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 standardized 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 standardized 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@ For more information on the Standard API Signatures Task Force click here.