7. A research agenda
A number of research issues and opportunities arise from the development of formal specifications of semantically rich accounting reporting on the Internet in general and from XML and XBRL in particular. We outline eight broad areas of research.
7.1 New taxonomies
First, there is the development of new taxonomies. Research, either singly or more likely in groups of subdiscipline specialists, can bring their expertise in financial accounting, industry and international accounting, semantic representation of accounting information, and accounting information system to the development and refinement of new taxonomies. Development of a suite of new taxonomies that meet the needs of defined market segments is clearly an important requirement for the global XBRL community. At the same time, these new taxonomies must interoperate with existing taxonomies.
7.2 Database accounting
A second research area is the relationship of XML – and XBRL – based accounting systems to the existing research in database accounting (Cushing, 1989). XML coupled with the forthcoming standard for XML schema provides functionality isomorphic to that of a database schema. Indeed, XBRL is to be represented by an XML schema. In this first iteration of XBRL, there is very little difference between XBRL reports and the static information presented in annual financial statements. The use of XBRL as a universal frontend for database accounting information systems of the type envisaged by McCarthy (1982) presents an interesting, even tantalizing, prospect. At this stage, XBRL assumes the static reporting of unchanging accounting numbers. However, industry leaders, such as Robert Elliott of KPMG, have predicted that consumers of financial statements will interact directly with corporate databases (Elliottฐ 1992, 1994). How will human or automated financial statement users interact with underlying databases of more detailed information to provide data analytics and drill down? What are the underlying semantics for the representation of these database accounting systems that output active XML – based XBRL – compliant accounting information?