Towards an XBRL Ontology Extension for Management Accounting

The Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is used in several countries to share business data and it is largely diffused, for example, for balance sheets exchange and archival. On the other side, the analysis of management accounting data poses more interoperability issues. In particular, it requires more sophisticate information models in order to integrate data generated by different parties (both internal and external to the enterprise) in different formats and for different purposes. For the same reason, the "flat" mapping, performed by automatic mechanisms often used to import XBRL streams into Web Ontology Language (OWL) for further processing, is inadequate and more sophisticate options are required. In this perspective, we propose a modification and extension of an existing XBRL ontology, with the aim of better supporting the concepts and the operations needed for management accounting.