Taxonomy Catalogs Overview

Taxonomy Catalogs Overview

As the name suggest, a taxonomy catalog is a local repository of taxonomy files that the processor can consume as if they were coming from the Internet.

For example:

An XBRL Report contains a schemaRef pointing to an external URL where a taxonomy shall be located.

In normal circumstances, the target URL is available and reading the Taxonomy is required to perform XBRL validation. Reading files from the Internet is also a slow process.

The solution is to install a kind of "proxy" that serves the files as if they were read from the official location but the file is on the hard drive.

The first idea about implementing taxonomy catalogs comes from OASIS https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html

At this time, we have implemented several taxonomy catalogs and all can operate in cascade so if one file is served by a taxonomy catalog the processor never goes to the Internet. On the tools that contains a user interface, at the very bottom of the taxonomy catalogs stack there is one taxonomy catalog implementation that asks the user to provide a file from a directory. This makes a point about how deep we use the idea of taxonomy catalogs