JustSystems and Mark Logic Corporation announced a technology partnership that will enable enterprise organizations to streamline data aggregation, content creation and publishing of financial reports using XBRL. Driven by XBRL compliance requirements set forth by the SEC and by the need to eliminate accounting errors and fraud, JustSystems and Mark Logic will offer customers a technology integration that combines JustSystems xfy XBRL Report and MarkLogic Server. This integration option allows enterprise organizations to push complex financial XBRL content from MarkLogic Server to content applications built on the JustSystems xfy platform at any stage of a business workflow. Using this functionality, organizations can also analyze and create detailed financial reports from XBRL content and add XBRL-aware document management functionality to their existing MarkLogic Server deployments. JustSystems xfy XBRL Report lets users review and analyze XBRL data and share their results with others. To that end, xfy consumes XBRL, creating content that uses the XBRL data and publishes it in a web-ready HTML or PDF. Other users can view the published reports without any special software, just a standard web browser. http://www.justsystems.com/, http://www.marklogic.com
Category: Web technologies & information standards (Page 22 of 59)
Here we include topics related to information exchange standards, markup languages, supporting technologies, and industry applications.
Platformic unveiled version 3.0 of its enterprise web development software. Acontent management system (CMS) with a built-in point-and-click mechanism for building layouts visually, Platformic removes the need to hard-code websites or use third-party web authoring tools. The new version is based on Platformic’s ability to simplify web development and management with its browser-based building capability and cascading style sheet (CSS) template generation tool that automatically and visually writes fully validated, nested CSS Div structures through a point-and-click architecture. Users can now import a flattened Photoshop file of their website using the Image Guide, which can then be used to guide the building process. The Layout and Style Console are used to build the structure of the site based on the Image Guide. The Platformic system then automatically builds a nested, compliant and validated CSS structure as the user visually creates each page. Previous releases of Platformic had browser based CSS generation functionality, but with the new release, the method of navigating through a nested div structure has been made even easier. A Platformic user can now navigate through “parent” and “child” user levels and highlight the complete contents of specific layers, enabling him/her to see everything within that container. Complex nested structures can be easily navigated as the page structure is organized. Tool Tips show users exactly where they are within the CSS structure and reveal the properties of each container. http://platformic.com/
Lynn Turner, the outspoken and former SEC chief accountant under Arthur Levitt, is again in the news straight talking about what is wrong in the world of accounting. His straight talk has earned him a reputation as a beacon for clear financial reporting and no non-sense. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Turner in 2002 while speaking as a conference at the University of Northern Colorado. My topic, XBRL, was very new to the entire audience except for Lynn. Then something completely unexpected happened.
In the middle of my talk, Lynn raised his hand like traffic cop and said “Stop”.
The next few words surprised me and stuck with me to this day. Lynn said, “Neal, I’m a believer and supporter of XBRL. In fact, I wrote the speech for Arthur Levitt when he mentioned XBRL back in 2000. But please promise me that whenever you speak in public about XBRL remind people that you must get the accounting right first.”
When the shock of being stopped in mid-sentence by the former SEC chief accountant wore off, I thanked Lynn for his comments and continued with my talk. Later, as I reflected upon what Mr. Turner had said, the idea of putting accounting first began to resonate. You see, XBRL is a unique new way to tell the world about the accounting choices your company has made. Each line item and soon, each numerical value in the footnotes to financial statements will carry additional information about the label, definition and authoritative reference associated with each value. Never before has the accounting behind the numbers been so exposed.
Getting the accounting right will be a process that will evolve over time. For example, I do not expect the newly released 2009 Us GAAP taxonomy to be perfect. Each individual line will require careful review by the management team during the time-compressed close to file cycle. Review processes will be tested and tweeked as the XBRL becomes a critical part of the correctness and timliness of the corporate SEC filing.
Problems are also likely to surface from outside filing companies. The taxonomy will be “stress tested’ when over 500 first phase filings begin this June. I expect to hear reports of missing elements and errors in the taxonomy. We will also hear about cases where the use of the XBRL taxonomy exposes interesting things about corporate accounting that might not be right. As Lynn Turner admonished over seven years ago, companies need to get the accounting right first, then correctly tag the results in XBRL.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group updated the Candidate Recommendation of “Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification.” CSS 2.1 is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts and spacing) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML’s “style” attribute and a new calculation of the ‘clip’ property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. But most of all CSS 2.1 represents a “snapshot” of CSS usage: it consists of all CSS features that are implemented interoperably. This draft incorporates errata resulting from implementation experience since the previous publication. http://www.w3.org/Style/
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group has published a Working Draft of “HTML 5.” HTML 5 adds to the language of the Web features to help Web application authors, new elements based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. This particular draft specifies how authors can embed SVG in non-XML text/html content, and how browsers and other UAs should handle such embedded SVG content. See also the news about moving some parts of HTML 5 to individual drafts. The ” full list of changes” since the previous draft are listed in the updated companion document “HTML 5 differences from HTML 4.” http://www.w3.org/html/wg/
The W3C OWL Working Group has published new Working Drafts for OWL 2, a language for building Semantic Web ontologies. An ontology is a set of terms that a particular community finds useful for organizing data (e.g., for data about a book, useful terms include “title” and “author”). OWL 2 (a compatible extension of “OWL 1″ ) consists of 13 documents (7 technical, 4 instructional, and 2 group Notes). For descriptions and links to all the documents, see the ” OWL 2 Documentation Roadmap.” This is a “Last Call” for the technical materials and is an opportunity for the community to confirm that these documents satisfy requirements for an ontology language. This is a second Last Call for six of the documents, but because the changes since the first Last Call are limited in scope, the review period lasts only 21 days. For an introduction to OWL 2, see the four instructional documents: an “overview,” “primer,” “list of new features,” and “quick reference.” http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL, http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-owl2-new-features-20090421/
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