A year of advances: new and improved XBRL specifications
We continue to manage, improve and modernise the XBRL standard to ensure that it is fit for purpose as the world’s standard for digital data exchange. Key developments in 2024 included:
- The first public working draft of the XBRL Rules and Query Language specification. While it’s still early days, this specialised query language is designed as an eventual successor to XBRL Formula. It will facilitate validation checks for data quality in any XBRL format, while also offering expanded and more flexible ways to query XBRL data, reflecting the ever-increasing use cases for XBRL.
- Significant steps forward on the new Digital Signatures in XBRL (or ‘D6’) standard. This, we believe, will be a key plank in enhanced trust in digital reporting, allowing frictionless, reliable and granular authentication of XBRL reports and assuring the integrity of data. The specification is currently available as a Candidate Recommendation and we continue to be interested in hearing from you on software implementations, while we anticipate publishing the final standard during 2025. This was also a topic of interest at Data Amplified 2024, and you can hear from Shraddha Bagul of IRIS Business Services Limited, member of the XBRL International Best Practices Board, with an exploration of D6 here.
- The finalisation of the new Country Code and Currency Code taxonomies. These provide standard lists of ISO codes that are automatically updated, making it easy to incorporate these codes into XBRL reports, freeing regulators from the burden to maintain their own taxonomies, and enhancing consistency. Want to know more? Try our webinar.
- The development of new approaches for improving text block tagging in Inline XBRL. Explore some of the technical challenges and our recommendations to address them in our Working Group Note here.
There’s much more we’ll be working on in 2025. Perhaps most importantly OIM Taxonomies 1.0 aims to simplify, modernise and harmonise XBRL taxonomies, making them easier to use, more compatible with AI analysis, and better able to handle large volumes of data. Watch this space for more news – and why not consider volunteering with one of XBRL International’s working groups to help shape the future of our shared standard?
