Using Oracle XMLDB with XBRL or "A bunch of accountants went down to the corner and found this really big crack dealer..."

I attended my first 'regular' Open World session this morning.

It was presented by Steve Hord from UBMatrix and discussed the topic of XBRL. Extensible Business Reporting Language is an extension of XML that is used as a standard means of submitting reports between organisations, such as when submitting filings.

Although they share a common purpose and hold similar data, these kinds of documents can vary enormously from industry to industry and the problem was how to find a standard that was flexible yet rigourously structured, without at the same time becoming unwieldly. XBRL solves this problem by providing object oriented style inheritance in XML. This goes further than the traditional include statement by combining a "flat" XSD template with a more detailed XML specfication, with the data in another XML file.
This allows the Federal Reserve, or whoever is using these files, to perform structured queries over very different documents.

XBRL is supported by a consortium of all the big software vendors plus several large accounting firms, and it sounds like its really taking off internationally.