What is a taxonomy?
XML taxonomies are "vocabularies" or "dictionaries" created by a group in order to exchange information. In the future, there will be many XML taxonomies used to describe all types of data. What will drive the development of these taxonomies are industry groups, governmental agencies and other organizations. XBRL taxonomy components (files)
There are six basic files that comprise an XBRL taxonomy:
Schema
The XBRL taxonomy schema file defines the actual concepts that make up an XBRL taxonomy. It gives their names, their data types, period type, whether you can report about them etc. The properties of concepts (elements) are defined in the XBRL specification.
Linkbases
An XBRL linkbase file contains the explicit relationship definitions between the concepts defined in the XBRL schema. There are five linkbase types defined by the XBRL version 2.1 specification:
- The label linkbase allows the user to attach labels with different roles and languages to a given concept
- The reference linkbase the user to attach external information (sources) to concepts
- The presentation linkbase defines how concepts are nested and ordered
- The calculation linkbase defines how values of concepts should sum up from one to another
- The definition linkbase allows the user to define additional semantics
