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.