Endeca announced the availability of new Manufacturing & Distribution Search Solutions, a combination of information retrieval applications, services and expertise. The new Endeca solutions help people can find parts and products knowing only limited information, such as attributes, dimensions or fragmentary knowledge of what they need. Whether an engineer searching for the best part to include in a new design or a customer looking for product information on a manufacturer’s website, Endeca’s search and Guided Navigation helps employees and customers find what they are looking for. The Endeca Product Data Navigator combines search and browse into a single integrated function, giving users the ability to find products, parts, components and related information through a web-based interface. With the Endeca Product Data Navigator, pre-built content adapters can combine data from multiple systems, like PLM, ERP and any other information repository to create an integrated view of data from multiple silos. http://www.endeca.com
Day: May 3, 2005
IBM announced new software and investments in research and development to help customers and developers leverage information on demand by integrating, analyzing and managing their business data, no matter where it is stored. The offerings include new technologies and assets immediately incorporated into IBM’s portfolio following completion of the acquisition of Ascential Software. The software technologies and investments unveiled include: expanded IBM information integration product roadmap that features the next generation WebSphere Data Integration Suite (code-named “Hawk” by Ascential) – IBM plans to deliver the “Hawk” software platform to customers this year, as part of the company’s next generation WebSphere Information Integration solutions portfolio; expansion of worldwide information integration research and development resources to accelerate the delivery of information integration software; and introduction of a new Federated Records Management software solution for automated electronic records management across the enterprise. An open customer beta test program of the WebSphere Data Integration Suite will be launched in the second quarter of 2005. http://www.ibm.com/software/data
TRADOS Inc. announced the availability of its second-generation release of TRADOS Language Server for Documentum, a solution to tie together content globalization with EMC Documentum, an enterprise content management (ECM) platform. The integrated solution enables companies who are already using EMC Documentum as their ECM platform, to globalize their content within their existing business processes. TRADOS Language Server provides customers with opportunities for revenue growth by delivering their product content to more countries in a larger number of languages. http://www.documentum.com/app_portfolio,
PureEdge Solutions Inc. and Open Text Corporation announced they are partnering to deliver new solutions that will help large organizations streamline and improve complex processes that require electronic forms. Open Text will utilize the PureEdge 8x XML solution to extend e-forms capabilities in its Livelink ECM Solutions. A key target for the new solutions will be large government agencies, in addition to major corporations in the financial services, healthcare and manufacturing sectors. Livelink ECM Solutions unify information and complex processes, while allowing the people involved in those processes to collaborate in real time. By using PureEdge XML e-forms with Livelink, customers will be able to accelerate their e-forms implementation. http://www.opentext.com, http://www.pureedge.com
Fractal:Edge announced that Innodata Isogen has become a strategic alliance partner. The alliance will give Innodata Isogen’s clients the opportunity to take advantage of Fractal:Edge’s Fractal Maps in order to unlock the potential of their data. Fractal:Edge solutions allow visualisation, navigation and query of large data sources and are suited to content management.
Fujitsu Software Corporation announced the availability of Interstage Contentbiz v7, the newest version of Fujitsu’s application platform for enterprise content integration. Interstage Contentbiz v7 extends support for Web services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), offers a new extensible audit trail and enhances integration capabilities. These features allow companies to more effectively access, modify and search structured and unstructured enterprise content resident in disparate, networked systems, independent of format or location. Key features and enhancements include: Bidirectional WebDAV Agent enables integration with any enterprise content management (ECM) system that complies with the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) standard; New Extensible Audit Trail ensures that proper audit trail information is maintained for all compliance documentation; Enhanced Web Services Interface enables enterprises to leverage a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to create Web services and integrate reusable content integration services with applications; New Web Content Agent extends the reach of content integration solutions to intranet and Internet content; and, New Content Portlets, which comply with JSR 168 (Java Specification Request for Portlet API), provide commonly used content navigation and search functionality that can be easily deployed on enterprise portals. http://www.fujitsu.com/interstage
XBRL is, in some ways, a funny kind of XML language. It doesn’t make much use
of the capabilities within XML Schema to express relationships such as
order, hierarchy, and so on. Viewed strictly as XML, XBRL looks pretty flat,
without a lot of contextual constraints.
But that’s nonsense, of course. Financial documents are highly constrained
and contain intricate interrelationships. XBRL expresses these relationships
within "taxonomies"–special XBRL constructs that define business
"concepts" and that relate these concepts to each other. The
relationships can, in fact, be really complex …more so than would be possible
within a strict XML Schema definition.
Once consequence of this decision to define the bulk of XBRL semantics
outside the range of standard XML semantics is that XSLT (XML Stylesheet
Language Translator) doesn’t work very well
as a way to transform XBRL documents into something that humans can read. Since
XSLT cannot
"understand" the information in the XBRL taxonomy, XSLT does not have
the information that it needs to present the "facts" in an XBRL instance
in a way that reflects the taxonomy relationships.
So, how do people produce formatted output from XBRL today? In a Wednesday morning session at the 11th
International XBRL Conference, Raymond Lam of BlastRadius
explained that the usual solution is to hard-wire all
the necessary contextual information into the XSLT rules. The result is an XSLT
stylesheet that contains nearly as many separate template rules as there are
separate facts to be presented. Bummer.
I remain a fan of Onfolio, which began life as kind of a personal knowledge manager for Web-based content, but has evolved to also handle RSS feeds and provide more publishing capabilities. I have used it for quite a while now to maintain my eForms Resources page, and am currently using the new version, 2.0, which supports Firefox, which is now my primary browser.
I’ve had some correspondence with Sebastian Gard, who does product marketing for Onfolio. He asked me for some feedback on 2.0 compared to the earlier version of the product, and I offered the following.
