On Friday, May 11, a group of Semantic Technology thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about Semantics in the Financial Services Industry, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics. Lee shared insights gained over many years working in the semantic technology field and with numerous customers in the financial services industry.
Read more

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

 

Credit default swaps. Collateralized debt obligations. Moral hazards. The average person might find the financial services sector and its language as mystifying as some of those involved in the industry might find semantic technology. An event hosted by OMG and the EDM Council in New York City yesterday was aimed at demystifying the latter for Wall Street. But putting the technology to work there might help clarify the discourse around financial instruments for a wider audience, including the regulators who want to deal with concentration of risk issues that played a big role in the Wall Street meltdown.

One part of the picture is FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology, which was the subject of two sessions at the event. An advance discussion of the topic with Thematix principals Elisa Kendall and Jim Rhyne, who was a panelist at the event, set the stage for us here at The Semantic Web Blog. “The primary practical use for an ontology like FIBO that is descriptive of various kinds of financial instruments, including so-called exotics, is that regulators and financial market participants get a common language to talk about things,” Rhyne explains. This is important, given that financial regulators try hard to be collaborative with the industry, pointing out the need, he says, for careful management of financial instruments, including recommendations about capital buffers to deal with downside risk and asking for timely reports of information that would allow them to assess the possibility that a systemic problem could occur rather than directly intervening by stopping trades.

Especially in the derivatives marketplace, there is a lot of “funky terminology,” he says, and not all of it is as well-understood as it should be. Different parties and different parts of the marketplace may call the same instrument by different terms, and one of FIBO’s aims is to provide a common vocabulary.

Read more

The International Journal of Business and Systems Research has released an article entitled XBRL, semantic web and web services. The article is available here for a fee. The abstract states, “Computer and information technology innovations have revolutionised how business is conducted and how information is exchanged across systems. Technologies, such as eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), semantic web and web services, have emerged to transform the landscape of business information provision, exchange and consumption.” Read more

If you missed the live webcast with Drew Warren of Recognos Financial and Bryan Bell of Expert System, the recording is now available and posted below. 

Description

The software that runs computers is getting smarter every day. Semantic technology allows computers to understand the meaning of words —content and context— helping put users in touch with the right information at the right time.

Read more

MetaMoJi Announces Launch of MashIQ XBRL Analysis and Reporting Solution PR-CANADA.net (press release) … and published through the internet. MetaMoJi Corporation acquired the entire XBRL, advanced XML handing, and semantic technologies from JustSystems.

Innovation in this market is a mixed bag and most of it is below the radar. There is some movement at the consumer level with very simple legal templates. At the other extreme, there is a visionary attempt to make all legal information open source, called Law.gov. We also see movement in the legal work for early stage venture financing; while this is small, it is interesting because this is a community that does not shy away from innovation. In other areas where we would expect to see progress, such as legal xml, very little is happening.

This matter to all of us. The law is “the operating system of business”. It has to work right and it has to be open and low cost.

Read on to see how we might get a better operating system for business.

(Photo: Mike Atkins/Flickr)

Read more

XBRL: Accounting Geeks Get Radical ReadWriteWeb (blog) Yes, that sounds like the semantic Web, and we all know that has faced the chicken-and-egg problem (ie not enough content is semantically tagged yet). …

One on One with Diane Mueller, XBRL expert at Just Systems FierceContentManagement That said, I see a new genre of products on the horizon that will enable consumers to leverage social networking, mash-up and semantic technologies to …

India Carbon Outlook, India’s First Carbon Focused Information … PR Newswire (press release) India Carbon Outlook is also putting together a working group to build the taxonomy for Carbon XBRL and also to build a linked-data repository of URIs being … and more »

W3C and XBRL International have announced the organization of a Workshop on “Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web”. From the Call for Paper:

The goal of this workshop is to identify opportunities and challenges for interactive access to financial data expressed in XBRL and related languages, and the broader opportunities for semantic technologies. What are the use cases? Who are the stakeholders? What are the potential roadblocks and how can they be addressed? How can new applications be created based upon integrating XBRL with other sources of information?

The main outcome of the workshop will be the publication of a report that will serve as a guide for further work in both W3C and XBRL International.

The Workshop will take place in Arlington, Virginia, on the 5-6 October, 2009. The Workshop is co-organized by W3C and XBRL International, and is hosted by FDIC.