Understanding XBRL-based Digital Financial Reports
Click on the tabs below to understand in five slides critical information needed to harness the power of digital.
Computers are Dumb Beasts
Computers are dumb beasts. Here are the fundamental capabilites of computers and obstacles to harnessing those capabilities: (more about this)
Reasoning Capacity
To get computers to do work, you have to put information into machine-readable form. Different machine-readable forms yield different reasoning capabilities of computers: (more about this)
Ontology-like Things
One of the more powerful approaches to representing information in machine-readable form is the ontology. But even more powerful than an ontology is a formal "logical theory" or "logical system": (more about this)
Logical System
A logical system (logical theory) enables a community of stakeholders trying to achieve a specific goal or objective or a range of goals/objectives to agree on important common models, structures, and other statements for capturing meaning or representing a shared understanding of and knowledge in some universe of discourse. A logical system or logical theory is made up of a set of logical statements that describe a set of permissable models, structures, terms, associations, assertions, and facts. The logical system is said to be properly functioning when (a) all the statements in the system are consistent, (b) the logical system is precise and (c) the logical system has a complete set of statements. (more about this)
Business Report Model
A business report is a type of logical system. Reports have fragments; fragments have fact sets; fact sets have facts; facts have aspects that differentiate one fact from another and values; etc. (more about this)
Financial Report Model
A financial report is also a logical system, a specialization of the more general business report. Because XBRL-based reports are digital, they have many interesting and useful features. (more about this)
