On October 1st, Evan Lenz, President of Lenz Consulting Group, Inc., will present a talk entitled "A Developer's Introduction to XBRL", at the XML-in-Practice 2009 conference, in Arlington, VA. The eXtensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, is a technical standard for representing business reporting information. All publicly-traded companies in the U.S. will soon be scrambling to report their financials in XBRL format, thanks to the SEC's mandate earlier this year.

Lenz's interest in XBRL grew when he took on a consulting assignment earlier this year for XBRL International Inc., the standards consortium responsible for creating XBRL and its supporting specifications. "While there's no lack of reading material on XBRL," said Lenz, "there's not a lot of guidance for XML developers wishing to write applications to leverage all that data that will soon be available to us. This presentation is meant to help bridge that gap."

However, Lenz plans to go further than the in-depth technical introduction. "I've always been suspicious of XBRL's astonishing complexity. After having dug further, it's now clear that XBRL is a prime example of bad information modeling." Despite his negative conclusion about the quality of XBRL's design, he's hoping to make a positive contribution. "Once you identify the problem, you can move on toward creating a solution. I'm exploring alternative representations of XBRL that will make the data much more human-readable. I think people sometimes forget that developers are humans too."

Lenz says he plans to demonstrate some of his progress at the conference. "It's still in the experimentation phase, but I think this approach has a lot of promise, particularly if I can prove that the two representations can be mechanically translated back and forth."

The talk will occur just days before the World Wide Web Consortium hosts its "Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web", also in Arlington, on October 5th and 6th. As stated on the workshop's website, "participants will collectively help to identify opportunities and challenges for interactive access to business and financial data expressed in XBRL and related languages." Lenz sees his efforts as highly correlated with the workshop's. "People are recognizing that there are challenges. It's good to see them being addressed from multiple angles."

Lenz Consulting Group, Inc., helps companies optimize publishing workflows, improve business processes, empower technical staff, adhere to industry standards, automate manual processes, and assure clean and correct publications. The company applies expertise in XML technologies to help businesses achieve extraordinary results. For more information, see