Background

New taxonomy releases, called “versions”, are a direct result of the XBRL taxonomy life circle. Differences between versions are sometimes indicated in separate documentation called “change logs”. However, no fully developed solution which provides a comprehensively human readable change log and machine-readable versioning information has been introduced so far. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to create a solution which will identify and capture the differences between various taxonomy versions in a machine-readable form, which is understandable to IFRS-GP taxonomy users.

This form of versioning information could be used to create more automated solutions to support taxonomy extension developers in updating their taxonomies, as well as to provide better information to instance users to compare financial data in XBRL.

Project Phases

The versioning project is divided into three phases:

• Phase I: Defines what should be captured and how can it be captured to get a diffing linkbase. Finally an implementation of a diffing linkbase with those predefined decisions should be developed and presented.
  
  
• Phase II: Takes the results of phase I and builds on top of it an interface to create a versioning linkbase by combining the output of the diffing linkbase with comments from the taxonomy developer.
  
  
• Phase III: Uses the versioning linkbase in phase II as a base to build support tools for IFRS-GP taxonomy extension and instance upgrades.

Click here to go to the Approach.