased implementation costs for all adopters in the EU market.

Targetted audience

EXTA is targetted at taxonomy authors. Initially organisations like EBA, EIOPA, ESMA, ECB etcetera. As a spin-off of these taxonomies local (national) initiatives will emerge, hosted by National Supervisory Agencies (NSA's). To meet local legislation the European taxonomies may have to be extended with local requirements. The EXTA is also aimed at supporting these national extensions according to the same guiding principles. The main advantage being a consistent framework of XBRL taxonomies which enables a cost efficient implementation in software solutions.

Consistent taxonomies throughout Europe also creates the opportunity for cross-EU harmonisation of terminology and, in a later stage, consistent reported facts that are more easily analyzed since the underlying structure is the same and terms used are complementary to each other.

A consequence of a consistent taxonomy framework is that software developers can choose to support only the architectural guidelines of EXTA. Although this limits their software in supporting full fledged XBRL taxonomies it eases implementation costs.

Area covered

From a semantic point of view, EXTA is aimed at European financial reporting frameworks. This involves (but not limits to) banks, insurance companies, pension funds, stock exchanges and investor vehicles that have an obligation to report their financial status to European supervisors.

From a syntax point of view, EXTA works with:

• XBRL 2.1
• XBRL for Dimensional Taxonomies (XDT) 1.0
• XBRL Generic Link 1.0
• XBRL Formula 1.0
• XBRL Versioning 1.0
• XBRL Table linkbase (not released yet)

The syntax standards documentation is freely available at | XBRL International

Principles

Approach

Definitions, terminology

Localisation (language), extensibility