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FISD Forms XML for Market Data Working Group

December 20, 2000


Related Reports

Market Data Markup Language Presentation James E. Hartley, Bridge, Global Technical Lead, Bridge Internet Toolkit, Dec. 2000

XML for Market Data Jeremy Sanders, Merrill Lynch, Director, Global Application Infrastructure, Dec. 2000

Market Data Markup Language Specification Version 0.12 PDF File (160 KB) Click here for downloading help. Nov. 14, 2000

XML: The Future of Data Exchange Martin McCaig, Solutions Marketing Director, Reuters Ltd. presentation on XML, Sept. 2000

FISD Industry Resources on XML

FISD is forming an XML for Market Data Working Group as a result of the (discussions leading up to and) presentations given during the December 6-7 general meeting in NYC. Members interested in participating on the working group should indicate their interest and forward contact information to Michael Atkin. The first working group meeting is being targeted for January 2001.

At this stage, the fundamental purpose of the Working Group will be to consolidate industry efforts to define the parameters of the XML for market data discussion (i.e. the fields needed to describe a security and its price). If the industry is able to unify around a common size and scope definition, FISD is interested in (1) serving as the facilitator of the discussion to create a standard, (2) supporting and maintaining the standard as a permanent home and (3) coordinating with the other major financial industry XML standards efforts such as NewsML (news), FpML (derivatives), IRML (investment research) and XBRL (business reporting) as appropriate.

Jeremy Sanders (Merrill Lynch) and James Hartley (Bridge Information) presented the industry with a solid starting point during the FISD meeting. According to Sanders, the user firms are interested in extracting information from a vendor's (defined as any information provider including exchanges and contributors) data feed into common desktop applications. The requirement is not for an individual trader who wants access to multiple sources of data, but rather for distributing information to disparate systems throughout the organization. For that, the users need a standard protocol and common data format. Sanders envisions using the XML standard primarily for end-of-day and intra-day snapshot application feeds rather than for streaming data. The additional benefits of XML are that it is inherently web-enabled as well as transport independent.

Sanders further explained that once the standard is developed, implementation could be easier than expected. For example, rather than converting to a native in XML, vendors could continue to use their own internal formats and convert to the XML standard at the users site through the use of mapping/translating software. The difficult job is defining the elements and attributes, standardizing the nomenclature, resolving symbology and "filling out" the standard.

Hartley is global technical lead of something called Bridge Internet Toolkit. Bridge has been on the leading edge of XML and has been working on a draft Market Data Markup Language (MDML) specification for the past two years. According to Hartley, XML is very functional for companies that are seeking to develop products that manipulate and exchange market data. In his own words … "success is facilitated if data is of use to more than one program or chain of users." Hartley went on to maintain that while XML is "verbose and a data monstrosity," it is a clearly defined, accepted, platform independent and extensible standard for interchange and data expansion.

FISD has also been beating the bushes on XML over the past month or so. We have had open, positive and useful discussions with most of the major market data vendors. All are interested in pursuing XML as an industry standard. FISD has also open discussions with the other XML groups who have all indicated their interest in working with us to ensure that the XML standard for market data is integrated with the rest of the financial industry XML standards. At the moment, all signs look promising.

Interest in XML for market data is clearly growing. Since the presentation in NY, fourteen companies (including Bank of NY, Bloomberg, Bridge, Dow Jones, Financial Times, Goldman Sachs, Lipper, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Reuters, and Standard & Poor's) have asked to join the working group. The draft MDML specification from Bridge is posted on the FISD web site at: http://www.fisd.net/mdpolicy/1100_mdmlspec.pdf.

Once again, please identify yourself if you are interested in participating on the working group. We will publish our documentation on the web site and are creating a BBS for working group communication.

 

 

 

 

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