February, 2012 – Leaders of the computer industry standards organization OMG®, and XBRL International, Inc. (XII) have agreed to establish a liaison relationship to further cooperate on the development of a standard abstract model for the XBRL language. OMG will become a Direct Association member of XII, and XII will become a Domain Member of OMG.

“OMG and XBRL have worked jointly in many capacities for over a decade and we are delighted to deepen the relationship with cross-membership and a joint effort to develop a standard abstract model for XBRL” said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., chairman & CEO, OMG. “XBRL is becoming the de facto standard for structured business information, while OMG’s Model Driven Architecture drives increased adoption when applied to XML-based standards. Increasing the usability of those standards will result in wide use of XBRL even outside of the reporting world.”

“This formal liaison between XII and OMG is a result of the strong compliment and benefit that Model Driven Architecture brings to XBRL and OMG’s long term commitment to the standards development and business community,” stated Tony Fragnito, CEO of XBRL International, Inc. “This is in direct support of XII’s strategic commitment to making XBRL easier to use and reducing the barriers to XBRL software development”.

In other news, OMG and XBRL announced that a joint panel discussion will be held at OMG’s “Demystifying Financial Services Semantics” Conference being held in New York on March 13, 2012. This panel will discuss the joint framework to define and align XBRL semantics leveraging OMG’s modeling standards for business, architecture and technology. XBRL leadership will present the proposed framework along with the XBRL Abstract model and discuss the potential business applications that can be built off this framework and align XBRL taxonomies using OMG standards based “semantics registry” in a “public cloud” environment.

“More than two-thirds of the world’s market capitalization – trillions of dollars – is already being reported in XBRL format. Hundreds of XBRL initiatives are underway in more than a dozen countries that will benefit millions of companies as well as the users of their information,” said Liv Watson, Seconded to XBRL International, Inc. by WebFilings. “This session will examine how additional OMG semantics can be linked to XBRL data to allow for greater use, interoperability and comparability across countries, regions and industries to promote better accountability and transparency.”