XBRL - eXtensible Business Reporting Language

XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language and is an XML based metadata standard for representation of business, accounting and financial data as well as semantic relationships between these entities. As a standard it is specifically focussed on financial data that would historically have be represented by either unstructured objects (e.g. a block of text) or an arbitrary method (e.g. a spreadsheet where there is an implicit structure but not necessarily a uniform structure). The type of financial data represented is not necessarily transactional but might include information such as net profit or other aggregate information. A typical use case scenario would be for investor relations or financial publishers who wish to represent corporate accounts in a method that can analysed via third party applications or other automated methods (e.g. stock screening). See the official XRBL site for more details.