ISWC2012Tutorial

ISWC-2012 Tutorial on Financial Information Management Using the Semantic Web

To be held at the International Semantic Web Conference 2012, in Boston, MA on Nov. 12 (see conference website's tutorial program schedule [[1]]).

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. The tutorial will explains foundational concepts in finance and semantic web technologies, present relevant standards and languages, and work through several use cases and motivating examples in detail.

Lead Organizers/Presenters: (alphabetically)

• Benjamin Grosof, Senior Research Program Manager, Knowledge Systems, Vulcan, Inc., [[2]]
• Leora Morgenstern, Technical Fellow and Senior Scientist, Autonomy and Analytics, SAIC, [[3]]
• David Newman, Vice President, Strategic Planning Manager, Enterprise Architecture, 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.

Preliminary Outline

• Introduction
  • Financial Data Integration Scene
  • Major Challenges
• Use Cases motivated by Systemic Risk
  • Visualization and analysis of a financial counterparty network
  • Knowledge representation of a financial contract
  • Implementation of a “living will” for a large financial firm
  • Fostering an ecosystem of credit analysis
  • Reasoning over financial contracts for completeness and integrity
  • Privacy and trust: multiparty sharing of confidential financial data
• Semantic Rules Standards and Languages
  • Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Framework and RuleML
  • SILK
  • Other: OWL-RL, OMG SBVR, ISO CommonRules, RIF-BLD, RIF-PRD, Oasis LegalRuleML, OMG API4KB
• Financial Standards: Existing and Emerging
  • Legal Identifiers
  • Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO)
  • eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)
• Representing Financial Contracts
  • Examples
• Financial Reporting and Compliance
  • Examples
• Wrap-up discussion

Additional Background

Relevant Past Workshops and URL’s:

• Workshops on Financial Cyberinfrastructure on Knowledge Representation and Information Management for Financial Risk Management sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
  • Website and materials for July 2010 workshop [[4]]
  • Website and materials for July 2012 workshop [[5]]

• The Macroprudential Toolkit: Measurement and Analysis, sponsored by the Office of Financial Research and the Financial Stability Oversight Council [[6]]