Standards Leaders Set Sights on Upper-Level Ontology for Industry

The new head of a key technical committee is pushing forward some ambitious goals for financial industry standards, most notably an upper-level ontology he hopes to establish by 2020. 

In January, FIX stalwart Jim Northey was named chair of Technical Committee (TC) 68, which authors, supports and maintains ISO 20022, a single standardization approach for financial services developed through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Northey says the semantic ontology was “one of my big goals going in,” adding that he and his subcommittee chairs are currently discussing which group is best suited to take on the project, and how to ensure it has “proper support” from industry and national standards bodies.

In the meantime, TC 68 is moving forward with projects that support the larger goal of an upper-level ontology. The committee is incorporating semantics into its reference data standards, with its SC 9 information exchange subcommittee currently finalizing technical reports on semantic representation of ISO 20022. Northey says TC 68 is proposing an advisory group on best practices and data consistency, which he hopes will be approved during ISO/TC 68’s mid-May plenary meeting in Paris. 

“I would hope to see that same core group of people… go on to do this next round of work [on the upper-level ontology],” he says. “At the same time, as we’re revising our existing reference data standards, I would like to see work items in the 2019 timeframe start to have them modeled and viewed in semantic terms.”

As the industry moves away from legacy messaging toward Internet of Things devices and mobile payments, data items are becoming increasingly important, Northey says. 

“If you don’t have really concise data definitions and identifiers, then you’re not going to have any chance of standardization. I think the industry has shown that semantics is a much better way to improve the quality and the definition, and then [you] make those actionable by things like machine learning and these other advanced tools. So that’s definitely the way we’re going,” he says.

The work is already keeping the TC 68 committee very busy. “I would say the number of standards we have going on simultaneously has never been greater. We’re working on a natural person identifier as part of regulatory response; we’re looking at crypto asset token identifying standards; and we’re doing some revisions to the LEI [legal entity identifier] standard. There’s a lot of stuff going on,” he adds.