International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation XBRL team The views expressed in this presentation are those of the presenter, not necessarily.

International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation XBRL team

The views expressed in this presentation are those of the presenter, not necessarily those of the IASC Foundation or the IASB

IASC Foundation

XBRL Versioning for IFRS Taxonomy

22 June 2009, FINREP

Haiko Philipp

March 2009

2009 IASC Foundation | 30 Cannon Street | London EC4M 6XH | UK | www.iasb.org


2Agenda• Versioning at the IASCF

• Versioning specification

• Versioning report syntax / semantics

• Versioning approach for the IFRS

• Implementation aspects

• Challenges and next steps


3Versioning at the IASCF

• Background: annual update of the IFRS Taxonomy resulting from the changes in the written Bound Volume of IFRSs

• Enhancements to the change management and its standardized communication necessary

• Discussions about versioning at IASCF since 2004

• Resulted in a prototype presented in 2006

• Prototype and feedback on it were input for the versioning WG


4Versioning at the IASCF

• Project objective: enhance change management• IFRS Taxonomy consumers:

• More transparent development process (easier comparison)

• Represents taxonomy developer view on the changes (explanation of changes)

• Enables grouping and filtering of changes

• Software developers

• Standardized way of communication of taxonomy changes (former proprietary software)

• Possibility of automated consumption of versioning report

• Enables statistics

• XBRL tools:

• Better workload estimation while migrating between taxonomy releases

• Semi-automated integration of new taxonomy release


5Versioning specification

• XBRL Versioning Specification is an extension of the base specification for XBRL 2.1

• Versioning specification currently a Public working draft – syntax may change

• On the way towards candidate recommendation (last call for comments from XSB)

• Versioning report published for IFRS Taxonomy 2008 –> 2009 on 28 April 2009

• Based on the Public Working Draft from 04 February 2009


6

• Purpose of the versioning report is to document differences between two taxonomies

• Interest in semantic changes rather than syntactical changes

• Benefits / advantages• Users should better understand changes made

• Tracking / documenting changes by taxonomy developer

• Enable automated processing - XBRL is used in production today

• Taxonomy extensions development

• Tools using taxonomy or its extensions

Versioning specification


7Versioning report syntax / semantics

• Versioning report is divided into three major building blocks

• Categories: classification of an assignment

• Default categories: Errata, business, technical

• Assignments: represent a versioning task

• Enable documentation through labels and references

• Enable classification through links to categories

• Enable breakdown into individual actions

• Actions: represent one or more changes using single or combined events



• Events on concepts

• Concept add

• Concept delete

• Concept name

• Concept type

• Concept substitution group

• Concept period type

• Concept add-attribute

• …

• Events on relationships

• Relationship add

• Relationship delete

• Relationship next

• Relationship previous

• Relationship add-attribute

• Relationship delete-attribute

• Relationship change-attribute

• Events on resources

• Resource add

• Resource delete

• Resource value

• Resource role

• Resource add-attribute

• Resource delete-attribute

• Resource change-attribute

• Resource add-child

• …



Action: myAction

Generic label linkbase (documentation)

Versioning report

link:locator

label:label

gen:arc

…

Category:errata

Assignment: myTask

Event: Concept Add

Event: concept delete

Event: resource value

…


10

• Where are IFRS Taxonomy changes coming from?

• Physical / structural changes

• Changed file and folder names, updated namespaces, role URIs

• New technologies: XBRL dimension (new schema definitions)

• Semantic changes

• Updated, deleted and new IFRSs

• Taxonomy improvements (typos, reference updates,...)

Versioning approach for the IFRS


11Versioning approach for IFRS

• Versioning report for IFRS

– Categories: use default categories only

– Default categories: errata, business, technical

– Assignments: objective is keep assignments stable over a period of time

– Definition of major tasks like “OutOfDateIFRSs”, “WordingImprovements”, …

– Actions: focus on concepts (one Action per one concept)

– Concepts are currently crucial for stakeholders



Action: del_BusinessSegments

Linkbase (documentation)Versioning report

Link:locator

label:label

Gen:arc

Category:businessCategory

Assignment: OutOfDateIFRSs


Action: del_DisclosureOfSegmentReportingExplanatory


Out of date IFRSs


13

• Versioning report approach used for IFRS:

• Light versioning report

• Comprehensive versioning report

• Reasons for providing two versioning reports

• Identification of two major groups of stakeholders

• Requesting an overview of major changes in the taxonomy

• Implement the IFRS Taxonomy into their software and requiring detailed list of changes

• Human readable visualization of light report

Versioning approach for IFRS



• Light version report (basic changes for concepts)– Concepts added: 201 [concept add event]

– Concepts deleted: 152 [concept delete event]

– Concepts renamed: 194 [concept name event]

• Comprehensive version report (basic changes for concepts + detailed changes for concept attributes and resources)

– Basic changes (all basic changes for concepts)

– Changed attributes

– Added, deleted, corrected labels

– Added, deleted references

– Current approach does not document changes in presentation-, calculation- and definition linkbases


15Implementation aspects

XBRL Processor

Versioning stylesheet

Raw versioning reportCreate raw

versioning report

Configure versioning stylesheet

XBRL versioning report

-Set documentation path-Definition categories-Definition assignments-Create namespace mapping-Create role mapping

-Set path from/to DTS-Define mapping rules (actions-assignments)

- Run XBRL processor


16

• Based on XSL stylesheets & XBRL processor

• Semi-automatic process

– Manual

– Namespace mapping

– Definition of assignments + corresponding documentation

– Definition of the rules (assignment – action mapping)

– Automatic

– Recognition of actual change

– Grouping of actions by concepts

– Applying defined rules

Implementation aspects


17

• Current mechanism is able to version any taxonomy (not IFRS specific) with minor adjustments to the stylesheet

• Current IFRS concept naming convention does not allow recognition of renamed concept on pure basis of XBRL attributes (this applies only to taxonomies introducing renaming of concepts)

– Introduction of a non XBRL attribute @info:creationID for IFRS Taxonomy concepts which is stable over releases

– Enables identification of added, removed and renamed concepts even if @name and @id are changed

– Detailed comparison on concept attributes, relationships and resources is done on the basis of @info:creationID attribute

Implementation aspects


18

• Versioning of presentation, calculation and definition linkbases

• Dimensional versioning - improve current versioning specification through documenting dimensional changes (not supported by current spec)

• Ex-ante vs. ex-post explanation of changes

• Syntax changes in the specification

• Lack of clear understanding of versioning usage in the market (documentation vs. automated change log vs. migration tool)

• Lack of software that support versioning

• Physical/structural aspects of migration (changes to file and folder names, namespaces, URIs, web locations, etc.)

Challenges and next steps


19

• Improve current versioning mechanism implementing documentation for relationship changes (presentation-, calculation-, definition linkbase)

• Constantly feedback to versioning WG

• Consider requirements for dimensional versioning if IFRS Taxonomy architecture changes

• Expand versioning discussion with ITA and TAWG to agree on best practices

• Improve market understanding of versioning

Challenges and next steps

International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation XBRL team

The views expressed in this presentation are those of the presenter, not necessarily those of the IASC Foundation or the IASB

IASC Foundation

Questions?

March 2009




• Events on concepts

• Concept add

• Concept delete

• Concept no-change

• Concept namespace

• Concept name

• Concept type

• Concept substitution group

• Concept period type

• Concept nillable

• Concept abstract

• Concept block

• Concept balance

• Concept default

• Concept fixed

• Concept final

• Concept add-attribute

• Concept delete-attribute

• Concept change-attribute

• Concept add-child

• Concept delete-child

• Concept change-child



• Events on resources

• Resource add

• Resource delete

• Resource no-change

• Resource value

• Resource role

• Resource add-attribute

• Resource delete-attribute

• Resource change attribute

• Resource add-child

• Resource delete-child

• Resource change-child

International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation XBRL team The views expressed in this presentation are those of the presenter, not necessarily.

Documents

ifrs versioning report

agenda versioning

versioning task

versioning wg slide

xsb versioning report

ifrs taxonomy changes

cannon street london

ifrs slide