NIEM 3.0 Public Review

The National Information Exchange Model (the data model used by law enforcement and first responders) has made NIEM 3.0 available for public review from today until May 6, 2013. NIEM is looking for both technical and non-technical comments. If you have an opinion about this now is the time to comment

Layer 7 blogs

Layer 7, a software development company (XML, cloud computing, SOA, and so on) has a whole flotilla of blogs:

Layer 7 company blog

Scott Morrison

Adam Vincent

Francois Lascelles

Well done Layer 7.

Call for Participation: XML-in-Practice 2009 Conference

IDEAlliance

IDEAlliance cordially invites you to participate at the world’s longest-running conference devoted to Markup and XML. XML-in-Practice 2009 offers an unparalleled opportunity to connect and apply the learning from leaders in government, publishing, business, healthcare, and technology.

This year's conference will provide two full days of program that will focus on XML in three key areas:

• XML in eGovernment
• XML In Publishing & eMedia
• XML Foundations, Applications, and Interoperability

XML in Practice will showcase real world applications and solutions that XML has enabled, enhanced and or made possible. In addition, and as is tradition with the IDEAlliance XML Conference, the foundations, applications and interoperability track will offer topics with sufficient technical depth to explore pressing issues beyond the fundamentals.

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Important Dates

• Abstracts due: May 8
• Notification: May 25
• Program Posted: June 1
• Presentations Due: September 15

• 
  

DC XML Users Group Feb. Meeting: Taming XML Using Rules

Last week I went to the DC XML Users Group to see KC Morris of NIST explain the tools they had developed to help XML developers to write code that conforms to standards.

She ran through quick demonstrations of their Content Checker, Naming and Design Rules Profile, a Quality of Design Tool and a Constrain Generator (a tool to aid in coding business constraints in various rules languages).

She discussed the challenged of developing tools to be used across the federal government, with every agency having its unique requirements. Concerning the Naming and Design Rules Profile for example, Morris said that there was general agreement that spelling out an entire name, as opposed to using an acronym, was preferable; except the CIA pointed out that their acronyms were for classified material. At this a member of the audience said, “welcome to the program,” to general laughter. It was a Washington, DC moment.

Attention DC XML Community

The DC XML Users Group site has undergone a complete redesign. It is now a Drupal site, with the possibility to maintain a blog, participate in discussion forums, and otherwise participate in an online community.

Thank you Betty Harvey!

New to me local XML blog

PilotFish Blog

Why “Balisage”? Because that’s the way we say “Markup” in Montréal!

Call for Participation
Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009

Balisage is a peer reviewed conference designed to meet the needs of markup theoreticians and practitioners who are pushing the boundaries of the field. It's all about the markup: how to create it; what it means; hierarchies and overlap; modeling; taxonomies; transformation; query, searching, and retrieval; presentation and accessibility; making systems that make markup dance (or dance faster to a different tune in a smaller space) — in short, changing the world and the web through the power of marked-up information.

When:

August 11 — 14, 2009
August 10, 2009 — International Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently

Where:

Montréal, Canada

To Participate

We welcome papers about topic maps, document modeling, markup of overlapping structures, ontologies, metadata, content management, and other markup-related topics at Balisage. If you want to talk, in detail, XML, XSL, SGML, LMNL, XSL-FO, XTM, RDF, XQuery, Topic Maps, SVG, MathML, OWL, UBL, XSD, TexMECS, RNG, or any other markup-related topic, we urge you to participate in Balisage.

How:

Submit full papers in XML to info@balisage.net
Guidelines, DTDs, schemas, and details at http://www.balisage.net/submissions.html

Apply to the Peer Review panel

Schedule:

15 March 2009 — Peer Review Applications Due
24 April 2009 — Paper Submissions Due
22 May 2009 — Speakers Notified
17 July 2009 — Revised Papers Due
10 August 2009 — Processing Symposium
11–14 August 2009 — Balisage: The Markup Conference

Please help us make Balisage: The Markup Conference exciting and lively. See you in Montréal!

Coming attractions: XML-In-Practice 2008

Next week's GHQ for XML affectionados, Marriott Crystal Gateway, Arlington, VA




I am pleased to report that XML-In-Practice 2008 has given me press credentials. Bob DuCharme has written an excellent preview. I plan to cover the presentation of the use of XML by the Associated Press and US News & World Report's presentation on PRISM for Metadata.

Here are the schedules for Tuesday and Wednesday (scroll down). If readers have any views on what they would like to read about, please leave word in the comments.

Owen Ambur talks about his work for the federal government, XML, and standards

This is the second of an occasional series of interviews with local tech leaders.

Owen Ambur recently retired from the Fish and Wildlife Service. He talks about the Federal XML Work Group, and his current work with AIIM's StratML Committee.

How did you come to work at the Fish & Wildlife Service?

After a 14-year stint on Capitol Hill with Congressman/Senator Abdnor, our election defeat became an opportunity for me to serve for 7 1/2 years as the Congressional liaison for an agency in whose mission I strongly believe.  As chief of the Office of Legislative Services, I implemented an electronic document management system and the Director of the agency asked me to take a special assignment in the Office of Information Resources Management (IRM) to expand the system agency-wide.  After spending the first two-thirds of my career in Congressional affairs, that's how I ended up in a more technical line of work -- not because of a fascination with technology but because I needed it to do my job efficiently and effectively


How did you get interested in XML?

My involvement in XML stems from my long-standing interest in document/records management and forms automation.


How was the xmlCoP formed?

Early in 2000 I sent a message to George Brundage of GSA highlighting two opportunities for the government to leverage the potential of XML.  He posted my message on a listserv he was maintaining relating to information technology architecture.  Martin Smith, who was then with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), and more recently has worked at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), suggested that I bring those ideas to the attention of the CIO Council (CIOC).  I did so and Lee Holcomb, who was then CIO at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and co-chaired what is now the CIOC's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee (AIC), commissioned Martin and me to form an ad hoc group and come back to his committee with a recommendation.  That group recommended that a more formal working group be chartered under the auspices of the CIOC, and our first charter was approved in the fall of 2000.

The original message thread that led to formation of the XML Working Group (XML WG) is available at http://xml.gov/documents/completed/genesis.htm In September 2004, the XML WG was re-chartered as the XML Community of Practice (xmlCoP) and the history of the group is available at http://xml.gov/documents/completed/history.htm  Coincidentally, our current charter expires on November 30: http://xml.gov/documents/completed/charter.htm


How did you come to co-chair the Federal XML Work Group?

In the ad hoc group that met prior to chartering of the XML WG, I was pushing for GSA and NIST to co-chair the group, in light of their missions, and Marion Royal of GSA was subsequently assigned to serve as co-chair. However, Martin and others pressed for me to accept the other slot and it was an offer I could not refuse to do something in which I truly believe.


What do you think the Federal XML Work Group achieved?

As I told Lee and others in the CIOC, XML was going to happen regardless of whether the CIOC did anything about it or not.  It has taken longer than I had hoped and we still have a long way to go to fully capitalize on the potential in an effective and well-coordinated manner on a government-wide basis.  However, I do believe the fact that the xmlWG/CoP was formally recognized by the CIOC, met virtually every month for six years straight, and still maintains the xml.gov site has fostered awareness, education, and sharing of experiences and expertise. Hopefully, that has brought greater credibility to what is to most people a pretty esoteric subject and, in turn, has encouraged agencies to act more rapidly than might have otherwise been the case.

For example, it is somewhat ironic that the first time the xmlCoP was briefed on the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) was when Pat McCreary and Bob Greeves of the Department of Justice (DOJ) filled in at the last minute when our scheduled speaker was unable to appear due to the events of 9/11.  The agenda and minutes from that meeting are available, respectively, at http://xml.gov/agenda/20010919.htm and
http://www.xml.gov/minutes/20010919.htm  Subsequently, the GJXDM morphed into the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), which may be the single, best success story for XML in government.

However, I cannot leave this topic without addressing what I consider to be
our greatest failure, which was the failure of Congress to approve the President's budget request for $2.1 million for the XML registry -- despite a projected return on investment (ROI) in the range of 500 - 1400 percent.
http://xml.gov/documents/completed/bah/registryBusinessCase.htm#_Toc19694635
The history of that failure is documented at http://xml.gov/registries.asp As a result, it remains far more difficult than it should be for agencies to discover and reuse XML data elements, rather than reinventing them, needlessly and perhaps inconsistently.


What is the importance of the Federal Enterprise Architecture  
Technical Reference Model? What is its influence on the technology  
industry as a whole?

While most of the focus of the FEA has been placed on the Business Reference Model (BRM), on the theory that it is the "business" that is most important, I contend that it is impossible to truly understand our "business" without understanding the data (records) required to conduct it.  Thus, I believe there is a reason the Data Reference Model (DRM) was the last of the FEA "models" to be drafted ... because it is the only one that truly matters.

However, from my perspective, the Technical Reference Model (TRM) is the second most important -- because unless and until the relevant technical specifications are fully supported in the IT products, components, and services used to conduct We the People's business, all the talk about "interoperability" is just that ... talk.  It would be nice to think that IT vendors would "do the right thing" by coalescing around and implementing those standards.  However, the reality is that they have every incentive to continue selling us proprietary stovepipe systems as long as we are stupid enough to keep wasting the taxpayers' money on them.


Can you tell us about ET.gov? Has it been a success? Do civil servants use it?

The history of the ET.gov site/process is documented at http://et.gov/history.htm  It was commissioned by the former co-chairs of the CIOC's AIC, John Gilligan, CIO of the Air Force, and Norm Lorentz, CTO at OMB.  It was declared a "success story" in the CIOC's strategic plan for FY2007-2009.  See pages 13 & 14 (PDF pages 15 & 16) at
http://xml.gov/documents/completed/cioc/StratPlan2007-2009.pdf

The ET.gov site has been up and running for several years.  More than 100 components and specifications have been registered and are discoverable at http://et.gov/component_search.aspx as well as via IntelligenX's search service at http://etgov.i411.com/etgov/websearchservlet?toplevel=true&
About 15 of them have progressed to Stage 2 of the ET.gov process --
http://et.gov/stage2.htm#CoPs Five have reached Stage 3 --
http://et.gov/stage3.htm#CoPs -- and three have "graduated":
http://et.gov/stage4.htm  Two of those -- PDF/A and X3D -- have been incorporated into the FEA TRM.

Considering the relatively small amount of money originally allocated by EPA (when Mark Day, EPA's Deputy CIO co-chaired the CIOC/AIC's ET Subcommittee) for development of the site and the fact that no additional funding has been provided since then, it might be fair to suggest the ET.gov site/process has been a success.  However, in truth, the jury is still very much out on the questions of whether:

a) Federal agencies really do want to collaborate more efficiently and effectively together to evaluate, demonstrate, prove and implement emerging technologies, and if so,

b) they want to use the ET.gov site/process or some other as-yet-undetermined means to do so.


You once quoted one of your fellow civil servants as saying "We can't deal with vendors coming at us with intergalactic solutions." What should vendors know about approaching the federal government with an "intergalactic solution?"

Norm Lorentz, CTO at OMB, is the one who made that statement, when he and John Gilligan, asked the ET Subcommittee to develop the ET.gov site and process.  Now that he has gone over to the "dark side" again, Norm might be better qualified to answer your question than I.  However, for my part, I must confess that it still seems to me that too many folks are too easily impressed with large, slick, fancy, so-called "solutions" that are too complex for anyone, including their proprietors to fully understand, much less effectively support.

Although Frank Raines' name has been sullied in the intervening years, his name was affixed to some very good guidance given to Federal agencies more than a decade ago when he was the Director at OMB.  My favorite among the eight points that became known as "Raines' Rules" was number seven, which directed agencies to implement IT in "phased, successive chunks as narrow in scope and brief in duration as practicable, each of which solves a specific part of an overall mission problem and delivers a measurable net benefit independent of future chunks."
http://www.xml.gov/documents/completed/iea/RainesRulesRevisited_files/frame.htm

Unfortunately, it still seems to me that it is possible to fool too many of
the people too often and, thus, government agencies continue to waste far
too much of the taxpayers' money on "intergalactic solutions."  However, I
remain hopeful that such foolishness may not continue indefinitely, if for
no other reason than it is becoming clearer and clearer that "change is
coming" ... because we can no longer afford "business as usual."


Small vendors tell me all the time how they cooperated with the federal government to develop an idea, often without compensation, only to see it handed off to one of the very large well known contractors. How can they avoid that unpleasant experience?

I don't think I'm qualified to answer this question, although I will say that I do believe the Federal procurement process is badly broken. I believe the process would be vastly improved by greater openness and transparency, in contrast to the current, highly centralized and secretive process.  Perhaps the best I can suggest is that:

a) it doesn't cost anything to use the ET.gov site to identify emerging technology components, specifications, and services that may be of interest to .gov agencies, and

b) if someone uses the ET.gov process to identify something for which another vendor is subsequently paid to do work for Uncle Sam, at least the record would be clear as to who proposed it first and the government may feel some additional obligation to justify paying someone else to carry it out.


What are some of the things you would like to see the federal government do with the Web and RSS to make government more transparent and citizen centric?

First of all, as suggested in the EEIRS report, agencies should post all of their public records on their Web sites, so that they can be indexed by the search engines. http://www.cio.gov/documents/EEIRS_RFI_Response_Analysis.pdf

Second, they should specify XML schemas for all of the records, and they should post all of those schemas on their Web sites so that XML registry services can be built from the bottom up.

Third, consistent with the E-FOIA amendments, agencies should begin to create and maintain their records in XML format so that they can easily be made available in whatever formats they may be requested.
http://www.usdoj.gov/oip/foia_updates/Vol_XVII_4/page2.htm

Fourth, agencies should participate in the finalization and use of the XML schema (XSD) for the FEA DRM: http://xml.gov/draft/drm20060105.xsd  In the FEA PMO's assessment of enterprise architecture programs, agency scores on the DRM performance element should be based upon the degrees to which they have documented their data collections on their Web sites in conformance with the XSD for the DRM.

Fifth, as directed by subsection 202(b)(4) of the eGov Act, agencies should:

a) use AIIM's emerging StratML standard to explicitly identify the stakeholders for each of their strategic objectives,

b) embed in each and every one of their records a metatag(s) identifying the strategic objective(s) it supports and, thus,

c) enable the discovery of all of their records based upon the stakeholders
to which they apply.


What is StratML?

Strategy Markup Language (StratML) is an XML vocabulary and schema containing the elements that are common not only to the plans that U.S. federal agencies are required to compile and maintain under the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) but also to the strategic plans of all organizations.

The prospective purposes of the emerging StratML standard are outlined at
http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm#DefinitionPurposes.  Under the auspices of AIIM, we aim to establish it as an international voluntary consensus standard for potential use by all organizations worldwide, thus enabling population of the *Strategic* Semantic Web.

In the service to the notions of citizen-centricity and the government as a single "enterprise," as well as conformance with OMB Circular A-119, it would not be unreasonable to think that OMB might require U.S. federal agencies to post their GPRA plans on their Web sites in StratML format.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars/a119/a119.html


How did AIIM come to be involved?

I originally approached AIIM in December 2003 because:

a) I had been a member of AIIM since 1995, and

b) AIIM was then touting itself as the "strategic content management" association and I wanted to help them make that concept real, rather than merely a marketing slogan.

The full history of StratML is documented at
http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm#History


Why should private businesses who don't have significant federal work care about StratML?

Anyone who cares about the concept of "strategic alignment" has a stake in the success and widespread usage of StratML.  There is nothing unique or "inherently governmental" about strategic planning.  Any organization that wants to be effective must have a clear understanding about what it aims to do and how it will "align" its resources to achieve its objectives.

In times like these, it is more important than ever not only to use our own resources wisely but also to partner more efficiently and effectively with others with whom we share common objectives.  That is the essence of StratML, whose purposes are more fully outlined at
http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm#DefinitionPurposes


Where do you see the XML industry going in the near future? Are we close to the semantic web?

There is little doubt that innovation will continue apace in the XML community.  Just as the simplicity of HTML, HTTP, and IP enabled the explosion of the Web, the relative ease with which XML enables the sharing of data means that we haven't seen anything yet by comparison to what we will soon experience.  Although the financial realities that have recently become too compelling to ignore any longer will place increasing pressure on IT budgets, those same realities increase the need to apply IT more
efficiently and effectively.  Indeed, more and better usage of technology --
particularly information technology -- is the *only* way that we can hope to avoid reliving the mistakes of the past, much less continuing progress into the future.

Regarding the semantic web, I'm not sure that the business case has been sufficiently well-established, much less that most people have any idea yet as to how they might contribute to and benefit from it.  However, I do hope that the emerging StratML standard will foster the development of a worldwide Web of organizations and individuals who choose to lead mission/goal-directed lives and seek to pursue those goals in collaboration with others who share their objectives.

Betty Harvey talks about the DC XML users group, the evolution of XML and where the industry is going

This is the first of an occasional series of interviews with local tech leaders.

Betty Harvey, founder and owner of Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. , head of the DC XML Users Group talks about the industry.


How did you get interested in XML?

I was working as a civilian for the Navy at David Taylor Model Basin, aka David Taylor Research and Development Center, currently Naval Surface Warfare Center in the Scientific and Engineering Users Support Section. My office was part of the Mathematics Department. Another office was working on the "Paperless Navy" project. In 1992, I transferred to this project and was exposed to SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).

SGML was part of larger DoD standard, CALS (Computer Aided Logistic Support).CALS was a very aggressive DoD standard. The cost for organizations to support SGML was astronomical. It was almost impossible for DoD vendors to support SGML for under a million dollars because of various technical and cultural reasons. There was lack of toolsets. The tools were inadequate and very expensive. I really didn't see where SGML was going to be successful in DoD - at that time government was the only environment I had a frame of reference for.

In 1992 I stumbled on the Cern project and something called HTML (really an application of SGML) and the Mosaic browser! It was 'love' at first sight. Here is a 'free browser' that supported an SGML vocabulary, albeit simple. It didn't take 20 million dollars to create.

David Taylor used the DBOF (Defense Business Operating Funding) which meant that we had to solicit funding from projects. Our office stood up one of the first WWW sites in the Navy (http://navycals.dt.navy.mil). This site was used to disseminate information about CALS standards within the Navy. (Luckily for me, the Technology Transfer Advocate at David Taylor got wind of what we doing and he sponsored me to attend the first WWW Conference in North America in Chicago in 1994.

That conference was the best conference I have attended before or after. The energy and innovation was intoxicating. At this conference they had a session called "SGML on the Web". Yuri Rubinsky was the chair of this conference and he had a vision of XML - although it hadn't been solidified at this point. Yuri was one of the founders of a company called SoftQuad, a small Canadian consulting and SGML software company. Softquad had bought a software library from a group of graduate students in Stockholm. They developed Panorama, a validating SGML browser. SoftQuad offered the Panorama as a free plugin to WWW browsers. It was a very successful browser and is still be used today in places like Bell South and the Pentagon.


When and why did you decide to launch your own company?

On a Friday afternoon before President's Day 1995 the Navy arbitrarily shut all websites off in the Navy. I was very frustrated because I thought we were providing a beneficial service to both the Navy and Navy suppliers (and ultimately the taxpayers).

On Monday I went to the bank and got a $20,000 loan. By April I had a server co-located on a T3 line. A year later I had my own T1 line, which I still maintain.

In June, Yuri offered me the opportunity to be a consultant for Softquad. In August I left government employment and started as an independent exclusive consultant for SoftQuad. In February 1996, tragically Yuri Rubinsky passed away and didn't get to see the success of XML.


Please tell readers a little about what Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. does.

We are a consultancy that focuses on helping organizations to understand how to obtain, use, repackage and/or add value to their information. In most cases this is XML, but not always. Believe it or not we still have clients who interface with DoD and still are contractually required to provide their data in SGML.

We have worked with major publishers and government agencies in helping them to develop the business processes and infrastructure for data.

I have also worked with several standards organizations in developing XML standards for vertical industries, such as insurance, banking, etc.

I am also a member of several global consultancy organizations such as The XML Guild (http://www.xmlguild.org) and Document Engineering Services (http://www.documentengineeringservices.com/).


How did the DC XML Users Group get started?

It happened in 1995 in a Usenet Group called comp.text.sgml. John Czarnecki, asked if there was a SGML users group in Washington, DC (http://tinyurl.com/65fu8r). I piped in to say that I didn't know of one but I would 'help someone' if they wanted to start one. I became that person. We struggled for meeting places for several months. After leaving the Navy one of my first projects for SoftQuad was for the American Geophysical Union to develop a DTD for their journals. Jon Sears at AGU offered to host the meetings at AGU. We have been there for the last 13 years.

Many people have asked why this users group has been so successful over the years. I believe it is having a centrally located facility that is key (not to mention the cookies). It is a very nice spot to have meetings.


How, if any, has it changed over the years?

The technology has definitely changed over the years. It would be hard to describe the technology changes. XML touches every one of our lives every day. In 1995 I don't think we could have known how pervasive XML would become. I know it is cliche to say but it is 'way cool'!


How would you characterized the audiences?

The audiences change depending on the speakers. We have a few diehard members that come month after month but for the most part people come when there are topics of interest. Occasionally there will be topics of interest across both vertical and horizontal markets, i.e., content management, that will attract a lot of different disciplines.

There are approximately 500 people on the Washington, DC mailing list.

How are speakers selected?

They are many ways speakers are selected in many ways. Some speakers will contact me and ask to speak. Alot of our members will use the Users Group as a sounding block for conference talks they are slated to give.

Some members will ask for a presentation on a given topic and we will try to find an appropriate speaker.

What makes a good presentation? Are there presenters who particularly stand out?

I think the best talks are presentations where the presenter interacts with the audience. Our members tend to be a lively and really bright group and tend to like to ask a lot of pertinent questions. I have to admit that there have been a few (very few) presentations that the subject was a little bland.

Some of the presentations that stand out are presentations on emerging technologies. Our group is inquisitive and some very good information has been presented and exchanged at these meetings.

Tutorial sessions have also be very well received. Mulberry Technologies, Inc. have been very gracious in providing several tutorials through the years on emerging technologies, i.e., XSLT and Schematron.


Where do you see the XML industry going? What do you see as the
important trends?

I think the most fascinating trend in the industry is the amount of Open Source software available. The software industry seems to be rapidly changing their model. There are some interesting software products, especially in the XML space, that are Open Source. The model seems to be consulting around the Open Source software.

I am not sure if there really an XML industry any longer because of the nature of XML. XML is used in one way or another in almost every software and hardware product.

As far as XML standards I think some interesting standards that are on the cusp to explode are XForms and Schematron. Products are just now becoming mature in this space. The Orbeon XForms server is pretty slick. Schematron is being used for XML validation where business rules need to be validate in the data.


What are your working on now?

I am currently working with the National Archive Records Administration (NARA) on the technology evolution for the ERA project. The ERA project is a project designed to ingest electronic records of the government. The first phase of the project recently went live. XML is key for metadata and business object development. I am helping
them look at different XML technologies and standards, i.e., XForms for Business Objects and XML content management and repositories.

I also continue to support long term clients.


What is the recipe for your famous chocolate chip cookies?

This one is easy - it is the Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from the back of the chocolate chip bag, slightly modified, double the pecans and double the vanilla.

New to me Drupal blog

The Universal Pantograph Representation is the essence of networking

SEC completes taxonomies for XBRL

Investment News

The SEC is encouraging users and creators of investment company information to review the taxonomies (see the link below).

Any comments received by Nov. 24 might be included in the final taxonomies that are to be used in mutual fund filings, starting in 2009.

Visit the SEC website to read the rule proposal on mutual fund risk-return summaries. To review and comment on the taxonomies, visit XBRL US. Visit the story “Advisers may benefit from XBRL shift” for more on how the standards will ultimately help advisers.

If you have an opinion about taxonomies for XBRL, the time to express it would be before November 24.

New to me local XML blog

finegameofnil

XBRL and investor relations

SEC to Junk Paper Filings, Require Interactive Online Reports

Within two years, the SEC will require all corporations and mutual funds to file using a technology called XBRL (extensible business reporting language) with the first wave beginning in December. This transition coincides with the agency's plan to replace its document-based system, for collecting, analyzing and retrieving data, known as EDGAR, with an Internet-based platform, IDEA, short for Interactive Data Electronic Applications. ...

... To illustrate the system during a recent interview, Blaszkowsky sifted through volumes of financial information with a few clicks of his mouse, extracting data from several companies and creating a multicolor bar graph to compare the figures. Then he exported the data into an Excel spreadsheet. What took Blaszkowsky only seconds could have cost hours for a reader of current SEC filings.

"The centerpiece of our regulatory approach is giving investors the information they need to make wise decisions," said SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. "We have an opportunity to exponentially improve the way we perform that mission."

This will make it much easier to understand SEC filings and far easier for financial reporters and bloggers to report on it. Far more data will be publicly available in a form that is easily comprehended by the general public. Investor Relations practioners would be well advised to explain all this to management.

The international market for crisis communications

IRS asks Swiss for help probing $100B in tax evasion

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has asked the Swiss government to help in an expanding investigation of tax evasion by U.S. clients of banking giant UBS.

It's also a great day for XBRL.

Open Office XML, a Potemkin standard?

At last night’s meeting of the DC XML Users group I asked what they thought of the controversy surrounding the International Standards Organization adoption of OOXML. There was general agreement that the ISO had not covered itself in glory and that its reputation has taken a major hit. Someone mentioned this post by Tim Bray -

The important thing is this: The ISO Delta is completely irrelevant to the marketplace. It is not implemented in the shipping Microsoft products. Microsoft may choose to implement some portion of it in some future release of some product, or they may not. Given Office’s release and adoption cycle, it’s very unlikely that any pieces of the delta they decide to implement will be widely deployed in anything less than five years.

Thus, if you write OOXML software and you generate ISO-Delta markup, it won’t be usable by the deployed base of software. In fact, we have no information as to how gracefully Office will react; will it bypass such markup or explode messily? I’m not optimistic. So, implementors should not generate ISO-Delta markup.

If Bray is correct, the whole purpose of a standards organization has been defeated. It is a shame, a real shame.

Supporting Universal Business with Open Standards Meeting

NEXT Friday, April 25, 2008, 9 a.m. - 12 p.m.

As an opportunity to introduce Document Engineering Services, we would like to invite you to be our guest at a free seminar on "Supporting Universal Business with Open Standards". This is an opportunity to hear about exciting new developments as well as international projects that use open standards for e-government and electronic business. Specifically:

* the business aspects of open standards
* the European Government e-Procurement Interoperability project
* management and governance challenges in universal business applications
* the document exchange standards landscape

Speakers include:

* Tim McGrath,the Managing Director of Document Engineering Services and author of "Document Engineering: analysing and designing document for business informatics and web services"
* Jon Bosak, Distinguished Engineer,Corporate Standards Office of Global Government Strategy, Sun Microsystems and Chair of the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) Technical Committee. He organized and led the working group that created XML and served for two years as chair of the W3C XML Coordination Group.
* Michael P. Onder, USDOT-Federal Highway Administration.

Why standards are newsworthy

There is a demonstration in Oslo against Microsoft's Open Office XML format. A demonstration for crying out loud!

Standards matter. Standard selection is vendor selection; which is why Microsoft has put so much money in persuading the International Standards Organization to accept OOXML.

The Potomac technology community is one of the most influential in standards issues. Even more than money, standards determine the direction of future technology. It is a pity local editors do not understand this.

New to me local XML blog

Glen Mazza’s Web Log

AIIM StratML Committee

AIIM adopts StratML

The AIIM Standards Board has announced that it is adding Strategic Markup Language (StratML) to its standards program of work. AIIM, based in Silver Spring, Md., is an enterprise content management association.

Owen Ambur, former senior architect at the Interior Department, and Adam Schwartz, a program analyst in the Program Management Office at the Government Printing Office, oversaw development of that schema, which is designed to encapsulate strategic plans, performance plans and performance reports in a format based on Extensible Markup Language, the association said last week.

January 10th saw the first meeting of the AIIM StratML committee. It opened with Betsy Fanning describing the AIIM’s standard’s process. I learned that AIIM is the US representative on the International Standards Organization Technical Advisory Group. If you want to influence the industry standards in this area it is necessary to participate in this group.

Adam Schwartz opened his presentation with a brief explanation of what StratML is, from my notes: StratML is a mark up language and schema for strategic plans as well as performance plans.

StratML creates a system whereby an organization can track its plans and measure performance. It was created to comply with the Government Performance & Results Act of 1993. This calls for, amongst other things, a publicly searchable database of federal government strategic and performance plans and progress reports. Although private organizations would probably not want to make their plans public, such a language would have obvious value for their internal planning and review.

The should the standard created by the committee be accepted by AIIM, it would then be submitted to the International Standards Organization, so the work of this committee will have far reaching consequences for the entire industry.

One of the committee members asked if StratML could be related to XBRL, but there was some feeling that might be taking on too much.

The core schema has been created and incorporates GEFEG XML. Mark Logic has created a search prototype, a password in required.

AIIM members who are interested in participating in the work of this committee should contact Betsy Fanning, Adam Schwartz, or Owen Ambur.

StratML Wiki