14th XBRL International Conference: An Internal Perspective
Monday, January 1 2007
The 14th XBRL International Conference and Exhibition, held December 4-6, 2006, in Philadelphia, Pa., was an unprecedented success in terms of attendance, interest in the "interactive data" concept, and attention from the media and the business community. Understandably, the bulk of the public's attention has been on the declarations of one of the keynote speakers, Securities & Exchange
Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, who discussed the benefits of XBRL in terms of cutting human errors, reducing restatements, and improving audits. His comments are even more compelling since they follow the September 2006 announcement regarding the SEC's $54 million investment in the transformation of the EDGAR database to enable it to use the XBRL technology and the completion of the XBRL representation of U.S. GAAP financial statements.
Various major announcements of new XBRL software products (from vendors such as Hitachi America, EDGAR Online, CoreFiling, JustSystems, and Rivet Software) and of XBRL initiatives and projects from around the world were overshadowed by the spotlight on the sec championing XBRL, but they all point to the fact that XBRL is taking the big step across the chasm that separates early adoption from broad implementation and fulfilling its promise to revolutionize business and financial reporting as we know it. The emergence of the "open source" model for XBRL tools, with Rivet Software putting its Dragon View into open source and UBmatrix contributing its XBRL engine to SourceForge, is another important trend marked by this Conference.