Slovenia

Slovenia

The Slovenian Insurance Association – SIA is the commercial interest association of Slovenian insurance companies. It was founded in 1992. Membership of the Association is voluntary and has grown continuously since it was established. Membership of the SIA is open to insurance companies involved in contract insurance which are registered in the Republic of Slovenia on basis of national legislation and the EU directives. The SIA membership is also open to other organisations where this is in the interests of the Association. The Association represents the common or individual interests of members and performs the tasks laid down by Slovenian regulations and international agreements. All the tasks are carried out by a 14-member professional service on the basis of resolutions of standing committees, divisions, working groups and bodies of the Association. Among them the Assembly, the Council, a Director and Green Card Bureau, as well as the Committees for individual insurance classes, Education and Statistics, Analysis and IT services are the most important.

The Statistics service of the SIA was established in 1995 and immediately began collecting, processing and publishing insurance statistical data provided by the insurance companies. When it was first aware of the XML importance for the electronic interchange of data early in the year 2003 the Statistical service of SIA proposed to take part in the eEG7 work. Currently, the SIA as the initiator, is involved in Statistics Project of the eEG7 and as a full member of the eEG7 also taking part in some other tasks of the expert group.

Why XML is important for statistics? Statistics as a service which operate in different business environment is performing three main tasks: collection, processing and dissemination of data. At least at first and third task statistics has to be in contact with respondents via interchange of data which are normally structured as a spreadsheets or questionnaires. XML as a markup language actually identifies that structures. The XML language also provides a facility to define tags and the structural relationships between them. This is the attribute and advantage of XML which HTML does not have. The XML specification defines a standard way to add markup to documents. In the XML schemas the content of documents can easily be changed and edited, but in the form of ordinary spreadsheets it is not the case. Furthermore, the statistical data in the form of XML schema can be easily transformed, for example, to Excel format if it is needed. One of the most important attributes of XML that we must not forget is that it was created so that richly structured documents could be used over the web.

Contacts

Tomaz Mancini - National Representative for Slovenia
Slovenian Insurance Association
Zelezna cesta 14
Ljubljana
Sl Slovenia