XBRL Versioning Specification Release 1.0

Hugh Wallis (XBRL International, Director of Technical Standards)
announced that the XBRL Versioning Working Group (VWG) has issued the
first Public Working Draft for the Versioning Specification. The
corresponding requirements document, conformance suite, and associated
XBRL Infoset specification are also available online. The XBRL 2.1
specification defines the syntax and semantics of that syntax in order
to define concepts, resources and relationships between those concepts
and concepts and resources in a DTS (Discoverable Taxonomy Set). One of
the most important benefits of the XBRL technology is that XBRL is a
standard about how to define the report content. This means that new
reporting requirements from regulators to regulated entities can always
be incorporated using the same XBRL 2.1 technology without having to
change the XBRL technology. In fact, when a new version of a DTS is
released, the regulated entities will have to adapt existing mappings
between internal data and the old concept definitions to the new concept
definitions. It is expected that for all concepts with no significant
changes the mapping rules can be adapted automatically... This
specification defines the syntax and semantics of the versioning report.
The versioning report represents the changes made to the concept
definitions and resources that exist in two different DTSs. In the
most common use case, the two DTSs will represent two consecutive
versions of the same taxonomy. The most important motivation for the
standardisation of a versioning report is the capacity to communicate
changes in a DTS to taxonomy users. This capacity allows taxonomy users
to identify and apply changes to internal systems. Some of the changes
may be performed automatically by software using the versioning report
and without human intervention and some other changes will always
require human intervention... Because the versioning report is a
communication tool, different taxonomy authors may want to communicate
the same things in different ways. In this sense, the set of possible
differences found between two DTSs can be ignored, considered separately
or grouped together and documented separately in the versioning report.
This specification does not impose any obligation to taxonomy authors
to document changes in a specific way but rather provides a framework
to standardize the way the changes are communicated so applications
can consume that information for its purposes.