In early January, XBRL International, a global consortium of over 200 leading accounting, technology and financial services companies and government agencies, announced the Recommended Release of version 2.1 of its XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) technical specification. Enhanced functionality of version 2.1 will ease XBRL implementation by users of XBRL-enabled software and will improve the ability of application developers to create platform independent XBRL applications and tools.

“In this latest release of the specification, the manner in which business reporting software applications produce or consume XBRL-tagged data has been clarified and enhanced,” said Walter Hamscher, XBRL International Steering Committee member at large and acting chair. “We worked with the leading software developers and users represented in our consortium over the last few months and this collaboration succeeded in enhancing the specification to make it more readily usable in their XBRL application development.”

“The release of Specification 2.1 will create greater interoperability between XML software applications by creating greater consistency and guidance for both producers and consumers of XBRL business reporting information. This milestone is important because it ultimately will accelerate adoption by both government and private sectors of XBRL tools and solutions,” said Dave Hoffman, Unisys partner responsible for the Call Modernization Program contract with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC).

“Available applications will speed the adoption and use of XBRL in the marketplace, and XBRL Specification 2.1 moves us even closer to global recognition of XBRL as the enabling technology for business reporting on the Internet,” said Mr. Shosaku Shimomura, head of Listing Company Services, Listing Department, Tokyo Stock Exchange, where the first stock exchange application of XBRL was implemented.

XBRL is a royalty-free, open specification that uses XML-based data tags to describe financial data in business reports and databases. XBRL benefits all members of the financial information supply chain by making data over the Internet more interoperable and relevant for users and by allowing the exchange of financial information across all software formats resulting in cheaper, faster and more reliable extraction of financial information of reports or data systems. XBRL-enabled applications use XBRL taxonomies that consist of definitions of financial and business reporting terms expressed in XML Schema, along with rich networks of relationships among those terms expressed using XML Linking Language (XLink).

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