Architecture and harmonisation
The target audience of this document is technical users familiar with the XBRL technology components.
A summary of the key features of the taxonomy architecture and harmonisation is provided below. For more detailed information on the taxonomy architecture, please refer to the Taxonomy Architecture document.
Alignment to natural business data is an important SBR outcome. Rather than develop the taxonomy from a government agency/forms perspective, the taxonomy is now based on a functional information classification perspective.
The taxonomy architecture is founded on the principle that information should be defined once and re-used many times. Data concepts will be defined in the SBR AU Taxonomy. These concepts will then be imported for use within the SBR AU Reports taxonomies, which are tailored to support specific reports.
Most reports with financial data are transactional in nature and require data elements to be reported with various usage contexts, optionality, complex cross context validation, calculation rules and deeply nested business relationships. These will be described using the XBRL taxonomy components and SBR's implementation guides.
Business concepts are re-used across agency forms. The taxonomy architecture assures that concept definitions only appear once in the information classification taxonomies and are not repeated in agency-specific taxonomies.
Data elements that have been identified as equivalent have been harmonised.
Naming conventions are critical to consistency and harmonisation. The information classification used provides rigorous, repeatable and easy to understand naming conventions. See the SBR AU Naming Convention.
Rather than use standards specific to a government agency, industry standards have been used wherever possible. Examples include IFRS (financial) & AS4590 (identity).
Harmonisation
SBR taxonomy harmonisation aims to reduce the number of reporting elements required to describe the data reported by business to government.
Harmonisation can be achieved by:
- rationalisation - identifying elements that are not required to be reported (obsolete or redundant);
- standardisation - redefining elements in order to conform to an endorsed standard;
- This can be seen as a top-down approach to harmonisation where conformance is imposed or expected and may involve mapping an element to a defined standard item. The naming of the elements as prescribed by the standard can be adopted.
- normalisation – deciding whether elements that seem similar will be treated as equivalent.
- This would include the definition of the element, as well as its description.
For the SBR AU Taxonomy Cycle 3 normalisation and standardisation have been an important focus of the development process.
For example, alignment to AS4590 has resulted in increased consistency of data elements where they have been identified as equivalent. Similarly IFRS-GP has been used where financial data elements have been identified as equivalent. A key aim for the harmonised taxonomy is to use AS4590, IFRS-GP and SBR-core elements wherever possible in preference to local agency variants of such information.
As at 31 March 2009, the SBR AU Taxonomy has reduced/harmonised the number of unique data elements from 9,648 to 2,838, which represents an overall reduction of 71%.
