European XBRL Taxonomy Architecture V2.0

From XBRLWiki

CEN WS XBRL Experts: Thierry Declerck (DFKI), Roland Hommes (Rhocon), Katrin Heinze (Deutsche Bundesbank)

Contents 1 Foreword 2 Introduction 2.1 Objective 2.2 Target audience 2.3 Relationship to other work

Foreword

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to present and explain the European XBRL Taxonomy Architecture (EXTA) defined by European supervisory authorities. In particular, it explains the scope (coverage of information requirements), modularization in files, manner of defining concepts and relations and other important design aspects. It is fully compatible with the Data Point Methodology approach. As DPMs are semantic models being created by supervisory experts, they are not formalized from a technical point of view. XBRL as formal language can fill this gap. XBRL as data format is standardized and can therefore be used to enable automated processes. XBRL taxonomies are metadata specifications that provide a formal description of the data requirements to be used as data format in the European reporting process.

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.

Objective

The objective of the EXTA is to set a framework or set of architecture guidelines that enables a DTS author to create an XBRL taxonomy that is:

• Consistent and predictable;
• (Automated) controllable;
• Modular, which enables lean extensions and ease of maintenance;
• Following international best practices;

Target 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.

This document is aimed at users of the Bundesbank taxonomies, in particular editors of the taxonomy or producers of instance documents (by applying mappings to internal systems or assigning XBRL tags with values in any other manner) as well as developers of the IT solutions facilitating reporting in the XBRL format or analysis of XBRL data.

Relationship to other work

The reader of this EXTA is expected to be familiar with the basic principles of data modelling and have a thorough understanding of the XBRL family of specifications to evaluate the impact of the rules set to the XBRL taxonomy that needs to be created.