Category: Web technologies & information standards (Page 32 of 58)

• 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!

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.

Over at DITA Users, Bob Doyle has put together a brief and very useful Flash tutorial on DITA.

Well as the name of the blog suggests, the focus is on both technology and strategy. We have been at this long enough to come to the stunning conclusion that technology adoptions minus well-thought-out and sound business strategies are doomed to failure. (Now you know why we get paid the big bucks!) While obvious, the conclusion is also true. I have had the luxury of consulting with several clients over a long period of time. I like to think they are successful because they listen to me (and they do), but the bigger reason they are successful is that they use my input to inform well thought out business strategies. Sometimes these are operational (they want to save money, improve efficiency), but more often they are about the top line. They want to drive more revenue.

For commercial publishers this means bringing more product to market more quickly, customizing products, and developing derivative products (think of offerings like SafariU). For enterprises, this is also tied to bringing more product to market more quickly; think of a company like Autodesk using XML-based publishing and globalization to bring more products to more markets simultaneously. These are world-class projects based on XML that are bringing incredible value to their organizations, but–even more significantly–these are not the only efforts of their kind. Whereas in the early days of SGML the community could count projects of this type in perhaps the low double digits, I have long ago given up on trying to remember or catalog how many of these projects are out there backed by XML technology.

But not every project is as successful as the ones I have cited. Indeed these stand out as case studies of the best practices. Projects do fail and projects do falter, and I will reveal my bias here in saying that, especially in the recent few years, few projects fail because of the chosen technology. (All complex systems require significant customization! Who would have thunk it?) Much more often they fail because of problems with project management, lack of sufficient staffing, and shifting plans and execution when the inevitable problems arise. And these kinds of failures come right back to a failure in strategy, or at least a failure in realistically planning for a complex undertaking that is critical to organizational success.
So content strategies are indeed a critical half of this practice, but technology is the other half. Here as well a comparison to SGML is in order. Whereas in the days of SGML there were few vendors at the table, now there are literally scores. Even more importantly, none of the major vendors are missing, and one can make the argument that the major vendors are–or soon will be–the dominant players in the market. XML is central to the product and development platform strategies of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Sun, Adobe, and EMC. One can only speculate at the level of R&D dedicated to XML at these companies, but it is safe to say it is a lot. Just as impressive is the community of developers who work in XML daily. Most programmers working in contemporary languages like Java and C# use XML for all kinds of routine tasks, and XML data mapping and modeling tools are built into Visual Studio and many other development tools.

To be more specific, we intend to cover what we categorize as the range of XML products of most interest to business and IT professionals responsible for content management initiatives. These include:

• XML Repositories
• XML Content Management Platforms
• XML Editors
• XML Transformation and Publishing Tools
• XML Utilities, Middleware, and IDEs
• XML Forms

Among other things, we will be developing an online directory of these product lines (more on that in a future post). I have been informally cataloging the companies over the recent few weeks and I already have 60 to 70 companies without trying very hard. We expect to interact with these vendors, get details of the products and product roadmaps, and also work with them when appropriate on product strategy and projects like white papers and case studies.

So that’s the news so far from here. Do get in touch if you have any questions, ideas, or complaints!