RIXML.org, a consortium of buy-side, sell-side and vendor firms committed to the development and implementation of the first open standard for investment research, is pleased to announce the release of draft 2.3 of its schema for a 30 day public comment period.

“We are grateful for the contributions from our members and the efforts of our Technical & Standards and Best Practices committees to bring about this draft release”, said Jack Roehrig, Executive Director, RIXML.org.

RIXML version 2.3 is principally motivated by the desire to improve clarity and respond to lessons learned from using the schema in production over an extended period of time. The organization has received excellent feedback from its member firms stemming from implementation projects and substantial exposure to real instance documents produced industry wide.

“We’ve improved the definitions of more than 120 of the enumerated values governing restricted tags throughout the schema” said Sal Restivo, Credit Suisse, and Chairman of the Technical & Standards Committee, RIXML.org. “We hope this will reduce confusion and corral the breadth of interpretations for these values we’ve seen in the field.”

Schema version 2.3 does not break backward-compatibility with version 2.2. That is, a RIXML instance document that validates against version 2.2 will also validate against 2.3.

We are pleased to announce the release of our flagship publication: Our Getting Started Guide & Marketing Primer. As a result of the work and findings of our Best Practices working group this past year, it became important to have marketing collateral in place to serve as useful ammunition and to shed light on the business opportunity for embracing and adopting our tagging standard. I urge you and your associates to share this guide within your organization, particularly, with those involved in the Research distribution chain, at all levels.

This piece is also the result of the outstanding efforts of Deirdre Goldenbogen in bringing this to bear. Deirdre’s long time buy-side experience and her prior role as Co-Chair of our organization has certainly been reflected in this work, in providing clear, concise and practical use cases for adoption.

This guide can be found on our web site at www.rixml.org

The sheer magnitude of investment research available today means that a sophisticated method of describing this information is essential.

Regardless of where you are in the information chain, you need a better way!

Content Producers need a way to ensure that content is seen by their target audience

• RIXML’s sophisticated structure enables content producers to provide exact tagging that better describes the content, which makes it more likely that it will be seen by those most likely to find it valuable

Our organization was very active and participated in several events, including:

5th Annual XBRL and Emerging Equity Research Technologies Conference

Jack Roehrig participated in the “Implementing XBRL for Investment Research” panel. Our organization also hosted a networking reception at the conference. The conference was very well attended. Feedback was very positive. We thank Eric Linder, CEO, SavaNet for chairing the event and Baruch College for providing the venue. The link below provides further detail.
Link

19th XBRL International Conference, Paris, June 23rd
Andrew Ling, Sell-Side Chair of RIXML.org, will once again represent our organization in a presentation entitled “How is XBRL Assisting the Investment Community” at this upcoming event in Paris. Please refer to the link below for further detail
Link

SIFMA 2009 Technology Management Conference & Exhibit, June 23 – 25 New York Hilton

RIXML.org will be represented at the Jordan & Jordan Exhibit Booth #1301. We hope to see you there.

PLEASE NOTE: This viewpoint is entirely my own and neither the official viewpoint of RIXML.org nor the viewpoint of any of its member organizations.

The Release of Schema version 2.3: Putting Best Practices into Practice
One of the definitions provided for the word “schema” using dictionary.com is:

An underlying organizational pattern or structure; conceptual framework.

Within the definition, I believe the resulting “underlying organizational pattern or structure” mentioned really has a lot to do with one word--teamwork.Dictionary.com provides the following definition for teamwork:

A cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause.

In witnessing the efforts of our Technical & Standards committee and Best Practices working groups over this past year, the above definitions have been fully realized(and intersected) through the draft release of our latest schema, version 2.3.

• It was teamwork that formed the sell-side/publishers and vendor/associates “best practices” groups to identify and “bubble up” the more important(sometimes thorny) issues for each group to address in order to comply with and not stray far from the tagging standard.
• It was teamwork that caused these groups to “agree to disagree”, where appropriate, in order to move the overall effort along in the right direction.
• It was teamwork that brought forth the recommendations that were incorporated into the enhancements for schema release 2.3
• It is teamwork that reviews feedback on the new schema during our 30 day comment period.

Jack Roehrig
Executive Director
RIXML
Tel: 212-652-4470
roehrig@rixml.org