XBRL Planet’s list (or map) of XBRL Projects around the world is impressive. It highlights the fact that XBRL really is an international language for contextualizing data and succeeding where efforts like Esperanto failed. After all, how many people have a copy of Universala Vortaro, the Esperanto dictionary on their bookshelf or would recognize this friendly greeting (seldom heard in polite company): Kiel vi fartas?

For the global financial ecosystem to work, for data comparability to truly cross borders, it has to be based on a common language (i.e. globally agreed and shared taxonomies) rather than a series of dialects, which in data terms, become just another row of silos attracting the tumbleweeds. That’s why the adoption of global reporting standards like IFRS and the efforts of initiatives such as the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC) are so important.

At the moment we have a lot of GAAPs in XBRL. For XBRL to truly power a global financial ecosystem of comparable data the emphasis now has to be on changing that last column in XBRL Planet’s list (IFRS Status/Info) from ‘not permitted’ to ‘required’. Otherwise all the future generations will be able to say about XBRL is: Tio estas hundo.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 30th, 2010 at 3:10 am and is filed under XBRL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.