The Semantic Web Blog has become accustomed to seeing announcements from publishers and media networks that have adopted OpenCalais’ entity extraction service. But one that recently caught our attention was a horse of a different color: A beta service called Hedgehogs.net, whose end game is to create something like a crowd-sourced Bloomberg terminal for the hedge fund and investment community. It’s providing a social platform where investors and traders can collaborate, share ideas and stay up on news, and also take advantage of services those with skills in the finance industry can build and monetize upon a cloud-sourced infrastructure that’s chock-full of capabilities to enable such transactions. That includes licensing, entitlements management, access controls, and merchant services features.

Where on earth does the semantic web fit into this picture? “The whole idea is to create an ecosystem that the community builds out, and rely on semantic web concepts to be the ergonomic glue that binds it all together,” says Ken Yeadon, CEO and co-founder of the service. He’s also managing partner of Thematic Capital Partners, a small private equity venture capital fund investing in new technologies that, like Hedgehogs.net, create intersections between financial markets, social media technologies and trading infrastructures. The impetus for such a service, he says, is the continuing deconstruction in the financial services industry that began before but has been accelerated with the crisis. (Off-topic question on deconstructionism: What would happen if Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Senator Carl Levin got in the same room with Jacque Derrida? The same thing that happened in last week’s Senate sub-committee hearings as the context and contradictions around market-makers were exposed for all to enjoy? Discuss.)

Today, Yeadon says, you don’t need the complex supply chain that could only be harnessed by a single large entity to build and deliver financial platforms rich in visualizations, market data, business logic, and computational analytics. Today these can be delivered as aggregated services over the web rather than software, supplied remotely from different vendors, large or small, supported by Hedgehogs’ platform.

And that, says Yeadon, brings us into the semantic end of the equation. “When you have lots of user contributed content, the challenge is how do you navigate it, qualify it as the stuff you might be interested in? You have to rely on metadata and a recommendation engine and correlated content as the basis by which you find things,” he says. For example, any user can add RSS news feeds to the service that then become sources in its search space; in the process the community is teaching its server the kind of content that is likely to be applicable to those in the finance community so that targets are prioritized by the crowd’s collective wisdom. “But sources are heterogeneous,” he says. “They are not consistent, they are not using a consistent symbology or taxonomy.” So to bind that content back together—and that’s about 200,000 pages of news items so far – each item is passed thru the OpenCalais web service, extracting tags and metadata from the text that are then attached to news items and which can then be used to correlate each to related content. In addition to a story or blog posting generating its own tags from going through OpenCalais, it also will inherit attributes a level up that are descriptive in context.

The same holds true for other content like services, such as widgets, that users may contribute to the site, under whatever licensing terms they prefer (including whether it’s fee-based or not). A bond calculator widget, for instance, would have its descriptive information and all its dependencies tagged – that it derives calculations about fixed income, for instance, uses Thomson Reuters data to do it, and is deployed in the cloud. And the widget has a feed, so if you subscribe to it and anyone comments on it, you’d be informed. “So basically we publish metadata about your areas of interest and that is matched to metadata automatically generated from the content that users contribute to the site or that is automatically generated from the site,” Yeadon says. And your actions on services, such as bookmarking one to a group, projects a thumbnail, descriptive data and metadata about it, “so it’s a viral marketing mechanism,” too.

At the end of April Yeadon reported Hedgehogs.net had topped the 4,000 user mark. Future plans for building on the beta service and the semantic glue that holds it all together include adding a capability for streaming market data more dynamically and to embed a development environment right into the platform that understands its artifacts.

“You could fire up the development environment, take someone’s assembly of calculations, build a function on top of it and list it for sale. And users would contract separately for your enhancement and the service which underlies it, respecting the rights of all parties in the supply chain,” Yeadon says. “There’s lots of commercial flexibility because you don’t need to worry about the inclusion of someone’s library in the output – the boundary between their IP and the enhancement is enforced.”

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