Dow Jones & Company is to provide its Market Data Markup Language to a US-based industry consortium vying to develop an XML standard for market data delivery.
Dow Jones' MDML spec has been posted at the Web site of the Financial Information Services Division (FISD) of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). The FISD - a forum for business and technical issues related to the distribution of financial information - recently formed a working group to coordinate XML efforts in the market data industry. Dow Jones says it contributed its MDML spec to help speed development of a common framework for publishing market data.
"We will jump-start the new FISD initiative by contributing a good portion of our XML expertise in this area," says Kevin Roche, news systems manager and head of the XML group at Dow Jones. "Our approach to the structural and content markup of financial statistics will provide a solid base for industry discussions."
The Dow Jones MDML has been in production for about two years at The Wall Street Journal Online. The language is used for posting text and statistical data on the Web site, and as a system interchange format within Dow Jones and with entities such as Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters.
"The market data industry is working together to solve the challenges of moving data from multiple sources into common desktop applications," says Michael Atkin, vice president of the FISD. "Dow Jones has provided a technological cornerstone for our XML project."
The FISD market data work will be done in coordination with other XML initiatives, including Extensible Business Reporting Language, says Atkin. The XBRL consortium is developing XML vocabularies for corporate earnings and regulatory filings and numbers Dow Jones and Reuters as active participants.
The FISD effort also dovetails with two XML standards developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council, of which Dow Jones, Associated Press, and Reuters are all members: NewsML is an XML model for packaging and managing news objects of any media type; the News Industry Text Format is an XML application for markup of news text.