The EDM Council has today released its first draft of a Semantics Repository for review by the industry. Its intent is to establish a common meaning for terms used in financial markets and data management in particular. How it is meant to be used and how it fits with other standards such as FpML and MDDL is briefly outlined by the following article.

As already mentioned in our earlier post, it would be great for the industry if this time of crisis provides the need and motivation to get standards in place. I guess we are all fighting against the profound Tannebaum quote of “the nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from”.

I wish the EDM Council every success with this effort, although the irony that we vendors and users of centralised data management systems and proponents of the single “Golden Copy”, need to do better ourselves on establishing centralised industry standards for data. As I say to my five year old son “do as I say, not as I do”…