Business intelligence in environmental reporting powered by xbrl

Abstract

Today, companies are handling increasing amounts of transactional data. This phenomenon commonly named as "Big Data", has transformed from a vague description of massive corporate data to a household term that refers to not just volume but the diversity of data and velocity of change. Commonly used approach leads to usage of Business Intelligence (BI) technologies used not only to environmental reporting purposes, but also used for a data discovery discipline. The critical issue in general data processing tasks is to get the right information quickly, near to real time, targeted, and eff ectively. This article aims on several critical points of the whole concept of BI environmental reporting powered by XBRL. First, and most important, is the usage of structured data delivered via XBRL. The main profi t on usage of XBRL is the optimization of the ETL process and its combination commonly used best practices on data warehouse models. The whole BI workfl ow could be moved further by additional data quality health checks, extended mathematical and logical data test, basics of data discovery and drill-down techniques. First part of the article review the state of the art on the XBRL level and also review current trends in environmental reporting. We also analyse the basics of Business Intelligence regarding to the application domain on environmental reporting. The methodology refl ects today's technical standards of XBRL accordingly to the application via ETL process. In results we describe concept for standardized data warehouse model for the environmental reporting based on the specifi c XBRL taxonomy and known dimensions. In discussion we explain our next approach and all the pros and cons of the selected approach.