financial data - semanticweb.com

Semantics & Big Data Go to the Bank

Angela Guess — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:55:26 +0000

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.” continued…

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Asia Pacific’s Central Banks and Government Institutions Turn to Thomson Reuters Eikon

Angela Guess — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:00:31 +0000

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. continued…

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Cutting the Cost of Financial Data Integration

Angela Guess — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:30:26 +0000

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. ” continued…

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Thomson Reuters Brings Semantic Search to the Trading Floor

Angela Guess — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:55:25 +0000

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’.” continued…

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Introducing the Sovereign Credit Risk Open Database

Angela Guess — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:55:44 +0000

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.” continued…

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News from the First Open Economics International Workshop

Angela Guess — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:30:52 +0000

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.” continued…

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Benefits of Open Data for Economic Research

Angela Guess — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 18:00:41 +0000

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.” continued…

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Manu Sporny Explains Linked Data & Why You Should Care

Angela Guess — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:00:18 +0000

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.” continued…

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Restoring Trust in Business with Open Data

Angela Guess — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 18:00:34 +0000

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.” continued…

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IBM’s Watson Gets to Work

Angela Guess — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 11:00:31 +0000

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.” continued…

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Opening Up World Bank’s Data

Angela Guess — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:00:05 +0000

Tim Herzog recently reported on World Bank’s efforts to make its data more open and accessible. He writes, “One of our goals in the next year is to make World Bank open data easier to find and use. As a start, we recently redesigned the country pages on data.worldbank.org to showcase other open data resources, such as Projects, Finances, Mapping For Results, Microdata, and the Climate Change Knowledge Portal. From any country page, you can now preview the data and navigate to the corresponding country page on any of these other sites. If you’re a developer or data geek and you’re interested in how this works under the hood, then read on.” continued…

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Metadata, Big Data, and the Financial Sector

Angela Guess — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:00:18 +0000

Bryan Bell of Cogito reports that financial companies are wise to turn to semantic metadata for better Big Data analytics. Bell writes, “Financial institutions are looking to linguistics and semantics as the best option for managing and taking advantage of their unstructured data, using it to better understand customers and competitors, to identify impactful market trends or simply to automate the process of answering common customer questions. As one Chief Data Officer put it, ‘We are the stewards of one of our firms’ most important assets, data, and we have been charged with bringing meaning to the data. I believe semantics offers a consistent, long-term capability and change in how data will be managed’.” continued…

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Financial Big Data & Semantic Technology

Angela Guess — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 09:00:48 +0000

Bryan Yurcan interviewed David Saul of State Street regarding how semantic technologies can be used to tame big data. He writes, “Financial institutions are accumulating data at a rapid pace. Between massive amounts of internal information and an ever-growing pool of unstructured data to deal with, banks’ data management and storage capabilities are being stretched thin. But relief may come in the form of semantic databases, which could be the next evolution in how banks manage big data, says David Saul, Chief Scientist for Boston-based State Street Corp. The semantic data model associates a meaning to each piece of data to allow for better evaluation and analysis, Saul notes, adding that given their ability to analyze relationships, semantic databases are particularly well-suited for the financial services industry.” continued…

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New Open Gov Project: MA’s Open Checkbook

Angela Guess — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:00:55 +0000

Andy Oram recently commented on Massachusetts’ newest open government venture, Open Checkbook. Oram writes, “On December 5, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick joined with state treasurer Steven Grossman to create an open government initiative with the promising moniker Open Checkbook. The site launched to some acclaim and has received over 220,000 hits. I decided to take a look at what’s offered and what’s missing from this site, and to ask someone in the government here in Massachusetts to describe their thinking in creating the site. The results can give us some insight into the effort it takes at each stage to release government data–and even more significantly, what it takes to increase the data’s value.” continued…

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Pingar Catches Semi-Structured Data from Invoices

Angela Guess — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:00:28 +0000

A new article reports that “Pingar, a leading provider of unstructured data management solutions today announced a new tool for enterprises to quickly capture data and business intelligence stored in documents and use that data for business advantage and operational efficiency. Invoice Analyzer extends Pingar’s proven ability to apply text analytics and natural language processing research, to capture, sort and analyze data in unstructured documents to include semi-structured data.” continued…

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