Specification Document - 14 April 2007
Copyright © 2006-2007 by Zitgist LLC. |
 |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
License. This copyright applies to the XBRL Ontology Specification
and accompanying documentation and does not apply to XBRL Ontology data formats,
ontology terms, or technology. Regarding underlying technology, XBRL Ontology
relies heavily on W3C's RDF
technology, an open Web standard
that can be freely used by anyone.
| This visual layout and structure of the specification was adapted from the FOAF Vocabulary Specification by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller and the SIOC Ontolofy Specification by Uldis Bojar and John G. Breslin. |
|
The XBRL Ontology Specification provides main concepts and properties for describing financial and economic data on the Semantic Web.
NOTE: This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document.
This specification is an evolving document. This document is generated by a machine-readable XBRL Ontology expressed in RDF/XML with a specification template.
Authors welcome suggestions on the XBRL Ontology and this document. This document may be updated or added to based on implementation experience, but no commitment is made by the authors regarding future updates.
The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC 2119].
Namespace URIs of the general form "http://www.example.com/." represents some application-dependent or context-dependent URI as defined in RFC 2396 [RFC 2396].
The XML Namespace URI that MUST be used by implementations of this specification is:
An alphabetical index of XBRL Ontology terms, by class (categories or types), by property and by individuals. All the terms are hyperlinked to their detailed description for quick reference.
Classes:
Properties:
Individuals:
An alphabetical index of external ontologies terms, by class (categories or types), by property and by individuals, used by the XBRL Ontology. All the terms are hyperlinked to their detailed description for quick reference.
Classes:
Properties:
Individuals:
The XBRL Ontology definitions presented here are written using a computer language (RDF/OWL) that makes it easy for software to process some basic facts about the terms in the XBRL Ontology, and consequently about the things described in XBRL Ontology documents. A XBRL Ontology document, unlike a traditional Web page, can be combined with other XBRL Ontology documents to create a unified database of information
There are the schemes of the hierarchy of the XBRL Ontology classes. These schemes show the interaction between the XBRL Ontology classes and other ontologies classes.
The XBRL Ontology is an effort of ZitGist LLC. and many other contributors to express financial and economic data relations using RDF and to query that same information using the SPARQL query language for RDF.
The specific contents of the XBRL Ontology are detailed in the XBRL Ontology namespace document.
This specification serves as the XBRL Ontology "namespace document". As such it describes the XBRL Ontology and the terms (RDF classes and properties) that constitute it, so that Semantic Web applications can use those terms in a variety of RDF-compatible document formats and applications.
This document presents the XBRL Ontology as a Semantic Web vocabulary or Ontology. The XBRL Ontology is straightforward, pragmatic and designed to allow simultaneous deployment and extension, and is therefore intended for widescale use.
Revisions and extensions of XBRL Ontology are conducted through edits to the namespace document, which by convention is published in the Web at the namespace URI.
The properties and types defined here provide some basic concepts for use in XBRL Ontology descriptions. Other vocabularies (e.g. the Dublin Core metadata elements for simple bibliographic description, FOAF, etc.) can also be mixed in with the XBRL Ontology terms, as can local extensions. The XBRL Ontology is designed to be extended, and modules may be added at a later date.
It is important to understand that the XBRL Ontology as specified in this document is not a standard in the sense of ISO Standardisation, or that associated with W3C Process.
The XBRL Ontology depends heavily on W3C's standards work, specifically on XML, XML Namespaces, RDF, and OWL. All the XBRL Ontology documents must be well-formed RDF/XML documents.
This specification contributes an ontology, the "XBRL Ontology ", to the Semantic Web, specifying it using W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF). As such, the XBRL Ontology adopts by reference both a syntax (using XML), a data model (RDF graphs) and a mathematically grounded definition for the rules that underpin the RDF design.
Why does the XBRL Ontology use RDF?
The XBRL Ontology is an application of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) because the subject area we're describing – citations and bibliographic references-- has so many competing requirements that a standalone format would not capture them or would lead to trying to describe these requirements in a number of incompatible formats. By using RDF, the XBRL Ontology gains a powerful extensibility mechanism, allowing XBRL-Ontology-based descriptions to be mixed with claims made in any other RDF vocabulary.
The XBRL Ontology as an ontology cannot incorporate everything we might want to talk about that is related to financial and economic data. Instead of covering all topics within the XBRL Ongoloty itself, we describe the basic topics and build into a larger framework - RDF - that allows us to take advantage of work elsewhere on more specific description vocabularies.
RDF provides the XBRL Ontology with a way to mix together different descriptive vocabularies in a consistent way. Vocabularies can be created by different communities and groups as appropriate and mixed together as required, without needing any centralized agreement on how terms from different vocabularies can be written down in XML or N3.
Check the Ontology namespaces referenced section to find some ontologies that ca be use in conjonction with the XBRL Ontology.
There are mechanisms for saying which RDF properties are connected to which classes, and how different classes are related to each other, using RDF Syntax and OWL. These can be quite general (all RDF properties by default come from an rdf:Resource for example) or very specific and precise (for example by using OWL constructs). This is another form of self-documentation, which allows you to connect different vocabularies together as you please.
In summary then, RDF is self-documenting in ways which enable the creation and combination of vocabularies in a devolved manner. This is particularly important for an ontology which describes communities, since online communities connect to many other domains of interest, which it would be impossible (as well as suboptimal) for a single group to describe adequately in non-geological time.
RDF is usually written using the XML or N3 syntaxes. If you want to process the data, you will need to use one of the many RDF toolkits available, such as Jena (Java) or Redland (C).
More information about RDF can be found in the RDF Primer.
The XBRL Ontology introduces the following classes, properties and individuals. See the XBRL Ontology namespace document in RDF/XML for more detail.
External ontologies used by the XBRL Ontology introduces the following classes, properties and individuals. See the XBRL Ontology namespace document in RDF/XML for more detail.
Ontology namespaces referenced:
| Prefix | XML Namespace | Specification |
|---|---|---|
| frbr | http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core# | Expression of Core FRBR Concepts in RDF |
| event | http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl# | The Event ontology |
| dc | http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ | Dublin Core Element Set v1.1 |
| dcterms | http://purl.org/dc/terms/ | Dublin Core Element Refinements and Encoding Schemes |
| foaf | http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ | Friend of a Friend (FOAF) Vocabulary |
