The Software Information Industry Association's (SIIA) Financial InformationServices Division (FISD) has released the draft version of its Market Data Definition Language (MDDL) specification. The first version, 0.9, is an XML-based interchange format for market data covering global equities, indices and collective investment vehicles. The MDDL working groups will release the beta version 1.0 of the MDDL specification on August 15th with the final launch of the specification expected at the FISDs World Financial Information Conference October 30th to November 2nd.

"In essence this takes everything found in a data feed from say Reuters or Bridge or Thomson and standardizes every market data element in that feed," explains Michael Atkin, vice president of Financial Information Markets at the SIIA and head of the FISD. "The initial motivation for this comes from the user firms. They are the ones who are spending a lot of money translating formats from vendors into their internal applications."

Firms will need to create a "translation table" as Atkin calls it to take in the data from vendor feeds, translate into MDDL and input into their applications. But Atkin says that some vendors may publish directly in native MDDL, which would eliminate the work on the firm side for data translation. "If a vendor is publishing in the common format, no problem, it goes right into the application," says Atkin. "But if the vendor isn't, then the firm would need to have translation software."

The draft specification of MDDL version 0.9 includes an MDDL XML schema, MDDL XML DTD, MDDL references XML schema, MDDL glossary/data dictionary and a sample style sheet for the glossary. The specification includes files, diagrams and examples, which is available on the FISD.net site. Before the beta launch of version 1.0 in August the FISD and MDDL working groups will continue to update the specifications with product hierarchies, glossary definitions and change management or a method for updating the data in the glossary.

The MDDL specification will also be interoperable with other XML initiatives such as NewsML, IRML, FPML, RIXML and others, says Atkin. He uses an example of NewsML used in newspapers for financial stories with stock prices referenced in MDDL within NewsML format. "It's all XML, we just happen to be doing it for market data." Until the full release of the MDDL specifications in October, the FISD will be seeking industry evaluation and comments on the standard. "As people start working with MDDL there will be other things that get added that we may have missed," says Atkin. "So we will add things as we discover them and there are some other small things that will have to be reconciled as we go forward."

Topic- Market Data Key Words-