Comparative Study Of XBRL Dimensions And Tuple

Since its birth in1998, XBRLhas received great attention. It isconsidered to be a new technology revolution of accounting disclosure. Intraditional way of disclosure, financial information is a simple text blockdisplayed ingeneral web pages and documents. However, XBRL itemdefines a label for each data sothat information can be automaticallyprocessing, thus getting rid of manual input and comparison. Thecomputer can identify, screening, analysis, storage these information andexchange with other computers, thendisplay the information in variousways for users. This greatly saves the cost of information recording, and atthe same time,utilization and regulatory efficiency has been greatlyimproved.As the XBRLtechnology developed,it has been paid attention byChinese government. Along with the national Treasury’s inspiration,XBRL in China has formally taken off and has beenimplemented instate-owned enterprises and large public accounting firm for test. OnOctober19,2010,the ministry of finance established XBRL taxonomy andXBRL technical specifications. In the XBRL taxonomy, it is madeclear that it will use the dimension technology for multidimensional informationmodeling, and completely devoid of tuple.This paper, taking this as the breakthrough point, analysis dimensionand tuple technology. First, we reviewed the XBRL technologydevelopmentin China, andgive a brief introductionof XBRL specification,taxonomy, instance document and dimension technology. Then based ondomestic and international literature, this paperdiscusses the differentmethods of multi-dimensional information modelingand then expanded tothe accounting information.This paper definesthree modeling ways ofmultidimensional information.Through the actual example andcorresponding code, we theoretically compared the data item modelingmethods, tuple method and dimension method. Then throughmathematical analysis, we analysis the numbers of elements needed to becreatedin taxonomy and instance document underthree differentmethodsrespectively.On the basis of theoretical analysis, this papercomparedtheapplication ofdimension and tuple from two levels. The first level is thetaxonomy, the second level is the actual disclosure situation.In taxonomy level, this paper mainlystudied China’s taxonomy issuedby ministry of finance. We focus on whether dimension could create fewerelements than tuple in modeling the tables of taxonomyand simplifies thecomplexity of taxonomy. In the actual disclosure level, this paper mainly aiming at thecorrelation between tables in taxonomy tables and the tables in financialstatements. There are two aspects: first, whether the tables in taxonomywere applied infinancial statements; secondly, should the table appearingin financial statements be model by dimension or the tuple.In this paper, the main conclusionsdrawn are:(1) theoretically,dimension, compared with the tuple, is more complicated in technologylevel, but more concise in application level,(2) taxonomy using dimensioncan greatly reduce the number of elements creation,(3) financialstatements actually utilized a small part of taxonomy tables and onlyfewtablescould be better modeled by tuple other than dimension.The innovation of this paper lies in:(1) new study object which hasforesight,(2) research are taken in three levels: the specificationcode,taxonomy and the practical financial statements.