Glossary

Term

Definition

Concept

A concept is the basic building block of taxonomies (concepts are sometimes referred to as ‘elements’, although element is strictly speaking an XML term). For example, a concept might be ‘asset’ or ‘income’.

Dimensions (also known as axes)

Dimensions provide additional context to facts. For example, a fact may be characterised by reporting party type or state (e.g. NSW).

Dimensions define the allowable set of metadata for a particular context of a fact. For example, the SBR Taxonomy holds the definitions for all the Australian states and territories, but a report specifies a given dimension limiting the set of possible values that dimension may take in that reporting obligation. For example, a NSW payroll report will have a state dimension, where the only valid value will be NSW.

Fact

A fact is a value for a particular data element. In other words, a fact is a particular ‘instance’ of a concept. The appropriate data element is identified in a tag associated with the fact. A fact is always accompanied by a reference to its associated context. Facts and the associated context are held in instance documents. There are two types of facts used within XBRL - items and tuples.

Harmonisation

The process of identifying where there are commonalities across government reports and promoting the use of the same term for the same meaning in multiple places (across both reports and agencies)

IASB

The International Accounting Standards Board is an independent standard-setting board that aims ‘to develop a single set of high quality, understandable and enforceable accounting standards to help participants in the world’s capital markets and other users make economic decisions.’ (ref. IASB)

IFRS

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is a set of accounting standards developed by the International Accounting Standards Board. (ref. IASB)

Instance Document

An instantiation of a taxonomy to a specific report for a given entity and period of time. It is a collection of data that is conformant to the taxonomy and the definitions within it. An instance document contains facts (instances of particular elements) and uses tags defined in one or more taxonomies.

In SBR, an instance document is an electronic version of a set of facts with context, brought together according to the taxonomy to fulfil a reporting obligation to an agency.

Item

A single fact which has enough contextual information so that it can be removed from its XBRL instance document and still be understood.

Linkbase

Used within XBRL Taxonomies to express relationships between data elements and resources related to them. Linkbases detail the relationships between data elements and hold references to external resources about those elements.

There are five primary types of linkbases defined in the XBRL 2.1 specifications- presentation, calculation, definition, reference and label linkbases.

Message Implementation Guide (MIG)

A document that supports each SBR report and is the entry point for software developers wanting to support a specific SBR business service (e.g. business activity statement, payroll tax etc).

The MIG describes in detail how to use the XBRL taxonomy to create and exchange valid web service messages. It provides business context about the nature of the business collaboration and information about the sequence of messages that must flow between the business and government in order to implement it.

Normalisation

The process of deciding whether elements that seem similar will be treated as equivalent. This includes the definition of the element, as well as its description.

An example of normalisation in SBR is the analysis of the treatment of the label ‘Australian Business Number’ (ABN). This label appears on a great number of forms in scope for the SBR Taxonomy (approximately 90 times across all forms, sometimes more than once on a form). The names of the labels vary according to the form. Examples include ABN, Australian Business Number, Company ABN, Disclosing Entity ABN etc. However, they are all clearly identifiable as an ABN. As the ABN retains its fundamental nature regardless of the context of the form on which it is placed, these elements were normalised into a single data concept in the SBR Taxonomy.

Rationalisation

The process of identifying elements that are not required to be reported (i.e. are obsolete or redundant). Because rationalisation requires elements to be deleted, it can only be achieved through legislative changes.

As SBR does not change legislation, this option has not been used. For example, SBR will harmonise payroll tax reporting definitions across all state and territories, however this does not change the rate of payroll tax or the date of lodgement to be the same in all states.

Schematron files

A rule-based validation language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in XBRL trees.

Schematron XSLT stylesheets are used to implement any business validation rules including simple calculations. For each form there may be a (one) Schematron file, however, not every form will require a Schematron file.

Software Developer Kit (SDK)

A product to aid software developers in their product enablement of SBR. SDKs can range from a single document of technical notes to an add-on application with full functionality. The SBR SDK sits between those two ends of the spectrum.

The SBR SDK is a set of optional components, with supporting documentation and sample code illustrating their use.

The SBR SDK components will support both the Java and .Net development environments.

Standardisation

The process of redefining elements in order to conform to an endorsed standard (e.g. AS4590 or IFRS-GP). This is 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.

Taxonomy

A taxonomy contains the definitions of the concepts, the human labels and descriptions associated with them and the interrelationships between concepts. It holds a collection of metadata describing reporting rules and the resources related to concepts / data elements (e.g. types of data, validation and aggregation rules, presentation structures and data dependencies).

Tuple

The container for a collection of facts and other tuples that cannot stand alone. Tuples group items which do not logically exist outside of that particular grouping.

For example, ‘address line 1’ makes no sense outside of a complete ‘address’ made up of multiple facts such as street, state, postcode, etc. All elements in a particular group are required. For example, address line 1, suburb, state AND postcode are all required to make a complete address.

A tuple does not have a context. A tuple describes the grouping, and the facts within that tuple are described with their own contexts.

Web services

A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL) (ref. W3C Web Services Glossary)

Four web services offered by SBR for consumption by software developers: Retrieve List (List), Retrieve Pre-filled Report (Pre-Fill), Pre-Lodge Report (Pre-Lodge), Lodge Report (Lodge).

Web Services Descriptions (WSDLs)

The ‘web services description language’ (WSDL) is the standard syntax for the definition of web services defined by the world wide web consortium (W3C).

Web Services Implementation Guide (WIG)

SBR’s Web Services Implementation Guide (WIG) describes common technical components and services that are re-used by all SBR AU Reports. The common services include: a single gateway that exposes four web services , a standard business document header, a secure token server, and a harmonised set of error messages and codes.

XBRL

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is an open standard mark-up language optimised for business information, including but not limited to financial and accounting information. It is a variant of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and adopts the same syntax and related technologies (XML Schema, XLink). XBRL is the optimisation of XML to represent business and financial data.