- XBRL International has announced their next conference, to be held this May in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. I wonder if they need a really smart XML analyst as a guest speaker. Actually, they are more than all set, as their keynote speakers include Christopher Cox, Chairman of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, Gerrit Zalm, Chairman of the International. Accounting Standards Board Trustees, and Eddy Wymeersch, Chair of the Committee of European Securities Regulators. I believe that is what you call a critical mass.
- In a related note, the SEC is moving apace with their Financial Explorer website we mentioned recently. Software engineers can now download the source code for Financial Explorer tools launched February 15. The source code download is available for free on the SEC Web site. I took a quick look at the zip file. It’s ASP Classic JScript on the server side and client side Javascript. They list the dependencies as IIS 6.0, .NET 2.0, Javascript 1.5, and ASP Classic JScript 5.6.
Author: Bill Trippe (Page 10 of 23)
Looking ahead to our conference in San Francisco, there are a number of sessions related to XML and content management, as well as some broader sessions on SaaS and content management platforms. David Guenette and I are working with Frank on the Content Technologies & Strategies (CTS) track as well as the Enterprise Publishing Technology (EPT) track. At this writing, we have the following sessions on tap (and you can see the whole grid here).
CTS-1: XML Strategies for Content Management
XML is fundamental to content management in two important ways–in how the content is tagged and structured and also in how content management systems interact with each other and with other enterprise applications. This session looks at how successful organizations make the best use of XML to support critical business processes and applications.
CTS-2: Enterprise Rights Management: Best Practices & Case Studies
As content management systems proliferate, so do the requirements for better and more sophisticated protection of that content. Simply stated, traditional protection is not enough–content needs to be protected persistently throughout complex business processes. Enterprise Rights Management platforms are answering these challenges, and this session uses case studies to help explain how this technology can help you meet your requirements.
CTS-3: SaaS – Is Software as a Service Right for You?
Software as a Service is exploding. Every day brings new offerings, new approaches, and new adopters. While content management SaaS offerings were once limited to Web Content Management, there are now SaaS offerings for document management, ECM, globalization, and XML-based component content management. This session looks at the big questions about SaaS and discusses whether SaaS might be right for you.
CTS-4: Platform Pros & Cons: SharePoint vs. Oracle vs.
Documentum vs. IBM
The long-predicted content management platform wars are upon us. Activity is everywhere–the introduction of SharePoint 2007, Oracle’s acquisition of Stellent, and EMC’s continued aggressive acquisition strategy, and IBM’s acquisition of Filenet. Will we all end up using one of these four platforms, and if we do, would this be a good thing? This session will offer the vendor, user, and industry perspective on this dominant issue.
CTS-5: Financial Content Collaboration with XBRL & RIXML
If you follow XML in the financial services arena, you undoubtedly know about XBRL, the emerging standard for financial data reporting that is really taking hold at the SEC and the regulatory agencies of EU countries. But a lesser known but equally intriguing standard is RIXML, the Research Information Exchange Markup Language. This session looks at these standards and the implications for the lifecycle of financial content.
EPT-1: Enterprise Publishing with XML (DITA)
June 2008 marks the third anniversary since DITA 1.0 was approved by the OASIS Technical Committee, and it is very safe to say that no XML-based publishing standard has had such rapid and far-ranging uptake. This session looks at some emerging uses of DITA while also discussing some of the positive business impact enjoyed by companies who have already adopted the standard.
EPT-2: Multi-Channel Publishing – How to Do It
Multi-channel publishing has become a mandate for nearly every organization. With the explosion in mobile devices, the mandate is becoming more complex. But along with this complexity comes opportunity to serve more users and more applications. This session offer case studies and practical advice for implementing multi-channel publishing to support your business objectives.
EPT-3: Digital Publishing Platforms: Magazines, Newspapers &eBooks
Amazon’s Kindle may be getting all of the publicity, but there is an explosion in new devices, technologies, and products for digital publishing–with implications for every traditional publishing medium. What are these new technologies, and what opportunities do they present to publishers? Hear from publishers and technologists, as well as some of the results of the Gilbane Group’s extensive research into how these technologies are reshaping the digital publishing landscape.
- I was researching something yesterday and ran a search for DITA and decided, heck, we have some good resources here.
- Danielle Guinebertiere writes to tell us that the 2008 Mark Logic user conference will be held June 10-13 at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco.
- Ditto Ektron CEO Bill Rogers, who alerted us to the call for papers for their 2008 user conference.
- AIIM is almost upon us. One of the things I’ll be checking out is the XPS showcase.
- Speaking of AIIM, I will be speaking as part of a post-AIIM webinar March 12 on dynamic documents.
- D-Day for Microsoft Office at ISO?
- Interesting article over at DevX about using PHP to create dynamic SVG. Always warms my heart to see new energy behind SVG!
As I write this, someone in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is editing the entry on British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. As Ben Vershbow notes over at if:book, it is weirdly compelling.
eBook followers will remember that Oprah endorsed eBooks early on, even choosing one of the early eBook readers as one of her Favorite Things. Now she has caused a bitstorm around an eBook version of Suze Orman’s book Women and Money.
The Oprah touch doesn’t just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman’s “Women & Money” were downloaded after the announcement last week on Winfrey’s television show that the e-book edition would be available for free on her Web site, , for a period of 33 hours.
“I believe `Women & Money’ is the most important book I’ve ever written,” Orman said in a statement released Saturday by Winfrey. “So this was not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to read it, and that was the intention behind this offer.”
The download offer “has built excitement for Suze’s book across all formats,” Julie Grau, the book’s publisher, said in a statement.
If you follow XML in the financial services arena, you undoubtedly know about XBRL, the emerging standard for financial data reporting that is really taking hold at the SEC and the regulatory agencies of EU countries. But a lesser known but equally intriguing standard is RIXML, the Research Information Exchange Markup Language. RIXML.org is a consortium of buy-side and sell-side research firms, and vendors, that is defining an XML-based standard for categorizing, tagging and distributing global investment research.
Like XBRL, RIXML has great potential to enhance how financial analysts work with financial content. With rich, XML-encoded financial information, you can imagine analysts finding ways to better filter information, to develop powerful queries and reports, and to commingle research content from various sources. I was talking to colleague Geoff Bock about this, and we both know financial analysts who do all this now, but do it with Excel. They are the ultimate Excel power users, and they consume and model vast amounts of financial information. And they typically do this under tremendous time pressure.
XBRL clearly has traction–9,540,000 Google hits, lots of vendor support, and a roadmap to mandatory SEC adoption (warning, big PDF file!). RIXML is a more nascent effort–9,740 Google hits–but its potential impact is significant. Financial reporting and research data already has an important lifecycle. We see it in the markets every day, though most of us only from a distance. XML has the potential to make this lifecycle much more efficient, much more content-rich, and much less dependent on the manual efforts of those frazzled financial analysts. Instead of 16-hour days during earnings season, maybe they can work, heck, 14-hour days! (Actually, their managers will likely just give them a few more companies to cover…)
By the way, an obvious question to ask about RIXML is how it might integrate with XBRL. This too is nascent, though the two organizations have signed a very general memorandum of understanding. You can also find a related presentation here (PDF again).
UPDATE: The SEC has launched a new website, Financial Explorer, that enables users to generate custom data from the underlying XBRL-encoded reports.
So says Tim Bray. And he would know; he helped invent it. Tim’s post is a very nice “where are they now” that gives credit to the interesting collection of folks who worked very hard on XML in the early days.
Hat tip, Dave Winer.
Steve Paxhia noted during a meeting the other day that the kindle is indeed still on back order, though as far as we know there are no definitive numbers out on how many they have actually sold. Still, unless there are extraordinarily problems with their manufacturing or supply chain, they have to be producing and selling a healthy number of them. In another meeting last week, someone actually said, “I will read that on my Kindle on the flight back.”
Then today, via Slashdot I learn that science fiction publisher Tor is giving away free eBooks in association with the launch of their new website. Science fiction is another market, along with romance, that has been good for eBooks, and this kind of wide-scale marketing strikes me as a logical next step.
UPDATE: Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press is making maximum use of his Kindle and thinks it beats the SkyMall catalog any day.
