4 Apr 03: MDDL Releases Draft of Schema’s Version 2.0

The Financial Information Services Division (FISD) of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) last month released a draft of Version 2.0 of the Market Data Definition Language (MDDL) schema. MDDL has been established to create a set of rules governing the exchange of financial market information between firms, using XML.

The release followed a visit to London by MDDL chief technologist James Hartley to garner support for the standard and gather feedback on its implementation. According to Hartley, “many (more [firms and vendors] than we expected) are in the process of incorporating MDDL into their implementation plans.”

Specifically, Hartley reported finding that most industry participants are in agreement on the value of the MDDL standard as well as its relationship to the International Standards Organisation’s 15022 messaging standard. Indeed, the theme of the MDDL group’s forthcoming conference – XML for Market Data - is ‘Defining the Reference Data Standard,’ underscores the relationship between reference data, the ISO 15022 data field dictionary, market data standards within ISO TC68/SC4, and MDDL.

The draft of MDDL 2.0 was released on March 31 and is available as a download from the MDDL web-site. In the release, the working group has included improvements in the debtDomain setup information, enhanced the quality of the existing domains, and seeded the specification with the framework for the new asset classes – including options, futures, entities and corporate actions – which are expected to be released through August.

The working group is now focusing on collecting internal terms, definitions and relationships – known as TDRs – from industry participants. The group plans to integrate as many TDRs as possible into the MDDL specification in order to create a single, normalized TDR list. The group has set an aggressive schedule for this activity and is urging participants to contribute their TDRs to the process.

To encourage contributions, and to keep the financial community up to speed with its activities, the MDDL group has created an ‘Interest Map’ outlining current priorities for MDDL development as well as detailing progress in collecting sufficiently deep TDRs to make headway on MDDL vocabulary and features.  The group has also created a complementary Development Schedule for MDDL releases, which defines the group’s areas of focus for MDDL over the next two quarters.