ISWC2012Tutorial

ISWC Tutorial

This page is for the Financial IM tutorial at the International Semantic Web Conference 2012, to be held in Boston, MA on Nov. 11 or 12 (see conference website's tutorial program schedule).

Title: Financial Information Management Using the Semantic Web

Abstract: Recent financial crises have demonstrated the need for sophisticated modeling of and deep reasoning about financial events and associated financial information. These tasks present foundational and technical challenges which are best addressed using open standards developed by the Semantic Web community. We propose a tutorial that brings together leaders in the Semantic Web and Financial Information Management communities to share their expertise and work together on several significant and timely problems in financial information management.

Lead Organizers/Presenters: (alphabetically)

• Benjamin Grosof, Senior Research Program Manager, Knowledge Systems, Vulcan, Inc., [[1]]
• Leora Morgenstern, Technical Fellow and Senior Scientist, Autonomy and Analytics, SAIC, [[2]] (primary contact)
• David Newman, Wells Fargo Bank

Motivation:

The Great Recession of 2008 and the continuing reverberations in the Eurozone have highlighted significant limitations in the ability of regulators and analysts/researchers to monitor and model national and global financial ecosystems. There is a lack of financial cyberinfrastructure to ingest and process in real time numerous streams of financial transactions, as well as the accompanying data streams of economic activity. Also absent are open standards and shared semantics so that this data can be used to populate models of individual markets, financial networks, and the interconnected ecosystem representing the global financial system. The most important challenge is the need to develop computational research frameworks, models and methods, in the spirit of past efforts to identify computational grand challenges in a diversity of data intensive domains such as the biomedical sciences, health information management, and climate change. The next generation of financial cyberinfrastructure must provide a platform that can transform our current approaches to monitoring and regulating systemic risk.

This tutorial will be held in conjunction with ISWC because academic researchers, regulators, and industry specialists from both the financial instruments and financial software products industries have recognized the critical importance of developing financial cyberinfrastructure over a platform of semantics and standards, semantic Web technologies, and Linked Open Data principles and methods.

The intended audience is both the Semantic Web and Financial Management communities. Organizations represented may include

• From the semantic web community: W3C, ISO, academics from computer science, economics, business schools, researchers from software industry
• From the financial community: Regulators, industry specialists from financial institutions

Preliminary Outline:

Part A: General topics

• Overview of “Issues in Financial Data Integration”
• “Using RIF and OWL to Codify Financial Information” (Overview of OWL and RIF, plus numerous examples of using them in practice in finance.)

Part B: Specific topics

• Semantic web approaches to financial data validation
• Codifying contractual meaning
• Modeling financial trigger rules

Relevant Past Workshops and URL’s:

• Workshop on Knowledge Representation and Information Management for Financial Risk Management, sponsored by the National Science Foundation in July 2010. [[3]]
• The Macroprudential Toolkit: Measurement and Analysis, sponsored by the Office of Financial Research and the Financial Stability Oversight Council [[4]]

Thanks to the ff. interested persons, several of whom have been assisting with organizing, as well:

• Tara Athan, Athan Services
• Mike Bennett, Enterprise Data Management Council
• Abraham Bernstein, University of Zurich
• Mike Dean, BBN
• Mark Flood, Office of Financial Research, US Treasury Dept.
• H. V. Jagadish, University of Michigan
• Vicki Lemieux, Univ. of British Columbia, ISO T68, Financial Services
• Bill Nichols, Office of Financial Research, US Treasure Dept.
• Frank Olken, Frank Olken Consulting, Berkeley, CA
• Peter Patel-Schneider, W3C and Bell Labs
• Louiqa Raschid, University of Maryland