February, 2012 – Leaders of the computer industry standards organization OMG®, and XBRL International, Inc. (XII) have agreed to establish a liaison relationship to further cooperate on the development of a standard abstract model for the XBRL language. OMG will become a Direct Association member of XII, and XII will become a Domain Member of OMG.

“OMG and XBRL have worked jointly in many capacities for over a decade and we are delighted to deepen the relationship with cross-membership and a joint effort to develop a standard abstract model for XBRL” said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., chairman & CEO, OMG. “XBRL is becoming the de facto standard for structured business information, while OMG’s Model Driven Architecture drives increased adoption when applied to XML-based standards. Increasing the usability of those standards will result in wide use of XBRL even outside of the reporting world.”

“This formal liaison between XII and OMG is a result of the strong compliment and benefit that Model Driven Architecture brings to XBRL and OMG’s long term commitment to the standards development and business community,” stated Tony Fragnito, CEO of XBRL International, Inc. “This is in direct support of XII’s strategic commitment to making XBRL easier to use and reducing the barriers to XBRL software development”.

In other news, OMG and XBRL announced that a joint panel discussion will be held at OMG’s “Demystifying Financial Services Semantics” Conference being held in New York on March 13, 2012. (Register for the event here). This panel will discuss the joint framework to define and align XBRL semantics leveraging OMG’s modeling standards for business, architecture and technology. XBRL leadership will present the proposed framework along with the XBRL Abstract model and discuss the potential business applications that can be built off this framework and align XBRL taxonomies using OMG standards based “semantics registry” in a “public cloud” environment.

“More than two-thirds of the world’s market capitalization – trillions of dollars – is already being reported in XBRL format. Hundreds of XBRL initiatives are underway in more than a dozen countries that will benefit millions of companies as well as the users of their information,” said Liv Watson, Seconded to XBRL International, Inc. by WebFilings. “This session will examine how additional OMG semantics can be linked to XBRL data to allow for greater use, interoperability and comparability across countries, regions and industries to promote better accountability and transparency.”

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XBRL International (XII) is seeking three (3) candidates to fill positions on the XII Best Practices Board (BPB). This is a call to all XII eligible participants who are interested in serving the organization as a voting member of the BPB.

The purpose of the XBRL International Best Practices Board (BPB) is to manage the production, dissemination and continual improvement of work products that describe methods and processes for successful development, implementation, integration and use of XBRL specifications.
Procedure

BPB candidates may be nominated by any member of XII and may include self- nominations. The Nominations Committee will conduct interviews after the close of the nominations period. Final candidate recommendations will be presented to the XII member Assembly for approval.

Term
The terms of these positions are annual but may be renewed for up to 2 years by mutual agreement.

Targeted Competencies
Candidates  should  demonstrate  a  record  of  working  knowledge  of  XBRL implementation with competencies in teaming, technical judgment, and strategic planning.

Commitment

• Participation in a one-hour weekly call
• Assist in the authoring of white papers and case studies illustrating XBRL best practices
• Review white papers which have written by other members of the committee

Eligibility
Any XII Eligible Participant may be nominated as a candidate to the Best Practices Board. Individuals may self nominate for this position and no seconder is required. If you are nominating someone else please ensure that they are able to confirm nomination by the deadline.

If your employer is not a member of XII or an XII Jurisdiction, please contact join@xbrl.org for a review of your membership and particpation options.

Deadline for Submissions
The deadline for submitting nominations and candidate statements and for nominees to confirm they accept nomination is 2359 UTC, 29 February 2012.

There is no limit on the length of candidate statements. Please send nominations, candidate statements and confirmation of acceptance of nominations, if applicable, by PRIVATE E-MAIL to nominate@xbrl.org.

The XII Standards Board (XSB) is seeking interested participants for the formation of an API Signature Task Force to survey market needs and lay the groundwork for developing publicly available Application Programming Interface(s) that are interoperable across different  platforms and programming languages.

Rationale:

As part of the Preserve-Promote-Participate initiative, the XSB proposes to provide standardised APIs for XBRL by providing blueprints in the form of API signatures. The XSB believes an XII issued   set of API signatures will provide more  consistency, interoperability and innovation in the software and tools used for XBRL-based projects and analytics.

The outcome of this initiative will likely be a set of API signatures addressing each of the following three categories:

• Mainstream programming languages, such as Java and C#.
• Relational databases and possibly Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) repositories
• Web services via an appropriate scalable interface set, such as WSDL or REST

Providing standardised APIs offers the following benefits:

• Providing software developers with a programming  point of entry into XBRL
• Serving as a useful learning tool for developers wishing to incorporate XBRL
• Encouraging further innovation in software and analytics tools
• Enabling consistency across vendor tools and greater interoperability across vendor implementations of XBRL

Interested parties, including software architects and developers, XBRL practitioners and programme/project managers should contact the XSB via e-mail at xsb@xbrl.org. For more information on the Standard API Signatures Task Force click here.

Organizations and experts are invited to test a new format for reports based on the GRI Guidelines, as GRI releases its draft XBRL Taxonomy for public comment. The resulting ‘exposure draft’ will be available for public comment until 23 January 2012. Find the taxonomy and related documents here.

Produced in a joint project with Deloitte, the new GRI XBRL Taxonomy for providing sustainability data will help investors, auditors and analysts to access information in sustainability reports faster, and more simply.

Rina Levy, Senior ESG Analyst at Bloomberg and member of the Taxonomy Review Team, said: “This is a really exciting time for sustainability reporting – the new taxonomy will really open up the information in reports and help investors and analysts find the data they need much more quickly and easily.”

GRI and Deloitte have produced an XBRL taxonomy covering both the G3 Guidelines and GRI's latest G3.1 Guidelines. The GRI Taxonomy has already been reviewed by an expert team. 

According to Inés García-Pintos, Head of CSR and innovation at CECA and member of the Taxonomy Review Team, public feedback is vital. “This XBRL taxonomy is for everyone, so we need to make sure it is as suitable and as high quality as possible. We urge organizations that report using the GRI Guidelines to help us achieve this by testing out the taxonomy and giving feedback to GRI.”

During the comment period, participants can review the Taxonomy and related documentation, see how the taxonomy is applied, and test the taxonomy by applying it to their reports. Feedback on these aspects will help GRI improve the taxonomy.

“The new GRI Taxonomy will enable organizations to tag their sustainability data in reports,” said Cees de Boer, CFO at Deloitte Netherlands and board member at XBRL International.

“The GRI Taxonomy will help organizations improve the quality and integrity of their sustainability performance data. This will help investors, auditors and other report users to access and compare GRI data more quickly and easily without the need for excessive manual work.”

Pedro Faria, Technical Director at Carbon Disclosure Project and member of the Taxonomy Review Team, added: “XBRL will have an important role to play in increasing accessibility to climate change and sustainability data in a user friendly, globally recognized format. Critical to the success of this project is ensuring that key stakeholders are closely involved in testing the taxonomies as they develop. I would like to invite all organizations to test and use the new GRI taxonomy as an essential contribution for its development.”

For more information about the XBRL taxonomy project, please see https://www.globalreporting.org/reporting/reporting-support/xbrl/Pages/d....