Ontologies Gain Importance

The financial industry must familiarize itself with ontologies, stated David Saul, vice president and chief scientist at State Street Corporation, who spoke at the recent North American Financial Information Summit.

"Data is traveling not only with its representation, but its meaning and relationship to other data," he said. "Think about what that opens up in its ability to do things with that data, which we couldn't do before."

The hurdle to implementing ontologies has typically been translation of the business problem into something IT staff can program, or database staff can address with a data representation, according to Saul. "The gap in understanding will continue until we have tools like these representations," he said.

The EDM Council and the standards body Object Management Group, have developed the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), which meets regulatory demands to handle FpML, pulls data from relational databases, analyzes and classifies data and analyzes links to counterparties, said Mike Atkin, managing director of the EDM Council, in February.

State Street itself has begun semantic technology efforts, as reported by Inside Reference Data in April.