Glen Fest of American Banker reports, “The use of semantics often is a way to evade the issue at hand (i.e., Bill Clinton’s parsed definition of ‘is’). But in David Saul’s world of bank compliance and regulation, it’s something that can help get right to the heart of the matter. Saul, the chief scientist at State Street Corp. in Boston, views the technology of semantics—in which data is structured in ways that it can be shared easily between bank divisions, institutions and regulators—as an ends to better understand and manage big-bank risk profiles. ‘By bringing all of this data together with the semantic models, we’re going to be able to ask the questions you need to ask to prepare regulatory reporting,’ as well as internal risk calculations, Saul promised at a recent forum held at the New York offices of SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.” Read more

Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today revealed that 18 central banks and government organizations in Asia Pacific have recently rolled out the flagship Thomson Reuters Eikon platform for real-time financial data, analytics, news and commentary.

The central banks and government authorities that have signed up to use Thomson Reuters Eikon in recent months include the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Reserve Bank of India, Nepal Rastra Bank, Central Bank of the Republic of China (Taiwan), State Bank of Vietnam, Bank of the Lao P.D.R and Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan. Read more

Pete Swabey of Information Age reports, “The banking industry, it is fair to say, has a legacy IT problem.  Having been some of the earliest adopters of information technology, most major banks have accumulated decades-worth of IT infrastructure, stitched together in unimaginably complex architectures.  For some banks, even keeping this legacy infrastructure running is proving difficult – look no further than RBS’s catastrophic IT outage in the summer of 2012. But it is also stifling innovation. The cost of integrating a new application into legacy systems can be three or four times the cost the application itself. This prevents banks from trying anything new unless it guarantees a phenomenal return on investment. ” Read more

Tom Groenfeldt of Forbes reports that Thomson Reuters is bringing semantic search to market information. He writes, “Looking up Cisco results on a Thomson Reuters Eikon terminal is as simple as typing in Cis. The name will autofill and you’re there.  Just like Google. Is nowhere safe from the consumerization of IT, not even trading rooms? ‘We want to change the way people interact with financial information,’ said Philip Brittan, global head of desktop platform at Thomson Reuters. ‘We are making it more like what modern search engines, such as Google, have done in the way you search the Web and interact with Web sites putting the search bar front and center allowing users to simply input what they are looking for’.” Read more

Marc Joffe of the OKF reports, “Throughout the Eurozone, credit rating agencies have been under attack for their lack of transparency and for their pro-cyclical sovereign rating actions. In the humble belief that the crowd can outperform the credit rating oracles, we are introducing an open database of historical sovereign risk data. It is available at http://www.publicsectorcredit.org/sovdef/ where community members can both view and edit the data. Once the quality of this data is sufficient, the data set can be used to create unbiased, transparent models of sovereign credit risk. The database contains central government revenue, expenditure, public debt and interest costs from the 19th century through 2011 – along with crisis indicators taken from Reinhart and Rogoff’s public database.” Read more

Velichka Dimitrova of OKF recently gave a recap of the organization’s first Open Economics International Workshop. Dimitrova writes, “The first Open Economics International Workshop gathered 40 academic economists, data publishers and funders of economics research, researchers and practitioners to a two-day event at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the workshop was to build an understanding around the value of open data and open tools for the Economics profession and the obstacles to opening up information, as well as the role of greater openness of the academy. This event was organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law and was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Audio and slides are available at the event’s webpage.” Read more

Guo of OpenEconomics.net recently discussed the benefits of open data for economic research. He writes, “There used to be a time when data was costly: There was not much data around. Comparable GDP data, for example, has only been collected starting in the early mid 20^th Century. Computing power was expensive and costly: Data and commands were stored on punch cards, and researchers only had limited hours to run their statistical analyses at the few computers available at hand.” Read more

Bill Culifer of WebProfessionals.com recently shared an audio interview with web expert Manu Sporny. Culifer writes, “In this fourteen minute interview with Manu Sporny Founder, CEO of Digital Bazaar a leader in the democratization of finance and payments on the Web we learn about Linked Data and why Web professionals should care.” The interview covers: “The history of Linked Data; Tim Berners Lee vision for Linked Data. How data is locked in silos; How Linked Data aims to free the data; How Linked Data differs from the Semantic Web; Examples of Linked Data; Benefits of Linked Data and why Web professionals should care; Recommendations for Web Professionals and how to get started; Linked data plugins and tools; Linked Data resources and best practices; The importance of education and advocacy.” Read more

Martin Martinoff of OpenEconomics recently considered how open data can help restore trust in business. He writes, “A few months ago, the Finance Innovation Lab launched AuditFutures – a new systemic work around rebuilding trust in business. The first innovation workshop on 4 July was a tremendous success and we have developed a strategy to move the work forward. Not surprisingly, open data came up in the discussions in two of the eight innovation domains. We feel that the knowledge and perspectives of the OKFN will bring value to the discussion.” Read more

IBM reports that the company is putting Watson to work: “Watson’s cognitive capabilities were designed to take on the real-world challenges of Big Data across a range of industries. From the outset, the aim was to put Watson to work first in healthcare and finance. Both industries confront deluges of unstructured data every day, and both industries have a compelling need to act on information quickly… While the Jeopardy! challenge demonstrated Watson’s ability to provide a single correct answer with confidence, IBM envisions the underlying technology moving toward a broader range of applications and industries to provide evidence-based decision support over large volumes of variable content.” Read more