The Investment Data Standards Organization (IDSO) Releases Web Crawling Standards for the Alternative Data Industry
NEW YORK, May 28, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Investment Data Standards Organization (IDSO), a non-profit consortium of Alternative Data industry practitioners, released its web crawling best practice standards for industry review. The 17-page report reviews risk identification, categorization, and minimization of online data collection practices known as web crawling or web scraping. The report focuses specifically on the usage of these data collection techniques within the alternative data industry, which is an information economy for institutional investors and their vendors. The complete report was released to the public and can be found at www.investmentdata.org.
"We see IDSO's alternative data best practices as a necessary addition to the industry," said Justin Zhen, Co-Founder at Thinknum, an alternative data provider. "The standards will help shed light on the compliance-related gray areas of leveraging powerful web harvested data such as ours to generate unique alpha."
The Investment Data Standards Organization (IDSO) is a 501(c)(6) organization and was formed to develop standards, frameworks, and best practices for the use of Alternative Data—information derived from apps, sensors, networks, and other non-traditional sources—by the investment community. Membership is open to all industry constituents, including originators, intermediaries, and data consumers such as hedge funds, mutual funds and other asset management organizations. Activities are primarily organized around working groups tasked with specific compliance objectives, which are prioritized by the community of members.
"Web crawling risk management is one of the most complex and fragmented aspects of alternative data compliance," said Gene Ekster, a principal at Alternative Data Group, an IDSO member company, who has previously worked with alternative data at Point72. "IDSO standards are the best way for compliance teams across the industry to converge on common risk mitigation best practices."
The consortium's goal is to identify and reduce risks associated with the use of alternative data and lower the compliance burden of data onboarding. Compliance teams widely adopt the standards in either original forms or modified for specific company needs. The IDSO standards are best practices complied through working groups consisting of over 15 buy-side organizations and multiple data vendors.
Investment Data Standards Organization
The Investment Data Standards Organization (IDSO) is a non-profit standard-setting body comprised of asset managers, producers and distributors of investment data, with particular focus on alternative data—information derived from non-traditional sources used by the investment community. The IDSO is founded on collaborative principles with the goal of serving all constituents of the alternative data ecosystem. For more information, and details about membership can be found at http://www.investmentdata.org.
Contact:
Michael Mayhew
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SOURCE Investment Data Standards Organization
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