Re: DAVENPORT: Re: Maintaing documents for multiple languages

[Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>]

| The AICPA will be issuing a press release in about a week to make its
| intentions public.  We currently have a project underway to create XFRML for
| Financial Statements.  It should be done in December, and in use soon
| thereafter.

That's good timing.

| We will have fully working versions of XFRML for Financial Statements in one
| week.  I have to make a presentation to the AICPA in January.  It would be
| nice to have your registry part of that demo.  We want to support BizTalk.
| I am confused about eCo.  They are sending mixed signals.

At this remove I feel positive that we can be ready by then; but then I'm
not doing all the work.  

Commerce One is also involved in Biztalk, though I personally don't think
Microsoft has thought it out very far yet.  Eco is not going to produce
a data element dictionary as originally intended (only recommendations
for future work), and will produce an architecture spec that assumes the
existence of registries and repositories, builds a layer on top of them,
but doesn't specify how they should work (so there's essentially no
overlap with OASIS).

| We have all 5 Big 5 CPA firms, Microsoft, Great Plains Software, FRx
| Software, FreeEDGAR, Edgar-Online (very soon), want to get IBM involved but
| they have opted out (but may decide to opt back in - something is in the
| works.)
| 
| What might the next steps be?  Any suggestions?

I'm appending our current set of documents; start with rrmembers.htm,
which is the prototype of what will be our members-only area home
page for Regrep.  See whether the use of ISO/IEC 11179 will suit your
needs for metadata (I know the XML sample isn't very informative;
I'm concentrating in the first instance on registering DTDs as chunks,
but we do want to use 11179 to register data elements - I'll be doing
more work on that next week).  There are links to 11179 online in the
appendix to the draft Tech Spec.

| If I had my way, I would want some information so we can build our
| specification so it includes everything which your registry might need.  I
| would like to start Beta testing (alpha testing?) to see how things might
| work.

Alpha, I'm sure, all round!  Note also that we need an update to THTTP's
syntax, but contemplate whether it would work for you.

| I would be willing to take a good stab at the accounting subset of business
| taxonomy.

That would be interesting; is there a standard one you can use?  if you
make your own could it stand for awhile without maintenance?  would AICPA
be willing to support maintenance of it in the future?

I thought I had heard of other efforts, and recovered the list:

FIXML - www.fixprotocol.org
FINXML - www.finxml.org
FpXML - www.fpml.org    

I believe XML.org will accept material for the repository regardless
of whether there's competition, but it's also thinking of encouraging
efforts at standards harmonization.  Are these candidates?

best regards, Terry

regards, Terry Allen