XBRL Taxonomy

An XBRL taxonomy is the standardized dictionary of reporting concepts that XBRL tags refer to. It defines each reportable element — such as "Revenues," "Net Income (Loss)," or "Total Assets" — along with its precise meaning, data type, valid relationships to other concepts, human-readable labels, and authoritative references to accounting standards. When a company tags a number in its filing, it is linking that number to a specific element in a taxonomy, which is what gives the tag a consistent, machine-understandable meaning.

The most widely used taxonomy for U.S. public-company financial statements is the U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy, maintained by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and approved each year by the SEC.

A taxonomy is more than a flat list of terms. It organizes concepts into structured relationships using "linkbases" that describe how elements relate to one another — for example, how individual line items roll up into a subtotal (the calculation linkbase), how they should be presented in order (the presentation linkbase), and what labels and references apply (the label and reference linkbases).

When a company needs to report something that the base U.S. GAAP taxonomy does not contain — a company-specific segment, product line, or non-standard line item — it can create an "extension," adding a custom element that extends the standard taxonomy. Extensions let companies preserve their own reporting structure while still anchoring it to the standardized base.

This anchoring is why the same financial concept can be located across thousands of filers. GeminIQ relies on these taxonomy elements to read as-filed values directly from SEC XBRL data, including company-specific extension elements, rather than collapsing everything into a normalized third-party schema.