A new XML-based standard for promoting transparency and interoperability in market data content has been launched in London.
The Software & Information Industry Association's (SIIA) Financial Information Services Division (FISD) launched Market Data Definition Language (MDDL) Version 1.0 at a conference in London this morning. MDDL provides a generic XML-based message format and glossary of fields for describing financial instruments, corporate events and market related indicators.
Michael Atkin, head of FISD says the standard has been introduced to overcome two basic business problems. "The first was to enable the industry to shift resources from low value-added and costly functions of normalising multiple data formats to higher value added functions of data applications. The second was to develop a standard glossary of terms and definitions so that people working with data delivered from multiple sources could understand what they were working with as well as how it related to their specific applications."
Version 1.0 covers equities, mutual funds and indices and is available from www.mddl.org. Future versions will be expanded to include all financial information necessary to account, analyse and trade within a market, says Atkin. The initial use of MDDL is for end-of-day and snapshot applications but it has been designed to be extensible to streaming, historical and other applications as appropriate.
Reuters has already committed to creating services using the standard. A demonstration Web site for Reuters and Bridge market data is set to go live shortly, says Mark Hunt, director of XML strategy at Reuters and a member of the MDDL steering committee.