NEEDHAM, Mass. and NEW YORK, March 15, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Leaders of computer industry standards organization OMG® and the Enterprise Data Management Council (EDM Council), a not-for-profit business forum created by the financial industry to address the issues and challenges associated with managing data content as a business and operational priority, have agreed to address high impact business challenges such as regulatory pressures emerging from financial reform with the development of a sustainable framework and data standards. OMG and EDM Council will help organizations transform their data into "Actionable Intelligence" to support systemic risk assessment and analytics while addressing the interoperability issues in the global financial system by working together to develop a common language and symbology because:

• Lack of high quality data, interoperability and portability across systems has an adverse impact on business and IT operations.  
• Efficient capital markets rely upon accurate information flows in near-real time to a wide spectrum of stakeholders and systems.
• A sustainable way to address these challenges is by developing a common but extensible language and symbology of terms, their semantics and complex inter-relationships, hosted in an open standards based semantic repository with a robust governance process.

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The prototype EDM Council Repository is already gaining traction in the financial services world, bridging the semantic gaps that exist in the marketplace. To succeed, the Repository needs the rest of a standards ecosystem. OMG has decades of experience in distributed semantic repository standardization, and EDM Council is incorporating OMG's business vocabulary, ontology and event modeling languages and interchange formats. OMG standards support and build large market ecosystems.

OMG and EDM Council are bringing together EDM's domain expertise and OMG's standardization expertise to complete, maintain and build a Semantic Repository standard that will dramatically increase efficiency in financial services firms serving capital markets. The upcoming joint standards that OMG and EDM are developing will be jointly developed, managed and maintained.

"OMG and the EDM Council have been working together quite successfully for some time, so this is a natural expansion of our efforts," said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., chairman and CEO, OMG. "The highly complimentary combination of deep knowledge of the financial services domain by EDM Council and decades of experience in standards development, maintenance and the creation of market ecosystems on the part of OMG will lead to a widely accepted standard terminology and agreed upon semantics library that will smooth trade flows and other financial transactions to enable low-cost straight-through processing."

"Financial institutions across the industry agree that it is critical to establish a precise common language describing the contractual structure of financial instruments.  Semantic precision is now recognized as the prerequisite for automating business processes and essential to ensure confidence in analytical objectives of both financial institutions and regulators, said Michael Atkin, Managing Director of the EDM Council.  "Our relationship with OMG will help elevate the Semantics Repository as a formal standard and establish the sustainable governance required to ensure its continuous maintenance, a crucial requirement to drive adoption within the global financial industry."  

"EDM Council's semantic repository and OMG's modeling and interoperability standards (coupled with their partnerships with other standards organizations) will help Citigroup and other financial services organizations better address the business and operational challenges emerging from the financial reform regulations such as the Dodd-Frank Act. Assessment and analysis of systemic risk not only requires Legal Entity and Financial Instrument Identifiers but also a deeper understanding of their complex hierarchies and traceability across front-middle-back office systems. Such capability can be better achieved by modeling the business events and concepts, their contextual nuances and inter-relationships supported by standard interchange formats across heterogeneous IT systems," said Eric Chacon, Global Head of Data Standards at Citi Chief Data Office and Dr. Harsh W. Sharma of Citi Chief Data Office, OMG Finance Task Force Co-Chair.

Upcoming Joint Meeting

On March 22-23, 2011, OMG and the EDM Council will hold a joint working group meeting. At this meeting, some of the world's leading experts will come together to discuss increasing financial information flow quality while reducing risk and cost. The agenda currently includes representatives from OMG, EDM Council and these organizations: Federal Reserve, NY; Fannie Mae, CFTC, Office of Financial Research, US Treasury, The Pew Charitable Trusts, JWG, Northern Trust, Citi Chief Data Office, Penn National Insurance, Firestar Software, PricewaterhouseCoopers, XBRL, and SAP Labs, LLC.

OMG and the EDM Council are inviting any groups or organizations that may have interest or expertise in this area to participate. For information on membership in OMG, contact Ken Berk, vice president, business development at +1-781-444 0404 or ken.berk@omg.org. For information on membership in the EDMC, please contact Laura Anderson, Articulate Communications, 212-255-0080 x11 or landerson@articulatecomms.com.

About the EDM Council

The Enterprise Data Management Council is a nonprofit trade association created by the financial industry to elevate data management as an essential business mandate. The Council is focused on standards, best practices, and practical business processes needed to enable financial institutions to increase efficiency, minimize risk, and create competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.edmcouncil.org.

About OMG

OMG® is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies and an even wider range of industries. OMG's modeling standards enable powerful visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes. For more information, visit www.omg.org.

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SOURCE OMG (Object Management Group)