XBRL Mapping

Altova MapForce® 2010 provides powerful support for producing interactive financial data that complies with the XBRL and XBRL Dimensions specifications as well as the ability to easily aggregate XBRL data for financial analysis.

Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is an XML-based markup language for electronic transmission of business and financial data. With a brand new mandate from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and official support from European Parliament as well as the governments of Japan and China, XBRL aims to reduce costs through the elimination of time consuming and error-prone human interaction. The introduction of XBRL tags allows computers to process information independently, thus increasing the speed of data integration and exchange, while at the same time virtually eliminating data redundancy and quality issues.

XBRL adoption gives companies the opportunity to introduce new efficiencies into their financial reporting workflow, preventing redundant tasks by automating data extraction and increasing accuracy through the validation of both syntax and semantics.

MapForce supports the use of XBRL taxonomies as the source or target of any mapping, enabling you to graphically transform backend accounting data into a compliant format without any risk to its semantic or structural integrity and/or integrate reporting data for financial analysis. Support for code generation in Java, C#, or C++ means that you can also automate the conversion of financial data based on the graphical mapping design. This makes public financial data submission a repeatable and highly manageable process, allowing you to produce valid XBRL reports as required based on the variable data stored in accounting system fields.

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Developing XBRL Mappings

MapForce supports using XBRL taxonomies as the data source or target structure for any mapping. Mappings to XBRL taxonomies can be used to extract financial data from accounting systems for reporting and disclosure, while mappings from XBRL taxonomies with associated instance files can be used to integrate data for financial analysis.

MapForce support includes:

XML data to/from XBRL
Database to/from XBRL
Flat files to/from XBRL
Excel 2007 to/from XBRL
Web services to/from XBRL

To develop an XBRL mapping based on an existing taxonomy, simply insert your taxonomy structure in the MapForce design pane using File menu command, or drag and drop your document into the design pane. MapForce will display a graphical representation of the file structure, depicting taxonomy concepts, hypercubes, abstract elements, periods, identifiers, etc. with intuitive icons. The XBRL component takes structural and semantic information from the associated linkbases and is presented in a hierarcy that can be easily interpreted, expanded or contracted as needed.

XBRL mapping component

Once you have set up your source and target mapping components in the MapForce design pane, you complete the mapping by simply dragging connecting lines between the components and inserting additional operators for more complex conversions.

Filtering and Processing XBRL Data

MapForce provides flexible support for filtering and processing data via advanced processing functions based on Boolean conditions or manipulating data as it’s converted from source to target format. You can create and combine custom functions, or build advanced functions using MapForce’s extensive function library.

For example, because XBRL data is essentially flat, it is often necessary to apply grouping functions that combine source data into groups and then further process those groups to transform the data into a hierarchical structure. This is facilitated by choosing one of the grouping functions from the library.

XBRL mapping

See the Data Processing Functions page for more information.

Automation

Once you have finished defining your data mappings and processing functions, MapForce can autogenerate the program code required to migrate data from the source to the target content structure for use in your own reporting tools or data integration applications. This allows you to reuse your mapping structure for quarterly financial statements, or any other future iterations. Transformation code can be generated in Java, C#, or C++, which ensures compatibility and interoperability across different platforms, servers, programming languages and database environments. MapForce also supports automating data conversions via the command line.

Learn more in the Automate Data Integration section.

See how MapForce® 2010 can help you integrate your accounting data for XBRL compliance. Download a free 30-day trial of MapForce.