The value of data in business reporting strongly depends on its availability, appropriate and individually customized presentation and the degree of interaction of the business reporting applications.

The increasing external impact and the desire for efficient enterprise controlling mechanisms make high demands on business reporting applications. The data interchange format XBRL offers a precise description for an improved comparability and interpretation of enterprise information. However, there is still a huge gap between the data and its meaningful graphical presentation for the users. It is difficult to squeeze proper processing and visualization of XBRL data into universal and generic software tools, which work consistently in different application domains.

The XBRL processor ABRA is a processing tool for bridging the gap between data sources and proper user interaction. It consequently supports XBRL features and its extensibility and allows XBRL processing without complex mappings and the need of bindings to programming languages.

Walking on the shoulders of a giant ...

The reason for the big success of XML is its simplicity and its modular design as a construction kit of standards. The W3C standards are precisely designed to fit certain application needs e. g. in the area of web service communication or security. XBRL benefits from the opportunity to combine it with other XML standards in a homogeneous way.

The XML transformation language XSLT is the most common and the most powerful processing language for XML documents. This applies to XBRL documents as well. The XBRL processor ABRA is based in contrast to other XBRL processors on an extension of the transformation language XSLT and not on a programming language like Java or C#. This approach eases and harmonizes the processing of XBRL's complex data model. Concrete examples for the improvements using XSLT are the simple access to all information in XBRL documents (including extended contents), the low training effort and the opportunity to efficiently embed it into the processing pipelines of publishing or web service frameworks.

ABRA Open Source Community Area

ABRA is a software tool for the development of business reporting applications. It is free software published under the Apache license model which can be downloaded in the ABRA community area. Please note that the Apache license model allows the commercial use of ABRA inside arbitrary applications. For this reason this open source license model seems to be particularly suited for the area of business reporting.

In the community area you can access further documentation and assistance for the development of ABRA based applications. To enter the community area a registration is required. Please select the link "Register" in the "Community Login" menu to register for the community area!