Dow Jones Contributes XML Work to Market Data Project.

Business & Technology Editors

NEW YORK, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--January 4, 2001

Dow Jones & Company announced today that it is providing its Market Data Markup Language to a financial industry consortium as a starting point toward development of an XML-based global standard for market data delivery.

The Market Data Markup Language (MDML), developed by Dow Jones is now posted at www.fisd.net, the web site of the Financial Information Services Division (FISD) of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). The FISD -- a forum for business and technical issues related to the distribution of financial information -- recently formed a working group to coordinate XML efforts in the market data industry. Dow Jones contributed its MDML to speed development of a common framework to publish market data.

"We will jump-start the new FISD initiative by contributing a good portion of our XML expertise in this area," said Kevin M. Roche, news systems manager and head of the XML group at Dow Jones. "Our approach to the structural and content markup of financial statistics will provide a solid base for industry discussions."

The Dow Jones MDML has been in production for about two years at The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com. The language is used for posting text and statistical data on the web site, and as a system interchange format within Dow Jones and with entities such as Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters.

"Timely market data is essential to all market participants," said Bill Godfrey, chief technology officer of Dow Jones. "Dow Jones is both a consumer and supplier of market information, and XML is a powerful new way of exchanging data within the industry. Creating a standard, open framework enabling data to stream across company boundaries and multiple platforms will benefit the entire financial industry, and Dow Jones is committed to taking an active role in that creation."

"The market data industry is working together to solve the challenges of moving data from multiple sources into common desktop applications," said Michael Atkin, vice president of the FISD. "Dow Jones has provided a technological cornerstone for our XML project and we're grateful to them for their contribution to this initiative."

The FISD market data work will be done in coordination with other XML initiatives, including XBRL, or Extensible Business Reporting Language. The XBRL consortium (www.xbrl.org) is developing XML vocabularies for corporate earnings and regulatory filings. Dow Jones, Reuters Group, and Reuters' Lipper subsidiary are all participants in XBRL.

The FISD effort also dovetails with two XML standards developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council, of which Dow Jones, Associated Press, and Reuters are all members: NewsML is an XML model for packaging and managing news objects of any media type; the News Industry Text Format is an XML application for markup of news text.

About Dow Jones & Company

Dow Jones & Company (NYSE:DJ; dj.com) publishes The Wall Street Journal and its international and online editions, Barron's and SmartMoney magazines and other periodicals, Dow Jones Newswires, Dow Jones Indexes, and the Ottaway group of community newspapers. Dow Jones is co-owner with Reuters group of Factiva, with Excite@Home of Work.com, and with NBC of the CNBC television operations in Asia and Europe. Dow Jones also provides news content to CNBC and radio stations in the U.S.