advice on modeling an XBRL fact as a triple

I wanted to bounce some ideas off of others regarding the modeling of an 
XBRL "fact" (an XBRL term of art) as triples. I'm not ambitious enough 
yet to model all the possible relationships that XBRL instances and 
taxonomies can express, and would rather start with simple facts as the 
low-hanging fruit.

Here is some sample XML from an XBRL instance:

       <us-gaap:SharesOutstanding
           xbrl:contextRef="x1"
           xbrl:unitRef="Shares"
           xbrl:decimals="-6">485000000</us-gaap:SharesOutstanding>

The toughest part is the PCDATA 485000000 part. To turn the above into 
an RDF/XML element, I could wrap 485000000 in an rdf:bag or something, 
but I want to keep it simpler to make the eventual SPARQL queries 
simpler. Assuming that structuring the triples around a blank node is 
the best way to go, how does the following look?

   _bnodex rdf:type "us-gaap:SharesOutstanding";
           xbrl:contextRef "x1";
           xbrl:unitRef "Shares";
           xbrl:decimals "-6";
           us-gaap:SharesOutstanding "485000000".

If the use of the rdf:type object as a predicate is not a good idea, is 
there some convention (i.e. an existing predicate from an existing 
ontology) to represent the PCDATA of an element that has attributes that 
are also being represented by triples?

thanks,

Bob

Received on Wednesday, 10 September 2008 14:58:11 UTC