An XBRL taxonomy is a document or set of documents defining a specific information set that can be reported using the XBRL specification. It assigns unique tags to specific accounting elements such as gross profit or price/earnings ratio.

Financial reporting taxonomies
Because accounting standards and business requirements vary between regions and organizations, financial reporting taxonomies are created specifically for individual regions, industries, or even companies. To improve the usability of taxonomy documents, XBRL International specifies recommended taxonomy design architecture guidelines on its web site.

General Ledger taxonomy The XBRL General Ledger taxonomy (XBRL GL) is a standard taxonomy that is more widely applicable than financial reporting taxonomies. It is also known as the Journal taxonomy. XBRL GL provides a structure for presenting any accounting information in an XBRL report. It collects all general ledger receivables and payables and represents them alongside inventory information in a traditional reporting format. Because it deals with general ledger entries rather than industry or region-specific terms, it is reportingindependent, unlike financial reporting taxonomies.

XBRL GL can also be used to present non-financial information found in an accounting system and it enables legacy accounting charts of accounts to be presented in a standardized way.

XBRL GL is system-independent and can handle imported data from any accounts application or operating system. It also facilitates the transfer of general ledger data from one system to another.

Applying the General Ledger taxonomy to an XBRL document
The latest release of XBRL GL is the draft version of release 1.1, which includes schemas and linkbases that handle business and inventory metrics as well as the general ledger. XBRL GL 1.0 is the approved version. To apply XBRL GL 1.0 to an instance document, you reference the namespaces shown in the following table.

XBRL GL Namespaces

XBRL GL also uses the standard XHTML and XLink namespace URIs – http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml and http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink. Versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the XBRL GL taxonomy schemas can be downloaded from the XBRL organization’s web site.

Following next, we shall talk about “The structure of an XBRL GL document” in Examining an XBRL taxonomy [Part 2], coming up next. If you are looking for some XBRL training, you can look for computer institute like CSI Chicago offers special classes and computer certifications about this.