Victoria forms infotech alliance

victoria-university-of-wellington

Mon May 10 2004 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)

Victoria forms infotech alliance

Monday, 10 May 2004, 9:17 am
Press Release: Victoria University of Wellington

Victoria University's New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) and Wellington-based web development company, 3months.com, have today announced the creation of a new alliance.

The two organisations will showcase their new alliance, XPA (eXtensible Publishing Alliance), at the 9th International XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) Conference in Auckland this week, presenting the results of their first research project with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand and the New Zealand Exchange Ltd (NZX).

"NZETC and 3months.com have led the way in using XML-based extensible publishing in New Zealand. The new alliance cements an ongoing relationship between our two organisations. It will enable us to provide a more comprehensive range of solutions and services than we could hope to do individually," said XPA Business Development manager, Chris Daish.

Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) promises to reduce the time it takes to get listed companies’ financial reports to the market, while improving the accuracy and usefulness of this information for investors and analysts.

"The opportunity to apply our publishing expertise to the activity of business reporting, creating financial statements, has been very exciting, and certainly a learning experience for everyone involved in the collaboration. It's a great first project for XPA, as it demonstrates the extent to which our open-standards approach to electronic publishing can satisfy workflow issues across a range of disciplines," said NZETC Director Elizabeth Styron. Using XBRL in an extensible publishing framework means companies can streamline the production of annual reports, media releases, website and intranet resources all from a single authoritative information source, she said.

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Mr Daish said the alliance was keen to demonstrate some of the downstream benefits of adopting XBRL for financial reporting.

"Listed companies producing financial information for their investors probably don’t see themselves as publishers in the traditional sense of the word. We take the view that any organisation disseminating information through websites and in print is a publisher. "Most organisations today are using out of date publishing processes that make information dissemination a costly and slow business. The marginal cost of supporting new information demands is simply too high unless you move to an extensible framework," he said.

New Zealand Electronic Text Centre is the University's research centre devoted to XML-based electronic publishing and the development of online digital libraries. 3months.com is a web development company, which specialises in XML web application development who recently completed a major relaunch of the government labour-market portal (www.worksite.govt.nz) using an open-source open-standard extensible framework.

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