Salomon Smith Barney is adopting XML for presentation of its research materials on the Web. The goal? To help investors and analysts quickly find specific information without having to download an entire file.
The investment house plans to have this XML-based Web document search capability available on its Web site, salomonsmithbarney.com, within a few months, says Steve Clifford, senior vice president and director of interactive marketing for the company.
"We will provide this for documents in HTML and PDF," Clifford says. "XML will also allow you to search across these documents for specific information, such as earnings."
To get information such as earnings from the Salomon Smith Barney commerce site at present, you would have to view the entire document file and find the data by eye.
XML makes searching easy because fields of the document can be wrapped in XML metatags that define specific content type. In the case of the investment firm, this might be tags for the "investment risks" or "fixed income mutual funds" portion of a research document, for example.
Salomon Smith Barney doesn't want to drastically alter its current Web document publishing process to take advantage of XML, Clifford notes. The firm decided the conversion to XML could be accomplished without a lot of changes by using a product called ReachCreate from ReachCast.
You simply send a Web or PDF file to a ReachCreate server for batch processing or do the XML conversion one by one on a desktop version of the product.
"It's rules-based, and it analyzes the data you give it to determine how to tag it," says ReachCast CEO Steve Mitchell. The XML-based files are going to be stored in an Oracle database. Based on individual investor interest, Salomon Smith Barney will set up a way to automatically e-mail information pulled from the documents using XML, as well as present it on the Web.
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