EDM Council Adds Corporate Actions to Semantics Repository

The EDM Council has completed the ontology work necessary to add corporate actions to its Semantics Repository, and now plans to liaise with the Object Management Group (OMG) to focus on the necessary steps to make it a financial industry business ontology (Fibo) standard, Inside Reference Data has learned.

Earlier this year, the EDM Council and the OMG joined forces to facilitate the expansion and standardization of the Semantics Repository, and set up a semantics joint working group to establish the strategic, technical steps and deliverables necessary to maintain the semantics repository as an OMG standard.

The Council plans to present the final corporate actions ontology work to subject matter experts in September, to then compare with the OMG’s processing and messaging of corporate actions.

“Although the ontology is now fully complete, corporate actions will not become one of the Fibo ontologies for a while,” says London-based Mike Bennett, head of semantics and standards at the EDM Council, and recently appointed vice chair of the Financial Domain Task Force, one of the groups that oversees creation and approval of OMG standards. “We are looking at how to make use of other OMG standards of process modeling as part of the corporate actions standardization model.”

Precision
Meanwhile, the Council has also completed a proof of concept that will be presented to the CFTC using Fibo. “The aim is to demonstrate to the CFTC that instruments can be described semantically with absolute precision, and that they can be classified according to attributes for aggregation and analysis while using existing messaging and FpML to communicate,” says Washington, DC-based Mike Atkin, managing director at the EDM Council.

In August, the Council carried out a proof of concept for the Semantic Repository, looking specifically at derivatives and interest rate swaps. “We took a very small section out of the repository and ran that through some semantic web technology applications to demonstrate its capabilities,” says Bennett.

Both the OMG and the Council plan to offer a presentation on the initial progress of the OMG's Fibo standard to the industry in their next quarterly meeting in September.