OMG and EDM Council Working Together:
Standardizing Semantic Data for Capital Markets Interoperability

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What's the Pain Point?

Why have OMG and Enterprise Data Management Council (EDM Council) come together? To help solve some interoperability issues in capital markets:

• Lack of interoperability and portability for financial services industry data, causes unnecessary duplication, costs, and pain.
• Efficient markets require efficient information flows.
• Systems at different organizations address the same problems in many different ways.
• The only way to bridge that gap is by agreeing on a set of terms and their semantics, and building and sharing a semantic repository.
• Addressing the complexities emerging from the financial reform requires a sustainable, data standards- and model-driven approach instead of an ad-hoc approach.

Who are the Participants?

EDM Council: Electronic Data Management Council (EDM) has been bringing together domain expertise in financial services (both on the user side, including banks and regulators; and on the vendor side, from general IT vendors to firms specializing in building and managing IT solutions). The prototype EDM Council Repository is already gaining traction in the financial services world, bridging the semantic gaps that exist in the marketplace. To succeed, the Repository needs the rest of a standards ecosystem.

OMG: has managed an open, transparently governed, worldwide, vendor-neutral standardization process almost 1,000 times, resulting in standards that not only change the world (from middleware to modeling, and in verticals as different as financial services, military communications and telecommunications) but result in complete standards ecosystems: documentation, open & downloadable standards, guarantees of implementation & use, long-term maintenance and clarification of the standard, access to training & education, and professional certification. OMG has decades of experience in distributed semantic repository standardization, and EDM Council is already relying on OMG technologies such as UML and SBVR so this is a natural partnership. OMG standards don’t stand alone—they support and build large market ecosystems that stand the test of time.

What's the Plan?

OMG and EDM Council are bringing together EDM’s domain expertise and OMG’s standardization expertise to complete, maintain and build a Semantic Repository standard that will dramatically increase efficiency in financial services firms serving capital markets. The upcoming joint standards that OMG and EDM are developing are already starting to sweep the market—and will be jointly developed, jointly managed and jointly maintained over time.

Next Steps

By joining OMG and EDM jointly, you bring your domain expertise to the table and get a say in the development and maintenance of these standards.

To simplify the process of participation:

• OMG is offering current members of EDM Council a 10% discount on all OMG memberships at the Influencing level or above through October 31, 2011.
• EDM Council is offering current OMG members a 10% discount on their membership fee.

Members at these levels get the opportunity to take a leadership position in both organizations, with opportunities to become a Board member as well as be in a final voting position in both organizations.

Want to learn more? We would be happy to discuss how participating in this joint project would benefit your organization. Please feel free to explore our website and when you are ready, please contact Ken Berk, Vice President, Business Development at ken.berk@omg.org or +1-781-444 0404.

Last updated on 03/08/2012