What "a long strange trip it’s been." I first started thinking about the precise tagging of data way back before the turn of the millennium when Merrill Lynch asked me to start work on an XML schema for market data.

OK. At that point, I had no idea what XML was or what Merrill was really after. And frankly, it wasn’t an XML schema. It just took me a long time to figure out the real deal. What Merrill was after was data precision. They wanted to compare data from multiple sources and from among dozens of internal repositories. They wanted out of the tyranny of data mapping. After years of misinterpreting a business requirement for a technical specification, data model or XML schema I think we’re finally on the right track.

The Board of Directors of the EDM Council authorized us to build a repository for standard data terms and definitions in the context of business reality. We hired a financial industry ontologist (I didn’t even know such an animal existed). And we collected data dictionaries from a bunch of sources as our raw material.

Yesterday, I saw the results of Phase One and got a chance to play around with the initial repository. And even though there are some changes required, I like what I see. What Mike Bennett (our ontologist) has created is a hierarchy of financial instruments plus content related to indices, components of a security, dated terms, securities processes and basic conventions. And while the initial repository needs to shift from being diagram to spreadsheet driven and from hierarchical purity to simple terms, definitions and synonyms – it is well on its way to achieving the core objective of consensus on terminology and a single point of reference for data mapping.

Well done Mr. Bennett.

To learn more about the objectives of the Repository, click here.
To view the initial repository, click here