The primary objective of the RIXML Research Standard is to provide extensive capabilities for enhancing any piece of financial research content, in any form or media, with sufficient tagging (also called metadata) to allow research users to search, sort, commingle, parse, and filter the published research in order to deliver highly relevant information to decision-makers.
When the RIXML consortium began, all of the participating firms provided a set of real-life scenarios — use cases — in which a standard like RIXML would help them.
- Buy-side participants said that they would like to be able to search, sort, and filter information published by the research providers, to provide relevant research to their decision-makers in an easy-to-use format, and to create tools to help them commingle research from different sources.
- Sell-side firms stated that they would like to be able to focus on developing and producing content and to dedicate fewer resources to the technical issues around delivering it.
- Vendors and others who create products used by these end users
The resulting list of requirements included a listing of the various types of research, such as:
- Single-company reports
- Morning notes
- IPO reports
- Macroeconomic research
- Sector, industry, and country overviews
- Compilations of several company reports
- Weekly, monthly, and quarterly publications
It also included the various tasks that need to be accomplished, such as:
- Searching
- Browsing
- Alerting
- Distribution of all research to research distribution vendors
- Distribution of subsets (such as models) to individual buy-side firms
- Email distribution to targeted recipients
Based on these use cases, the group determined the initial list of tags that would be needed. From there, a technical committee was given the task of translating this working draft into the RIXML schema.
The technical committee started by modeling the business requirements into an object model. It also re-organized the draft document to better address the requirements of and expectations for the RIXML schema. A parallel effort helped translate this object model into the actual RIXML schema. Some members of the technical committee took the schema back to their organizations and presented it to the potential end-users of the standard. The comments and concerns they elicited were either incorporated into the Research Standard or were added to the issues log to be further reviewed and addressed in subsequent releases of the standard.
The primary objective of the RIXML Research Standard is to provide extensive capabilities for enhancing any piece of financial research content, in any form or media, with sufficient tagging (also called metadata) to allow research users to search, sort, commingle, parse, and filter the published research in order to deliver highly relevant information to decision-makers.