Sinara expect that UDE's flexibility will make it a useful tool for financial market data vendors seeking to improve their data capture operations, and also for hedge funds or investment banks who want to enhance the performance of their automated trading algorithms.

For some data vendors, many of their original data sources start out as text, and the task of identifying and extracting the key information from these sources is a time-consuming and manually intensive task. Sinara have demonstrated that by deploying UDE, vendors can save much of this effort and cost, which in turn allows them to offer faster or more complete data to their clients.

Director Gary Hughes explains: "UDE goes way beyond web-scraping tools and many textual analysis systems, by performing a deep level of data extraction from detailed content. This advanced technology has been in use with a large data provider for some time, and is attracting interest from other major data vendors."

Sinara also believe that UDE can be used to help feed news-style content into algorithmic trading systems. Hughes continues: "Trading strategies are often influenced by news stories such as results announcements. UDE can extract important data from these announcements (e.g. turnover, profit, dividend payments, etc), and make these numbers available to a client's trading algorithms."

The next release of UDE will be in Q3 2006, and beyond that Sinara plans to add the capability to process new data sources by extending and configuring the data extraction rules within UDE.