Standards Question: NIEM is to XBRL as United States Customary Units are to the Metric System?

True or false?

NIEM is to XBRL as United States customary units are to the Metric System.

The good news is people are working to make sure we don’t need to care. Diane Mueller links to that work from her latest thoughtful piece on the state of transparency. There are alternatives to linking to show authenticity — for example the tools at ProofSpace (disclosure: I’ve advised ProofSpace). For some purposes, it makes sense to link to source data; for others it makes sense to prove source data integrity. Eventually, technology will make the price of both trivial.

The world has yet to discover database utopia. We’re a long way from the ideal of recording every fact once and only once, so data is almost always a mix of new and old information. Future technology, as it always does, will become so ubiquitous that people will wonder why our generation ever needed to contemplate linking data to sources and using technology to authenticate data. Meanwhile, the work that Diane and others are doing to make the connections between NIEM and XBRL as seamless as possible looks like a giant leap in the right direction.

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7 Responses to “Standards Question: NIEM is to XBRL as United States Customary Units are to the Metric System?”


  1. pjwilk (Paul Wilkinson)

    Twitter Comment


    New blog post: Standards Question: NIEM is to XBRL as United States Customary Units are to the Metric System? [link to post]

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  2. Jovite (Daniel J Roberts)

    Twitter Comment


    RT @pjwilk: NIEM is to XBRL as United States Customary Units are to the Metric System? [link to post] You suggest “victory” for NIEM?

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  3. PaulWilkinson

    UBmatrix has a helpful white paper entitled "NIEM and XBRL Collaboration," here: http://www.ubmatrix.com/downloads/UBmatrix_NIEM_X...

  4. PaulWilkinson

    UBmatrix has a helpful white paper entitled "NIEM and XBRL Collaboration," here: http://www.ubmatrix.com/downloads/UBmatrix_NIEM_X...

  5. PaulWilkinson

    UBmatrix has a helpful white paper entitled "NIEM and XBRL Collaboration," here: http://www.ubmatrix.com/downloads/UBmatrix_NIEM_X...

  6. NIEMExecDir (Donna Roy)

    Twitter Comment


    Great Post RT @pjwilk: New blog post: Standards Question: NIEM is 2 XBRL as US Customary Units R 2 the Metric System? [link to post]

    Posted using Chat Catcher

  7. Hitachi XBRL » Blog Archive » XBRL: An Interview with Paul Wilkinson (Part 2)

    [...] In a recent blog, you posited the idea that “NIEM is to XBRL as United States customary units are to the Metric [...]