If you’ve been reading my blog in the past or attended one of my presentations, you remember that I strongly believe in XML as the future of documents to bring structure, interoperability, and openness.
This is essential to allow the dissemination of documents, and their content. Since late 2007, we have one open XML-based format to represent the layout of documents: Open Document Format (ODF). But ODF only represents layout and “logical” information. The next frontier is the markup of the document ”content” or semantic information in those documents for specific verticals. A number of formats are appearing, including XBRL (Extensible Business Markup Language) and Health Level 7 (HL7).
On that topic, this great blog post by Kurt Cagle on the O’Reilly Community uses the SEC announcement that companies over $5 billion in assets would be required to start reporting their earning using XBRL to document the need for such XML-based standards. XBRL, like other similar formats, turns your documents from plain, unstructured containers of information, into highly structured, queriable containers of data - thus facilitating greatly the extraction of their content.
Although the author notes that achieving transparency in the financial domain will be harder than just imposing XBRL as a standard, he states:
”it is very likely that 2009 will be a banner year for XML technologies in general, as two of the key issues that are highly visible this year – financial transparency within corporations and the streamlining of health care, both involve rich XML standards – XBRL for financial reporting, HL7 v3 for electronic health records.”
I couldn’t agree more - let’s hope XBRL and HL7 pave the way to a wide spectrum of XML-based formats for the semantic representation of the data which is required for any business process.
