We often talk about the promise of the  ‘XBRL data ecosystem’ but most insiders understand that this is far from a reality and in fact XBRL is in as much danger of becoming a series of taxonomy-based data silos as the systems it is being layered onto. That’s why harmonization of data assets is so important, both to leverage non-XBRL data assets and to provide the mapping layers between new XBRL taxonomies.

Thomas Verdin, fellow presenter on the data sharing track at the 23rd XBRL Intl. conference, updated us on the progress of the xEBR taxonomy designed to provide a mapping layer between existing EU business register data from a number of countries (e.g. the eccbso databases BACH and ESD), some of which already provide many years worth of financial performance data for analysis purposes. MONNET is another EU data harmonization project that is focused on the automatic translation of public information to minimize the language barrier when trying to compare data from different countries that is only available in a local and reference language (e.g. English).