The Ambiguity Constraint Of Trade Terms Based On XBRL

Most e-commerce transactions are realized through documents exchange among participants,which include abundant trade terms.Potential Ambiguity Theory indicates the existence of potential ambiguity in Chinese terms is universal.However,it will result in the reduction of data interchange quality once it turns to real ambuguity due to wrong understanding of data semantics by computers.Therefore,research on ambuguity in trade terms is the foundation of improving business data quality in data interchange.It is essential to consider how to constrain ambuguity of trade terms in e-commerce data interchange after verifying it.XML is mainstream solution of electronic data interchange,however,it has many deficiencies in solving ambuguity problem due to lack of rules of data interchange details and semantic description.In comparison,XBRL(eXtensible Business Reporting Language)has intensive ability to express semantics.As an open and free business reporting language,it can be applied in many areas other than financial reports.On this background,the paper focuses on how to constrain ambuguity of trade terms making use of the intensive semantics ability of XBRL.The two questions this paper putforwards are real needs of small and medium-sized foreign trade platform.First,the paper explains phrase type structure and syntactical functional structure of trade terms in detail guided by Potential Ambiguity Theory and then verifies the existence of ambiguity.It then builds relational model of trade terms.On this basis,it tries to constrain ambuguity through constructing XBRL E-commerce Taxonomy which means a 'business dictionary' marking and describing elements and their relations.In the end,the paper validates the quality of the taxonomy in virtue of Fujitsu Software named Interstage XWand.Although terms must meet the requirement of monosemy in theory,the paper finds significant correlation between potential and real ambuguity in trade terms.Moreover,it explains the inconsistency of literal and academic meaning.The paper verifies ambiguity both from syntax and semantic level.On the other hand,there is no way to completely solve ambiguity problem at present.The paper proposes to use XBRL as a method to eliminate ambiguity basing on practice and hopes to improve quality of data interchange by constraining ambiguity in trade terms.