Industry Collaboration

The EDM Council will manage the Semantics Repository as a collaborative publishing activity. Additions, deletions, term modifications and conceptual model questions are strongly encouraged. Rants, raves and alternative points of view should be directed to Mike Bennett at Hypercube Ltd.

Conceptual Model

To get the process started, we have created a conceptual model demonstrating financial instrument concepts and their relationships using business names rather than data attributes. The goal of the conceptual model is to clarify functional specifications independently of technology. It is the template for the Semantics Repository and is intended to facilitate communication for data analysis and establish a consistent naming scheme. Each diagram tab in the Repository shows the complete model for the respective domain. A block diagram is also included enabling users to see a simpler version of the diagram.

Terms and Definitions

We have organized the Semantics Repository to follow the ISO 10962 Classification of Financial Instruments (CFI) standard. In order to construct the tables of terms and definitions we pulled from ISO, DTCC, FpML and data dictionaries from financial institutions. Both the terms and their definitions are presented in their raw (unedited) form. Many are derived from technical documents and are not sufficient to meet our objectives of business semantics precision. Alternative recommendations are encouraged and are one of the stated objectives of this activity.

Deliverables

This is the initial Repository. All changes are auditable with collective oversight over the accuracy of new contributions. After a brief period of initial review, the Council will assemble a number of subject matter expert committees to review the draft material in the Repository on a domain-by-domain basis. These review exercises will allow us to formally “book” these terms and definitions as we achieve agreement and add any that are missing. A separate quality assurance process will identify what validation has been performed. Once created, the Semantics Repository is envisioned to be used in three different ways:

1. The first is as a common ontology for internal mapping within financial institutions
2. The second is to work in collaboration with data and processing vendors to adopt the commonly agreed semantics to reduce the amount of mapping required for both inbound and outbound data transfer.
3. The third is to work with data originators and regulators to tag data attributes at the point of data creation to reduce the need for multiple transformations at every stage of the data manufacturing process.