Last year I covered each of the items in the Altova MissionKit 2008. The new version, MissionKit 2009 has been released and rather than going through each product, I am going to focus on some new technologies that have been introduced into their product line. The products that come with the MissionKit are XMLSpy, MapForce, StyleVision, UModel, DatabaseSpy, DiffDog, SchemaAgent, SemanticWorks, and Authentic. The feature I will look at in this article is XBRL Support.
Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is an XML-based vocabulary for electronic transmission of business and financial data. It was developed to facilitate business intelligence (BI) automation by enabling machine-to-machine communication and data processing for financial information. The goal is towards cost reduction through the elimination of time consuming and error-prone human interaction.
The requirement to submit financial data in XBRL means that companies of all sizes and types will need tools for viewing and extending standard XBRL taxonomies, transforming data in backend accounting systems to XBRL, and publishing XBRL data in various formats for communication with shareholders and other interested parties.
When you think about it, the main problem in tackling a problem like this is that those who understand the requirements — the financial personnel — are generally not technical enough to work with the tools to make it happen. Those who understand the tools are lacking in the financial expertise. This is where the Altova MissionKit 2009 comes in.
The Altova MissionKit contains three main tools to let the developers process the data properly. The first tool is Altova XML Spy 2009. They have added an integrated XBRL Taxonomy editor. This adds new functionality to XMLSpy that includes an overview window where users can view their files as well as open them for validation or editing.
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