Sustainability Reporting Using the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a reference architecture for sustainability reports based on the eXtensible Businesses Reporting Language (XBRL) which in particular meets – among others – the forthcoming requirements of the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) sustainability reporting guidelines, to be released in late 2006. Currently, this third generation of GRI-guidelines (G3) has already been released as “draft-version for public comment”. While developing a sustainability reporting reference architecture, we made use of on existing XBRL Financial Reporting Taxonomies Architecture (FRTA) which is widely used in financial reporting.