RIXML Sell-Side Steering Committee CO-Chair Joe Sommer says there has been a flurry of activity behind the scenes. RIXML’s first version of its schema-based specification was released in June and concentrated on creating a structure for classifying equity research documents. Other RIXML spokespeople quoted in this article include Deirdre Goldenbogen, RIXML buy-side CO-chair and assistant VP, senior content analyst at Putnam Investments and Dave Seibert, buy-side Steering Committee CO-chair and VP of investment systems at T. Rowe Price.

ResearchSummary.com has expanded its XML offerings with the release of its new ResearchSummary professional service, which utilizes RIXML.

UK-based IT consultant, Evolution, is launching an XML based framework and will provide an XSLT transform engine that can convert the data into other languages such as RIXML.

Since the quality of research is what differentiates investment banks, RIXML technology uses tagging to identify and tag all components in research, including the executive summary, forecasts and charts. IT consultancy Evolution plans to launch a research componentization framework that will enable banks to distribute highly customized research reports. A Transform engine can transform XML documents into other languages.

Salvatore Restivo, VP of Equity Research IT at Credit Suisse First Boston, has been elected to the position of technical committee sell-side CO-chair of RIXML.org.

RIXML forms new working groups to help the development of version 2.0. The new working groups include a fixed income group and distribution of research group. Application and deployment issues will be handled by a globalization and localization working group.

RIXML.org appoints Wall Street veterans to head its working groups.

RIXML.org appoints Wall Street veterans to head its working groups.

Fidelity Investments expects to complete a retrofit of its corporate data to an XML format. It will start using XML technology and will consider evolving standards such as FIXML or RIXML in the future.

More research is published in the equity space and equities remained the heaviest piece. The members came in with an equity force, but RIXML will support multi asset classes," said Dave Seibert, buyside CO-chair of the RIXML steering committee.

Deutsche Bank’s Chris Betz, director and global head of distribution, global equities will join a group of leading financial technology providers and is scheduled to speak on September 12 about, "Adopting and Implementing RIXML 1.0 into Asset Classes." The need for enhanced research standards and future RIXML developments will be addressed.

Deutsche Bank’s Chris Betz, director and global head of distribution, global equities will join a group of leading financial technology providers and is scheduled to speak on September 12 about, "Adopting and Implementing RIXML 1.0 into Asset Classes." The need for enhanced research standards and future RIXML developments will be addressed.

RIXML solves the problem of information overload by being able to find information which has been indexed on a document. Joe Sommer, director of US electronic trading and connectivity services at CSFB and sell-side CO-chair of the RIXML.org steering committee believes RIXML will aid the process of searching, filtering, comparing and distributing global research, with version 1.0 addressing equities. Sommer says, "with RIXML, we’ll describe it better. So by having the buy-side and sell-side of the financial industry working together in an open format, to pull information together and provide better categorization about research, it will help portfolio managers become smarter."

ResearchSummary joins RIXML as an associate member. Associate members will be able participate in the Standards and Technical Committees of the organization.

WorldStreet announces new line of products that will use XML technology for viewing documents which is the first of many products to use RIXML.

Two XML-based standards being developed to distribute investment retail research are set to merge to create one unified industry standard. A RIXML spokesperson declined to comment, saying it would be inappropriate at this stage.

The Software Information Industry Association’s Financial InformationServices Division has released the draft version of its MDDL specification. The MDDL specification will also be interoperable with other XML initiatives such as NewsML and RIXML.

RIXML.org releases final version 1.0 and forms three new committees. The new committees are the Membership Committee, Standards Liaison Committee and Administration Committee.

A consortium of buy-side and sell-side firms joins forces to help wade through the clutter of information on a 15-month project at the address RIXML.org. RIXML grew out of a broad consensus that a common method of classifying and filtering content is in everyone’s best interest.

Another firm discovers the benefits of the RIXML technology. Dain Rauscher signs on with World Street Net, which incorporates RIXML, because it wants employees, business partners and clients to find and retrieve financial data and documents in a much quicker, more efficient manner.

RIXML releases final version 1.0 and confirms new participants including Bear Stearns and Robertson Stephens

Christopher Betz, global head of distributions at Deutsche Bank and standards liaison committee CO-chair at RIXML.org says, "RIXML.org’s mission is to create an open standard for the categorization and classification of financial investment research."

After a period of comment and review, RIXML specification has been released. RIXML will incorporate the suggestions into Version 1.0. New members such as Multex.com, First Call, Blue Matrix, etc. are also joining as associate members. The Markets.com CEO David Eisner says, "RIXML has laid the foundation to transform the life of fund managers and analysts using financial research and we look forward to the rapid adoption of the RIXML standard by the industry."

A short announcing official RIXML specification and the addition of Robertson Stephens and Bear Stearns as steering committee members.

Worldstreet, a recently announced RIXML development group associate member, has developed RIXML Viewer, the first in a line of messaging products designed to support industry-standard XML formats and act as an enabler for exchanging information and attaining and viewing RIXML-based documents. Senior vice president and founder of Worldstreet, Alexis Kopikis says, "Standardization means that firms lose their ability to brand and provide value-added services." However, RIXML introduces a common language and the Viewer communicates across a host of applications and devices, without normalizing the user system.

Director of electronic business development, global development research at Goldman Sachs, RIXML.org sell-side member Wendy Moulton says the technology committee and standards committee have incorporated suggestions from the draft period of RIXML specification and the steering committee approved the decision to proceed to the launch. As soon as the committee finalizes the documentation and user guide, the release phase will go into effect because no significant changes needed to be made to the draft.

Filtering through the barrage of messages can be overwhelming for anyone, especially a busy Wall Street decisionmaker. At the SIA Technology Management Conference, WorldStreet Corporation demonstrated a communications platform that filters unwanted messages for buy-side firms while allowing sell-side firms to use the system to strengthen customer relationships in the investment community. Delivering on a promise to work with emerging Wall Street standards, WorldStreet will also unveil a RIXML viewer compatible with the new research standard.

Researchsummary.com, an up and coming research delivery access aimed at institutional investors, has acquired Navigateone, the creator of a search engine that specializes in the development of content location tools and the provision of search functionality. The deal has already resulted in the launch of a new service, called Navigatedepth that allows users to use RIXML to search through multiple documents for highly specific data and provide a consolidated summary.

With an abundance of research material on brokers and stocks cluttering the Investor’s information load, several Internet companies, such as TheMarkets.com, First Call, Multex.com, and Researchsummary.com, have aimed to organize the information and offer several investment banks and brokers free research postings for their institutional clients. In the pre-trade environment, several protocols, such as RIXML, will enable investment managers to effectively and efficiently search through research reports and find specific information using a universal and standard way to organize research.

RIXML.org recently held a launch event to kick off its earlier release of a draft version of its Research Information Exchange Markup Language specification for investment research. Steering Committee CO-chair Joe Sommer of Credit Suisse First Boston says, "Since the launch event we have had discussions with 29 firms regarding participation in RIXML.org through associate membership." He says seven technology providers in the research space have agreed to become associate members.

Dave Seibert, steering committee CO-chair and vice president of investment systems at T. Rowe Price, says vendors are already looking at examining ways to apply RIXML specification in their own business processes and are looking to establish partnerships with industry firms to address protocol issues, as well as issues relating to passing information between firms upon implementation. Participating firms, as part of the RIXML.org membership requirements, have agreed to publicly support and adopt the standard that emerges from the development efforts.

To manage a huge amount of information, RIXML.org has split the research domain into coverage categories, which include, corporate, government, foreign exchange, commodity, economic, and strategy. Within each category, RIXML.org is looking at meta data first at the product level, which has a defined data wrapper to cross asset classes and geographies, be language neutral, and media independent, and secondly at the content level, where meta data will be used to define ‘chunks’ of information, such as video and text.

With the adaptation of the GICS, RIXML.org will allow not only buy-side and sell-side members eligible for membership, but also third-party service providers will be added as potential affiliates as well. Information received from the 30-day comment period, in effect until the end of April, will be added to current and future specifications and will be helpful in the proof-of-concept trials.

GISC will be utilized as part of RIXML’s proposed XML standard, which aims to enable users of investment research to more easily sort, filter, and personalize across all research publishers. The two developers of GISC standard are Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), a provider of global indices and benchmark related products and services, and Standard & Poor, a global provider of financial information and index services. Jim Branscome, managing director of Standard & Poor’s Investment Ananlysis, says, "We fully support the efforts of the investment community in working together to develop open, global standards for delivery of investment research, and are gratified that they have chosen GISC as the industry standard."

RIXML has adopted the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), developed jointly by MSCI and Standard & Poor’s. GICS will be utilized within the RIXML standard for classifying and retrieving research by industry classification. Companies are grouped by the GICS at four different levels, sectors, industry groups, industries, and sub-industries.

RIXML.org released a draft version of Research Information eXchange Markup Language (RIXML) 1.0 for public comment. The need for a standard approach to investment reports is critical on Wall Street because brokerages produce some 2,000 notes and reports daily. "One new piece of content comes out of Wall Street every six seconds," said Christopher Betz, vice president for the institutional equity division at New York-based Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. "If you're a portfolio manager or analyst trying to make investment decisions, you have piles of content you have to go through." "That's a big problem, not only for buy-side firms but also for sell-side firms, which generate the bulk of these reports, " said Ariana Moore, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Celent Communications LLC.

In today's wired world, investment managers have access to a seemingly limitless range of up-to-the-minute data and information on which to base decisions. However, the sheer quantity of information available can make it difficult to see the wood for the trees. Buy-side firms have traditionally looked to broker reports to analyse the information and put it into perspective, but this dependence on research put out by sell-side analysts is being increasingly questioned. Ben Tolin, sales director of Blue Curve - a developer of e-business systems for firms in the City of London - believes RIXML will make it much easier for a buy-side firm to find and filter information on a particular stock. Thomson Financial will also be embedding support for RIXML throughout its product lines. Multex also commented that it would be relatively simple to change to RIXML, if that proves to be the dominant standard.

The RIXML.org Standards Committee is throwing its version 1.0 open for public comment and more input from the firms who will use it. "We’re going to be expanding the organizational structure in the coming weeks to allow for associate members to join," says Ellen Callahan, CO-chair of the Standards Committee and Director of Equity Market Data for Fidelity Investments. "That would mean additional buy-side and sell-side firms, vendors that may want to get into the space, technology enablers, aggregators, any third-party vendor that sees an opportunity in adopting RIXML. A 30-day comment period began March 26. RIXML.org will launch the language at an April 4 event.

RIXML.org has posted version 1.0 of the Research Information Exchange Markup Language specification on its website at www.rixml.org for 30 days for public comment. The finalized version of RIXML 1.0 is due to be released early May, according to Chris Betz, CO-chair of the RIXML.org Standards Committee. After that, the organization will look at adding other asset classes. In addition, following the comment period, feedback from current and associate members will be gathered, and the members of RIXML.org will review the specification in light of recommendations received.

When RIXML.org was released one year ago, some industry experts doubted the ability of the six buy-side and ten sell-side firms to reach a consensus on the structure of a protocol for classifying and categorizing financial research documents. However, RIXML.org Steering Committee Co-chairman Joseph Sommer says that the limited liability corporation is right on track with its development efforts and is nearing the release of version 1.0 of the Research Information Exchange Markup Language specification for public comment.

The fledgling standard ­ developed by the buy-side and sell-side firms that comprise the RIXML consortium ­ is available for public comment at a new website www.rixml.org. It is intended to provide a structure for classifying research in a way that will enable users to define specific sorting, filtering, and personalization criteria across all research publishers.

RIXML.org has released the first version of an RIXML specification for comment, beating the similar XML initiative for investment research IRML to the post. The organization has also decided to open its doors to non-institutional members for the first time. The Version 1.0 schema contains packages for contact, source, content, context and legal information, and will be available on the RIXML website for public comment over the next 30 days. Already, research information provider Thomson Financial’s First Call had indicated its support for RIXML and will likely join. Reuters, which is involved in IRML, has also signaled an interest in working with the RIXML organization.

RIXML.org today will publish an early version of RIXML standards ­ an electronic protocol for transmitting research between the sell-side and the buy-side electronically. The group wants to get feedback on the standard from the public before it releases another version of RIXML 1.0 and will take comments on the standard for the next 30 days.

RIXML.org has posted version 1.0 of the Research Information Exchange Markup Language specification on its website at www.rixml.org for 30 days for public comment. The finalized version of RIXML 1.0 is due to be released early May, according to Chris Betz, CO-chair of the RIXML.org Standards Committee. After that, the organization will look at adding other asset classes. In addition, following the comment period, feedback from current and associate members will be gathered, and the members of RIXML.org will review the specification in light of recommendations received.

RIXML.org is set to release for public comment consultation the first draft schema of an XML standard for investment research, as the first step toward producing an industry standard for research markup The schema is available for download from the website at www.rixml.org, and a period of public discussion will be open for the next 30 days, after which any constructive feedback received during that period will be incorporated in the formal recommended version 1.0 of RIXML.

When RIXML.org was released one year ago, some industry experts doubted the ability of the six buy-side and ten sell-side firms to reach a consensus on the structure of a protocol for classifying and categorizing financial research documents. However, RIXML.org Steering Committee Cochairman Joseph Sommer says that the limited liability corporation is right on track with its development efforts and is nearing the release of version 1.0 of the Research Information Exchange Markup Language specification for public comment.

Representatives from the buy- and sell-side firms have formed RIXML.org (Research Information exchange Markup Language) in order to establish that protocol-in-the-making as the standard for describing all types of financial research and analysis. By agreeing to one protocol to describe such information, which comes in many different forms including Word.