The following list of terms may be useful to an administrator who wishes to know more about XBRL.
XBRL specification—Defines what XBRL is and how to build taxonomies and instance documents. The specification uses technical terms and is meant for a technical audience.
XBRL taxonomy—A set of XML schemas and XML Linking compliant linkbases that, taken together, define the syntax and semantics of XML elements corresponding to concepts about which facts can be expressed in XBRL instance documents. For example, a taxonomy may define the concept Net Profit as having certain relationships to other concepts (such as being the difference between Revenue and Expenses) and that a fact about it, such as “it has the value of 2,450,321 US Dollars correct to 7 significant figures, for the period from 1st January 2003 to 31st December 2003, for the US division of company XYZ”, is expressed in an XBRL instance using the XML element “<netProfit>.
XBRL element—An XML element that is used to express a concept in an XBRL instance document. The syntax and semantics of XBRL elements are defined by XBRL taxonomies.
Instance document—An XML document, containing a set of XBRL elements, that expresses a set of facts that may constitute one or more business reports. For example, the financial statements of Hyperion Solutions, expressed in XBRL, would be an instance document.
XML—Markup language for documents containing structural information. XML provides for richly-structured documents that can be used on the web.