The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) held an international round table conference themed "Interactive Data in Financial Reports" - XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) Application in its Washington headquarters on June 10. Representatives from the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) were invited as China's capital market has seen remarkable achievements in promoting XBRL application.

Delegates exchanged opinions on the interactive data usage in information disclosure and regulation of listed companies and fund companies, discussed relevant application cases and shared their successful experiences.

Attendees also included representatives from regulatory authorities, exchanges and financial service departments in such countries as Spain, Switzerland, India, Netherlands, Israel, Japan and Canada as well as officials of the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC). SEC Chairman Christopher Cox gave a speech and participated in the discussion.

According to representatives from the CSRC and the SSE, the SSE and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE), led by the CSRC, started to study and promote the application of XBRL as early as 2002. So in 2005, all listed companies on the SSE and the SZSE applied XBRL to the disclosure of full texts and abstracts of periodical reports. The XBRL International has acknowledged successively the SSE-developed taxonomies of general listed companies, fund companies and financial listed companies.

Moreover, the SSE has implemented the CSRC's plan of applying XBRL to the information disclosure of China's fund companies and seen positive results in selecting representative companies to fill in information of 2008 1st-quarter reports. The CSRC is joining with related parties to pore over the establishment of XBRL taxonomies regarding companies' IPO and refinancing. Besides, the SSE has begun to disclose financial information of financial listed companies, while the SSE and the SZSE are working on the disclosure of temporary announcements.

The SSE representatives especially introduced that, in promoting the interactive data, they had launched a whole range of independent innovation achievements with Chinese characteristics and the key intellectual property rights. The taxonomies developed by the SSE can process structural data such as financial reports and a lot of unstructured data. Upon the issuance of China's new accounting standards, the SSE timely amended and updated the relevant taxonomies, which could meet the information disclosure requirements of the new standards.

XBRL, the abbreviation for eXtensible Business Reporting Language, is one kind of application of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) in the information exchange of financial reports. As the latest technology in the unstructured information processing, especially the financial information processing, XBRL has quickly developed worldwide since it unveiled in 1998. Research shows that XBRL technology has upgraded the transparency of companies' financial reports disclosure.