Cycle 1 prototype taxonomy release

Cycle 1 development approach, structural fundamentals and harmonisation

Development approach
Structural fundamentals
Harmonisation

Development approach

A seven phase development approach was adopted by the SBR Taxonomy Development Team to build the Cycle 1 prototype taxonomy. The approach is an adaptation of the broad approach provided in the unpublished paper XBRL Taxonomy Engineering: Definition of XBRL taxonomy development process model (2007) by Piechocki, M and Felden, C,

seven phase development approach

Development team

The following team structure was agreed to by the agencies, and adopted to develop SBR’s Cycle 1 prototype taxonomy.

Development Team Structure

Fundamentals of structure

An International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) style naming convention was applied to the elements contained in the taxonomy. The element names were developed by SBR by applying the IFRS 2006 final taxonomy naming standards.

For structures with repetitive information in a table form tuple, constructs were used. For future releases of the taxonomy, it is likely that dimensional structure will be used for many such cases, rather than tuples. However, dimensions were deliberately not used in Cycle 1 in order to provide simplified development environment for taxonomy developers.

Harmonisation

The SBR taxonomy development team developed a version of the harmonised taxonomy, which substitutes the original elements with the harmonised equivalents in the presentation linkbase.

The core objective of this taxonomy is to present the potential for harmonisation of data points. The taxonomy is not intended for any use apart from demonstrational or educational purposes.

The process of harmonisation involved:

various types of grouping of concepts identified using a common database of concepts;
analysis of element names, data types, attributes and underlying legal reference; and
SBR taxonomy development team experts review and feedback.

The key assumption of the harmonised taxonomy is to present the reuse of AS4590 and sbr-core elements wherever applicable.

Table 1: % reduction from Cycle 1 harmonisation across forms and their variations

The forms/variation category of harmonisation (see Table 1) represents the initial exercise of harmonising elements across forms and their variations. Form variations were defined in presentation linkbases, and as such, common elements were defined in the form schema and re-used across the presentations.

Table 2: % of reduction identified as equivelent at the inter or intra-agency level in Cycle 1

36% of the 1407 elements from the taxonomy were identified as equivalent at an inter or intra agency level. Please note that the unused elements were not removed from the harmonised taxonomy in order to create the equivalent links in the definition linkbase. The ratio may slightly vary if compared to taxonomy elements count due to agency requirements captured after harmonisation activities.

Collectively, there was a 69% reduction from the original number of data elements.

IFRS-GP

Similarities between elements from the IFRS-GP 2006 Final XBRL taxonomy and SBR taxonomy were captured in the definition linkbase for internal agencies review purposes.

AS 4590

The harmonised taxonomy presents the alignment and substitution of elements which were initially discovered to be equivalent to concepts defined by AS 4590 standard. The basis of this level harmonisation was comparison of elements’ nature, data types and agency experts opinion. Equivalences were captured in separate document and will undergo review by agencies.

Intra-agency

The harmonised taxonomy presents the reuse of agency-level harmonised concepts (eg: IntraABS and IntraATO) elements.

Inter-agency

This level of harmonisation presents the outcome of the initial recognition of elements which are of the same nature across agencies.