Call to action: cultivating the Semantic Web for Finance.

Serendipity. Possibly my favorite word. I was doing a quick scan of my RSS feeds this morning and saw Juliana’s post on Tim Berners-Lee and DBpedia – which I was thrilled to learn is collaborating with Freebase (created by Danny Hillis‘ MetaWeb – a company I’ve been following since its inception.) From there I stumbled accross triplify.org and then the W3C Semantic Web Activity homepage where I noticed there was a Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) Interest Group:

The mission of the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, is to develop, advocate for, and support the use of Semantic Web technologies for biological science, translational medicine and health care. These domains stand to gain tremendous benefit by adoption of Semantic Web technologies, as they depend on the interoperability of information from many domains and processes for efficient decision support.

The group will:

Document use cases to aid individuals in understanding the business and technical benefits of using Semantic Web technologies.
Document guidelines to accelerate the adoption of the technology.
Implement a selection of the use cases as proof-of-concept demonstrations.
Explore the possibility of developing high level vocabularies.
Disseminate information about the group’s work at government, industry, and academic events.

Now if I were 20 years younger, I might well be diving feet first into the realm of data, meta-data, and the semantic web. In 1990, there was a lot of opportunity and value to extract if you were skillful and comfortable understanding and manipulating cashflows; being a bond or interest rate swap trader was both financially and intellectually rewarding. That time has passed. (Although this didn’t stop the banks from flogging the horse until well after it was dead and decomposing…) In the 2010′s (the teens?), I suspect an analogous opportunity will exist for those that have mastered the art of managing or “trading” data. Hal Varian at Google articulates this well:

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.
I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively. But I do think those skills—of being able to access, understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis—are going to be extremely important. Managers need to be able to access and understand the data themselves.

I may no longer be young enough to master a completely new domain like this, but I think I’m wise enough to spot something important when I see it. And the semantic web and financial markets were made for one another. But even if I had the time, I don’t have the knowledge or the skills to get a Financial Services and Markets Interest Group up and running, even though the mission statement is pretty much a cut and paste from the one above. But I am fairly confident that amongst the very clever readers of the Park Paradigm and beyond – amongst your network of friends and colleagues – there is the Ocean’s 11 dream team needed to make this happen. And I’d be thrilled just to ‘hang around the edges’ shouting out ideas from the peanut gallery and pouring coffee so to speak.

This is big. This is important. President Obama calls for transparency in financial markets (hallelujah!): the financial semantic web is an important piece in that puzzle. Perhaps Secretary Geithner and the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets can lend moral and financial support to this project?

JP? Malcolm? Phil? Don? Pat? Chris? Roger? Bueller? Perhaps this is something that David Leinweber at CIFT can help catalyze?

As they say, ideas on a postcard!

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• The W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking Position Papers (blogs.sun.com)
• Report: A Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry (webtribution.com)
• Europe to lead Web 3.0? (pagoesdigital.wordpress.com)
• TED2009: Tim Berners-Lee (boingboing.net)

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