The Gilbane Advisor

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Category: Web technologies & information standards (Page 48 of 58)

Here we include topics related to information exchange standards, markup languages, supporting technologies, and industry applications.

Microsoft & Sun: What is the Right XML Strategy for Information Interchange? – Keynote Debate at Gilbane Content Management Conference

March 16, 2005 /

3/16/05

Attendees to Learn What XML Experts Consider the Best Strategy for Preserving and Protecting Critical Business Content in Electronic Documents

Contacts:
Evan Weisel
Welz & Weisel Communications
703-323-6006
evan@w2comm.com
Jeffrey Arcuri
Lighthouse Seminars
781-821-6634
jarcuri@lighthouseseminars.com

Cambridge, MA, March 16, 2005. The Gilbane Report and Lighthouse Seminars today announced that the Gilbane Conference on Content Management, taking place April 11-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, will present a keynote debate titled: “What is the Right XML Strategy for Information Interchange?” Participating in this debate are Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies for Sun, Jean Paoli, Senior Director, XML Architecture at Microsoft, and Jon Udell, Lead Analyst at InfoWorld. The keynote takes place on April 11th at 3:45 p.m.

The keynote debate description: Until recently it was difficult and costly to preserve your content in an “open” industry standard format so that it wasn’t, in effect, held hostage by being in a software vendor’s proprietary format and their own product and business goals. Integration of office documents into enterprise applications was a risky proposition for the same reason. With the widespread adoption of XML, and in particular Microsoft’s support for XML in their Office suite, it seems like enterprises should finally be able to own their own information, share it with whom they want, and integrate office documents into critical enterprise applications. But is it really that simple?

At one level this can be framed as a debate between Microsoft and Sun/OpenOffice.org – and that is a choice organizations will have to make, but it is more complicated than that. In spite of the fact that OpenOffice and Microsoft Office both provide comprehensive XML support, there are still subtle differences that need careful consideration. Is one more “open” than the other? What are the practical implications of each approach? What are the relevant technical, legal, policy, and resource considerations? This is a significant issue: governments in Europe and in the U.S. (e.g., Massachusetts) are making policy/ purchasing decisions about “open” document formats as well as about open source code. This panel will look at all sides of the debate, peel away the political and marketing hype, and provide you with a clear understanding of the real issues so you can make your own well-informed decisions.

“Although XML has been around for years, this remains an underestimated and misunderstood issue,” said Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, “Developers, IT managers, and business managers will all learn from Tim, Jean, and Jon, who have emerged as the chief industry spokespeople because of their deep knowledge of this issue from both an application and technical perspective, as well as a facility for eloquence and refreshing straightforwardness.”

This event brings together 750 thought leaders and practitioners to provide attendees with actionable advice, techniques, best practices, and case studies to help understand and successfully implement content technologies critical to their businesses.

The Gilbane Conference on Content Management is unique in that the majority of its conference sessions are delivered by industry analysts and researchers to offer attendees a neutral and balanced market perspective related to content technologies and trends. The program is organized into five technology-specific areas: Content Management, Enterprise Search & Knowledge Management, Content Technology Works (case studies), Document & Records Management & Compliance, and Enterprise Information Integration.

Full event details can be found at: https://gilbane.com/San_Francisco_05.html

About Bluebill Advisors, The Gilbane Report 
Bluebill Advisors, Inc. serves the content management community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Report administers the Content Technology Works(TM) program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Technologies, Atomz, Astoria Software, ClearStory Systems (OTCBB:INCC), Context Media, Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Mark Logic, Open Text (NASDAQ:OTEX), Trados, Vasont, and Vignette (NASDAQ:VIGN). www.gilbane.com

About Lighthouse Seminars
Lighthouse Seminars’ events cover information technologies and “content technologies” in particular. These include content management of all types, digital asset management, document management, web content management, enterprise portals, enterprise search, web and multi-channel publishing, electronic forms, authoring, content and information integration, information architecture, and e-catalogs. http://www.lighthouseseminars.com

XBRL on the Inside?

March 2, 2005 / / 1 Comment

In the middle of this month a new SEC rule will go into effect, allowing companies to voluntarily submit EDGAR filings in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language).  As the rule explains, the SEC is interested in “allowing registrants, the Commission and others to test and evaluate tagging technology.”

In a press release on the topic early last month, SEC Chairman William H. Donaldson said that “this initiative is part of the Commission’s broader effort to improve the quality of information available to investors and the marketplace. By working to enhance the Commission’s filing and disclosure process through the use of new data formats, including tagged data, the Commission can improve how content is organized and analyzed.”

What This Might Mean

The interesting thing about sending out financial reports tagged with XBRL is that you can analyze the reports automatically.  Rather than manually picking through the numbers, you can use software to compute values and ratios for things such as working capital, free cash flow, asset utilization, and so on.  You could then automate comparisons between companies, or could load data into spreadsheets for more detailed analysis.  Widespread use of XBRL could transform the financial marketplace, bringing new transparency.  An analogy might help bring the impact of all this into focus …

It used to be that, if you were buying something sold through specialized retailers … say, a really good camera or a high-end audio system … you did your product research by visiting lots of stores and reading lots of magazines.  It was even more difficult to get a transparent view into the pricing of such products.  All that changed with the advent of the Internet. On the Internet, buyers had access to professional reviews, discussions and evaluations by consumers who owned the products, and could find broadly available pricing information. Shopping “Bots” even automated the pricing comparisons. The result has been the emergence of a more competitive, more transparent marketplace.  XBRL has the potential to bring some of the same changes to the securities market.

Further, as Amey Stone suggested in a BusinessWeek article titled
“After Sarbanes-Oxley, XBRL?” the SEC’s interest in XBRL could make such possibilities more than theoretical.  She suggested that, “like many SEC voluntary programs, it’s likely to become mandatory if it’s successful.”

What’s In This for Public Companies?

All of this leaves open the question of why senior management should want to support this, short of someday finding that it turns into a requirement. Does XBRL do any good for the companies that use it?

It seems to me that the answer to that question depends on where the XBRL is being used.  Here is a diagram taken from the XBRL International website.  It shows that there are a number of very different ways to use XBRL:

The two kinds of applications on the right of this diagram are what the SEC is talking about. For these applications, it does appear that the benefit of XBRL is primarily for external users of financial information.  But, if XBRL were also used in the kinds of applications on the left side of this picture–aiding in the preparation of internal financial reports and in the translation from internal to external reports–there could be very substantial benefits from XBRL adoption.  I could also see applications to compliance and internal control initiatives.

Are any readers engaged in XBRL applications that would fall on in the left half of this diagram?  Is anyone thinking about it?  Does this seem like a good idea?  Send an e-mail or post some comments …

DITA 1.0 Committee Draft Open for Public Review

February 16, 2005 / / 0 Comments

Via Mary McRae at OASIS and Don Day, Chair of the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Technical Committee:
The OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC has recently approved DITA 1.0 as a Committee Draft and approved it for public review. The public review starts today, 15 February 2005 and ends 15 March 2005.
Public review from potential users, developers and stakeholders is an important part of the OASIS process to assure interoperability and quality. Comments are solicited from all interested parties. Please feel free to forward this message to other appropriate lists and/or post this information on your organization’s web site. Comments may be submitted to the TC by any person via a web form found on the TC’s web page. Click the button for “Send A Comment” at the top of the page.
We have a white paper on DITA in general and its potential role in globalization. I am also exploring DITA on behalf of a client, so will stay abreast of this.

XML, Britney, and God

January 29, 2005 / / 0 Comments

In an article for EContent Magazine in late 2003, I wrote:

If you google “XML,” you do get a stunning 20.5 million hits, which is about four times as many as “Britney,” but—sensibly—half as many as “God.” So I guess XML falls short of omniscience. Still, the prevalence of XML has led to its being a too-ready answer to seemingly every question about information technology in general and content management in particular. The assumption seems to be that, no matter the requirement or problem, XML is the answer.

Updating those searches for today’s results on Google, I get 119 million hits for XML, which is now about six times as many as “Britney,” and now only 10 million fewer than “God.”

Binary XML

January 18, 2005 / / 0 Comments

“Binary XML” sounds like an oxymoron. It is, after all, the plain text encoding of XML that makes it so easy to work with. Heck, I still use the “vi” editor to make quick changes to XML and HTML files.
Writing in the Australian edition of Builder.com, Martin LaMonica provides a nice roundup of the pros and cons of some efforts to develop a binary XML. He summarizes some related projects at Sun and the W3C, and has some very lively quotes from XML guru (and Gilbane Report Editor Emeritus) Tim Bray. (And if you want to hear directly from Tim on the issue of binary XML, his blog has plenty of related entries.)
I’ll leave it up to people much smarter than me to figure this one out, but the discussion of binary XML is related to the larger question of performance. As XML is more and more pervasive, organizations will need to find ways to deal with performance impacts over time. We talked about XML hardware in this context a few days ago, and ZDNet is reporting today that Cisco may be getting in the XML hardware game. Stay tuned.

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