[OpenSpending] XBRL for Local Government Financial Reporting

Thu Sep 5 17:48:52 UTC 2013

Paul

XBRL is just a dialect of XML. As such it allows a provider of data to validate his or her input prior to sending it to third parties.

For example, the data I extracted from California Credit Scoring and submitted to Open Muni Budget during the Hasadna Hackathon was messy.  Specifically, we had a lot of spelling variations across different cities for revenue and expenditure items.   This kind of issue could be detected prior to import by validating the XML against a taxonomy using off-the-shelf tools like Altova XMLSpy.  

The strength of XBRL as opposed to CSV and JSON is that it encourages the development of a standard for presenting revenue, expenditure and other fiscal information in a reliable way that can work with a variety of software solutions (Open Spending, Open Muni Budget, etc.).

Regards,

Marc

From: openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Paul Walsh
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2013 9:32 AM
To: OpenSpending Discussion List
Subject: Re: [OpenSpending] XBRL for Local Government Financial Reporting

What is the problem that XBRL solves, and how does it do so in way that can't be done with CSV or JSON or other data formats that are easily accessible?

On Thursday, September 5, 2013, Friedrich Lindenberg wrote:

Hey Marc, 

this is very interesting to see XBRL being picked up, but I have to say that I'm critical of its use for non balance-sheet data [1]. XBRL is basically a massive framework in which any type of data could be expressed (it seems very committee-run), but the benefits really aren't clear to me.

You can have well-documented CSV or JSON, too - and for those formats there is tooling which is useable by journalists and other end-users who do not have the means to start a 3 year XBRL implementation effort. In the end, releasing government data as XBRL could mean that only solutions from large companies like IBM or SAP would be able to invest the effort necessary to interpret the data.

Of course it would be nice to have a standard, but this one is so large and ambiguous, I can't see it being useful in a technical sense. 

Cheers, 

- Friedrich 

[1] http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter4-2.html 

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Marc Joffe <marc at publicsectorcredit.org <javascript:_e(%7b%7d,%20'cvml',%20'marc at publicsectorcredit.org');> > wrote:

Concha

Thanks for these questions. 

Like PDFs, XBRL files can either be published or kept confidential.  The use of XBRL by itself is not a guarantee of transparency.  However, a publicly available machine readable file is better than a publicly available PDF, since it is easier to process.  In the world of machine readable files, I see XBRL as better than CSV because XBRL tags allow for more complete self-documentation of the data, especially if it the data is complex.

I don’t know how many Spanish cities actually file in XBRL format.  I thought the fact that they had a fairly well developed site (at http://www.e-local.es/index.html ) indicated a substantial investment and perhaps substantial compliance.  On the other hand, I am not seeing recent updates.

I see some Spanish local government statistics here:  http://www.minhap.gob.es/EN-GB/ESTADISTICA%20E%20INFORMES/Paginas/estadisticaseinformes.aspx.  Have you see this before?

Regards,

Marc

From: openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org <mailto:openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org>  [mailto:openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Conchita Catalan
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2013 3:38 PM
To: openspending at lists.okfn.org <mailto:openspending at lists.okfn.org> 

Subject: [OpenSpending] XBRL for Local Government Financial Reporting

Hello Marc, 

Thank you for sending the article. It says 

"In Spain, the  <http://www.e-local.es/index.html> local government ministry encourages more than 

Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/openspending

-- 

Paul Walsh

0543551144

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