Archive for the ‘XBRL’ Category

Show Me The Money!

Monday, June 25th, 2012

I need to talk to Tommie Usdin about marketing the Balisage conference.

The final program came out today and here is what Tommie had to say:

When the regular (peer-reviewed) part of the Balisage 2012 program was scheduled, a few slots were reserved for presentation of “Late breaking” material. These presentations have now been selected and added to the program.

Topics added include:

  • making robust and multi-platform ebooks
  • creating representative documents from large document collections
  • validating RESTful services using XProc, XSLT, and XSD
  • XML for design-based (e.g. magazine) publishing
  • provenance in XSLT transformation (tracking what XSLT does to documents)
  • literate programming
  • managing the many XML-related standards and specifications
  • leveraging XML for web applications

The program already included talks about adding RDF to TEI documents, compression of XML documents, exploring large XML collections, Schematron, relation of XML to JSON, overlap, higher-order functions in XSLT, the balance between XML and non-XML notations, and many other topics. Now it is a real must for anyone who thinks deeply about markup.

Balisage is the XML Geek-fest; the annual gathering of people who design markup and markup-based applications; who develop XML specifications, standards, and tools; the people who read and write, books about publishing technologies in general and XML in particular; and super-users of XML and related technologies. You can read about the Balisage 2011 conference at http://www.balisage.net.

Yawn. Are we there yet? ;-)

Why you should care about XML and Balisage:

  • US government and others are publishing laws and regulations and soon to be legislative material in XML
  • Securities are increasingly using XML for required government reports
  • Texts and online data sets are being made available in XML
  • All the major document formats are based in XML

A $billion here, a $billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real business opportunity.

Your un-Balisaged XML developers have $1,000 bills blowing overhead.

Be smart, make your XML developers imaginative and productive.

Send your XML developers to Balisage.

(http://www.balisage.net/registration.html)

Posted in Conferences, XBRL, XML, XPath, XQuery | No Comments »

…such as the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).

Saturday, April 28th, 2012

Now there is a shout-out! Better than Steve Cobert or Jon Steward? Possibly, possibly. ;-)

Where? The DATA act, recently passed by the House of Representatives (US), reads in part:

EXISTING DATA REPORTING STANDARDS.—In designating reporting standards under this subsection, the Commission shall, to the extent practicable, incorporate existing nonproprietary standards, such as the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). [Title 31, Section 3611(b)(3). Doesn't really roll off the tongue does it?]

No guarantees but what do you think the odds are that XBRL will be used by the commission? (That’s what I thought.)

With that in mind:

XBRL

Homepage for XBRL.org and apparently the starting point for all things XBRL. You will find the specifications, taxonomies, best practices and other materials on XBRL.

Enough reading material to keep you busy while waiting for organizations to adopt or to be required to adopt XBRL.

Topic maps are relevant to this transition for several reasons, among others:

  1. Some organizations will have legacy accounting systems that require mapping to XBRL.
  2. Even organizations that have transitioned to XBRL will have legacy data that has not.
  3. Transitions to XBRL by different organizations may not reflect the same underlying semantics.

Posted in Law, Law - Sources, Taxonomy, XBRL | No Comments »

XBRL Challenge ($20K Prize)

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

XBRL Challenge ($20K Prize)

OK, I admit that after the US budget debate, $20K doesn’t sound like a lot of money. ;-) But, think of the prestige, groupies, etc., that would go along with winning first place.

From the website:

Over 1770 companies have already filed XBRL-formatted financial statements to the SEC and by year-end 2011, all public companies will be doing so. While several XBRL-enabled tools are available on the marketplace today, we’ve created the XBRL Challenge to encourage the development of more tools and build awareness among analysts about the wealth of data available to them.

The XBRL Challenge is a contest that invites participants to contribute open source analytical applications for investors that leverage corporate XBRL data.

Here is the short description of what they are looking for:

Tools that rely on XBRL data, e.g., tool that extracts data for multi-company comparison via desktop application; or one that creates real-time valuation measures and delivers to mobile devices.

I am going to check out the rules and existing apps.

See you near the winner’s circle?

Posted in Funding, Marketing, Topic Maps, XBRL | No Comments »