GoldenSource Implements FIBO Standard

Enterprise data management (EDM) software vendor GoldenSource has implemented the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) semantic standard in a new application, which it says will help market participants be more efficient because it brings together standardized data definitions and physical data.

FIBO is an industry initiative of the EDM Council trade association, which is intended to standardize the definition of data used in the financial industry. It has so far created definitions for business entity data, which it has uploaded to its Adaptive Tool.

GoldenSource is one of the many participants that have contributed to work on FIBO, and it has now cross-matched between the definitions in the Adaptive Tools and its own physical data architecture to create a new application it calls GoldenSource Open EDM.

"We did that [cross-matching] rapidly," says Mike Meriton, New York-based chief executive officer of GoldenSource and co-founder of the EDM Council. "The reason we could do so is because our physical data model is very organized structurally to easily map into metadata definitions, and for us this is just cross-referencing against the industry standard metadata."

GoldenSource has connections with more than 100 sources of data, which it standardizes. Meriton says by bringing together this standardized physical data with the standardized data dictionary definitions of FIBO, it can help firms to improve efficiency.

"If a regulator says it needs a report with 20 fields, we now know we are talking about exactly the same thing, because we have the FIBO terms. And then we go that step further to connect that standard term into the physical data, which comes from hundreds of different sources, and we can give an honest and transparent response back to the regulator," says Meriton.

He continues: "Until now, the first problem has been that we may not agree what you are asking for, or misunderstand what you want, and number two, once we know what you want, it is very hard to find it inside our institution because it is recorded in different systems, different formats, in different definitions."