XBRL AND THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL DATA MODEL

Ignacio Santos and Elena Castro

Carlos III University of Madrid, Computer Science Department

Avda. de la Universidad Nº 30, 28911 Leganés, Madrid, Spain

Keywords: XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), XML (eXtensible Markup Language) Taxonomy, XDT

(XBRL Dimensional Taxonomy), Conceptual data model, MDM (Multidimensional data Model).

Abstract: Over the past ten years, there has been a significant increasing of the development of XML and Data

Warehouse (DW) applications, and, in turn, more and more applications need to interact, and with different

technologies. In parallel, the economic data in the last ten years have also evolved, increasingly companies

and financial institutions need more information, in addition, this information must be reliable and on time.

Nowadays, it is taking a significant rise for XBRL standard, based on XML. This language is mainly used in

accounting reports and this consists of a set of taxonomies, which define different accounting regulations of

a specific report. XBRL is becoming a global de facto standard. XBRL reports are created from various

sources and are validated at source, so that, this is syntactically correct. XBRL represents business

information, and it is multidimensional, and therefore the logical destination is a DW. This paper aims to

analyze the data model of XBRL and its semantics, and how to map this data model to the Multidimensional

Data Model (Conceptual Model) and in turn to the Logical Model, either ROLAP (Relational OLAP),

MOLAP (Multidimensional OLAP), or HOLAP (Hybrid OLAP), so they can be analyzed by business users.

1 INTRODUCTION

The accounting world is static and dynamic. It is

static, because the accounting reports use strict

regulations, such as the International Financial

Reporting Standard (IFRS), or the Accounting

General Plan in Spain. For example, the financial

statements of credit institutions are specific reports,

and they are defined with one or more taxonomies,

but they have structures and meaning fixed. In

addition, the accounting world is dynamic because

accounting directives vary with time, turning up

versioning problems, or location. For example,

accounting regulations on capital movements are

based on Basel II (Basel II, 2004), but because

recent financial crisis, these regulations will be

amended in Basel III (Basel III, 2010). All of these

reports entail that a large number of companies,

economic and financial entities, must be called upon

to use a large number of resources in Information

Technology (IT). This paper presents the basis of

study to analyze and transform the data model of this

set of taxonomies in an automated way on a

multidimensional data model.

In the section two we develop the research work

about XML and the Multidimensional Model. The

section three, describes the XBRL data model. In the

section four, we analyze our proposal, about the

transformation of the models. The section five, an

example is shown. And, in the last section, some

conclusions and ongoing work are presented.

2 FROM XML TO THE

MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL

In this section, we check some works about XML,

and Data Warehouse and its connections.

In Kurtev et al., XML documents are

transformed into other formats, using XML Schemas

(Kurtev, 2003). Ogbuje does a comparison and

mapping of XML and Resource Description

Framework technologies (RDF), and with the Model

Driven Architecture (MDA) architecture (Ogbuje,

2002). XML documents are usually stored in

database. XML was not designed for data storage,

but it is a data description language (Lucas-Torres,

2009). It is possible to transform of an automatic

way the multidimensional model to a logical model,

using MDA (Mazón, 2007), (Pardillo, 2008),

(Mazón, 2005), (Castro, 2004), (Golfarelli, 2001).

161

Santos I. and Castro E..

XBRL AND THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL DATA MODEL.

DOI: 10.5220/0003399001610164

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2011), pages 161-164

ISBN: 978-989-8425-51-5

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

These developments are based on the Relational

Model (Logical Model), and not in the E/R model

(Conceptual Model). On the other hand, the

conversion between heterogeneous models and

applications with different sources, especially Web

applications and databases has been analyzed

(Golfarelli, 2001). It can be compared XML DTD

(Document Type Definition) model and the E/R, by

analyzing the mapping of DTD to E/R model, to

Object/Relational Model (O/R) and to Relational.

It’s possible to analyze also the entire life cycle,

from the XML document to databases (Golfarelli,

2001), (Castro, 2004). It is proposed an XML

notation of referential integrity (Pakorný, 2002).

3 XBRL REPORTING

LANGUAGE

Since the bankruptcy of Enron Corporation, was the

need to streamline the information received by the

supervisors of the stock markets to get this

information quickly, without mistakes, for security,

and also easy to analyze. XBRL is an XML-based

standard for financial reporting. Charles Hoffman,

an accountant and auditor, in April 1998 proposed to

automate the exchange of financial information,

developing a prototype of the financial statements

and audit programs, defining the bases of XBRL

(XBRL, 2001). These reports are used, for example,

to send balance sheets between Town Councils,

Autonomous Regions, and Treasury Ministry, or to

send results of corporate accounts to the Association

of Spanish Property and Commercial Registrars in

Spain, or to send financial statements to the

Supervision, and so on. XBRL is being used in most

of the world and is expanding rapidly, using it in

more than a half of European countries. Examples of

financial institutions are Bank of Spain, National

Commission of Securities Market of Spain (CNMV),

Bank of Portugal, "Deutsche Börse", Committee of

European Banking Supervisor (CEBS), in the U.S.,

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

(FED), US Securities and Exchange Commission

(SEC), and other countries as Japan, India, etc. And,

in last autumn China incorporated this standard. A

financial report is based on business rules such as

IFRS, Basel II (Convention on the law and banking

regulation), and others. These standards may be

international, and/or national and/or local and/or

company, or financial institution. This set of rules

can be inherited or overwritten. XBRL allows

modelling the information, the expression and the

semantic meaning commonly required in the econo-

mic and financial reports. It uses XML syntax and

related technologies like XML Schema, XLink,

XPath and Namespaces to provide semantic

meaning. (Hernández-Ros, 2009).

Figure 1: UML design of XBRL Schemas and linkbases

(DTS).

XBRL semantic information is separated from

the application software, and it uses the XML

standard, extending its definitions to support

semantic. A report consists of an XBRL instance,

which is the report itself, and this report has a set of

XML Schemas or XBRL Schemas, called

Discoverable Taxonomy Set (DTS), which specify

the economic concepts. As it is displayed in Figure

1, each XBRL Schema may have up to eight roles

(linkbases). These roles are the definition,

presentation, label, reference, and so on. However,

each XBRL Schema may have 0 or 1 role of a given

type, and this in turn depends directly on the

existence of taxonomy, so the diamond means

combination (no aggregation), except in dimensions,

formulas, and render, which can be used for multiple

taxonomies, and a taxonomy can have 0 or more

dimensions, renders o formulas. Also, a XBRL

Schema can have one or more labels, but

conceptually is one, is the same label of the concept,

but in different languages. Also the labels depend on

the existence of taxonomy. Each XBRL Schema and

its Linkbases (roles) are taxonomies or concept

definition, which are inherited (Martín, 2006). It

begins with a definition of concepts, in general

accounting concepts for example IFRS. From this

taxonomy or concept definitions, each country or

supranational institution adapts this taxonomy to

accounting laws, adding concepts or changing them.

XBRL Dimensional Taxonomies (XDT) has

treatment of dimensions, domains and hypercubes

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(Hernández-Ros, 2010), (Schmehl, 2009), (XBRL

International, 2001). In this specification a “Primary

Item” in the XBRL data model is a fact schema in

the Multidimensional Data Model (MDM) that

represents a report.

4 XBRL MODELING, PROPOSAL

UML provides a framework to capture more

semantic with XBRL reports (Callaghan, 2002),

(Callaghan, 2006). The XBRL reports are

multidimensional (Snijders. 2005), and there is a

need to be interoperable with other applications

(Ardenne. 2005). The XBRL reports are formed of

DTS, which use dimensions with a high meaning

and semantic constraints (Piechocki, 2007), (Felden,

2007). This approach is defined by XDT

(Hernández-Ros, 2010).

Figure 2: Global transformation of the XBRL metamodel.

We propose to develop a process of

transformation of XBRL metadata, to metadata for a

multidimensional database (Figure 2), but we want

to analyze the semantic and syntactic anomalies that

the designer finds when the taxonomy is created

(Schmehl, 2009). From a report, we get the DTSs

and we will obtain an abstract data model XBRL.

Since this model, we do a transformation to MDM

(Conceptual Model). Our process with the instance,

its taxonomies (DTS), with the help of metadata

definitions of XBRL 2.1, Dimensions 1.0 and

Formula 1.0, we will obtain the Conceptual MDM.

And, from the Conceptual Model, we have to

transform to the Logical Model metadata. With

respect to the logical model we have three

techniques, MOLAP, ROLAP, and HOLAP. And

finally pass from each of the logical models to

physical model. In this physical model would be

implemented the coding to create the builders in the

corresponding managing.

5 EXAMPLE GUIDE

In this section, we analyze an example and

demonstrate how the mapping between the XBRL

data model and the MDM is possible. The example

is the 6610 report (Public Sector Consolidated

Balance report), that Spanish banks sent to the

Supervision, Bank of Spain in 2008 (BdE-FINREP,

2008), (BdE, 2008). This report is an adaptation to

the common framework agreement of the CEBS,

recently the European Parliament has reformed and

renamed this institution as European Banking

Authority (EBA).

In the Figure 3 is showed with the help of

Fujitsu’s XWand tool, our contribution about the

dimensional view of 6610 report. We can see the

change in the name in the multidimensional data

model of this report 6610. On the one hand we see

the “Primary item”, which is equivalent to the fact

schema, the distribution dimension, the dimension

attributes, fact attributes or measures, and the facts

Figure 3: View of Dimensional table with Xwand of

Fujitsu.

6 CONCLUSIONS

XBRL is a language XML-based that is especially

devoted to accounting reports, with a number of

advantages over other, consists of a set of

taxonomies that will be inherited to form the specific

report, to suit a particular Economic and financial

report. This makes the set of taxonomies is high, for

collecting the semantic. As we are demonstrated the

XBRL reports are dimensional and for that they can

be transformed and automated in the MDM, we want

to build a model of abstract data and analyze it,

semantically. Ongoing work with the creation the

necessary infrastructure of the automation process

XBRL AND THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL DATA MODEL

163

and its development. Finally analyze your

performance in each of the stages, and in full.

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