Including narrative data

This article outlines general guidelines for designing a taxonomy that includes narrative data.

Narrative text may contain sustainability information that answers regulatory requirements. iXBRL allows you to tag sections, paragraphs, sentences, and words that have usable data.

Standard setters and data preparers should take the following into consideration:

• Design the taxonomy so that the concepts are arranged in logical groups to help the data preparer when creating narrative text for tagging.

• Decide on the level of detail of nested narrative tags.
  Nested narrative tags are only required if tagging of specific text brings an additional benefit to the consumers of the data.

• Design the taxonomy so that narrative questions use extensible enumerations.
  Enumerations are taxonomy-defined lists of values used in report facts. When a concept is defined as an enumeration type, the data preparer can only report values from this list.

• Data preparers should ensure that narrative data is prepared so that it can be precisely tagged with taxonomy concepts.
  This is to maintain the granularity of the data and to maximise the machine readability of that data. The narrative data should be prepared in line with the taxonomy.