The 4th European Semantic Technology Conference – ESTC2010 – will be organized in Vienna, Austria for the forth time in a row.

The aim of the conference is to bring together the world’s leading thinkers, innovators, developers, engineers, and senior practitioners within organizations responsible for information technology and systems in one place to learn about how to integrate this unparalleled technology into their operations. ESTC is Europe’s most prominent and authoritative conference focusing on the growth of the ICT semantic technology markets, highlighted by showcased industry practices, advancements in the field of semantic technologies achieved in the past year, and successful marketing strategies in delivering semantic applications that generate new revenues. Participants will learn how to develop a cohesive strategy for managing semantic technology initiatives and how to utilizing these to evolve the operations and effectiveness of their organizations.

ESTC2010 is organized by STI International.

The 3rd  European Semantic Technology Conference took place in December 2009.

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The legislation, if enacted, would bring the biggest change to financial rules since the 1930s, changing business practices for everyone from mortgage brokers in California to traders on Wall Street. The vote advances a major White House initiative designed to tackle the perceived causes of last year’s financial crisis.

The House’s action isn’t the final word. The Senate has yet to act, and an early version of its bill is different from the House version in many respects. But senators hope to have an agreement in principle by the end of December and to pass a bill in the first half of 2010.

The Wall Street Journal  (12/14)

The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones Newswires (9/30)

Reuters  (9/28)

It wants to create a super-watchdog – the European Systemic Risk Board – with the power to overrule individual EU member governments and a separate supervisor for insurers and markets to warn of early signs of problems.

Joaquin Almunia, the EU’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner said: “This new body will report at least annually to the European Parliament and to the Council and will liaise closely with the IMF, the Financial Stability Board and other international system risk counterparts.The creation of the ESRB will be a major contribution to safeguarding EU financial stability.”

Brussels hopes the European system can inspire a global one and will argue for that at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

But Britain, which is the region’s biggest financial centre, is worried that tighter European regulations will cause an exodus of companies to places where the rules are less strict:

Nicolas Véron, an economist with the Bruegel think tank was asked about that by euronews.

He said: “The biggest threat to London as a financial hub right now would be financial fragmentation in Europe and it may be the case that in the post crisis context, you need a strong European level of financial supervision to maintain this level of financial integration. So the calculation is not easy for London, but it’s not evident that this will be detrimental.”

Brussels would like all this to be in place by next year after being considered and approved by the European Parliament and the 27 EU member states.

Euronews  (9/23)

Integrated Technology Partners (ITP), a joint venture of Delta Data Software and Recognos Financial, was founded to address the mutual fund industry’s need to easily access fund data and distribute fund disclosure documents. The result of that effort is the Mutual Fund Information Portal (MFIP). The MFIP is an industry utility designed to provide the industry participants and their clients with ALL the Mutual Fund Information necessary to support all aspects of the business from start to finish.

The MFIP is a repository of compliance documents that include summary prospectus, statutory prospectus, SAI, shareholder reports and other disclosure documents that can be used by both Fund Managers and Distributors in flexible and innovative ways to satisfy their specific internal informational needs as well as their compliance obligations around disclosure document delivery.

Additionally, MFIP provides a reliable and cost-effective source of critical mutual fund information directly from SEC-filings, ensuring that the integrity of the source data is maintained and easily verifiable. MFIP requires no data entry, no data cleansing and provides industry consistency by showing all parties the same source data. The mutual fund industry currently incurs direct costs in excess of $300 million per year for data subscriptions and to print and mail prospectuses and other documents. ITP’s goal is to reduce these direct expenses by 50% within the first two years, and up to 60% to 70% in year three.

Recognos Financial has developed an application that creates structured data from unstructured documents. While the application can be applied to any type of unstructured text document, for Alternative Investments it includes: Offering Statements/Prospectuses, Shareholder Reports, Subscriptions, etc, in short – all of the documents required to meet the specific functions of a particular firm based on their role in the process.

Currently the function is labor intensive with the overwhelming majority of time spent by the clerical staff in reading and extracting key data from the hundreds of reports and documents received on a regular basis from fund managers, administrators, and other sources. This extracted data is then keyed into spreadsheets or other applications that feed internal applications. The Alternative Investments application does most of the tedious work by performing the data extraction and automatically populating required applications with the appropriate data. In addition, errors are reduced through the elimination of the re-keying of data. A summary of the process is essentially as follows:

• Receive e-mails, faxes and hardcopy documents from fund managers and/or administrators, etc. Hardcopy documents are scanned and merged with faxes – these documents are then processed via OCR and converted to text. E-mail attachments are stripped off and merged with the other document types.
• The text documents are then processed through the Recognos Financial syntactically and semantically based parsing agents where the key data elements are extracted. The results are displayed interactively in conjunction with the original document. Any exceptions are identified and directed to a work queue where they are reviewed by the staff.
• Resulting data is then available for review and export to both internal applications and a semantic data repository.

An average group of ten clerical staff can be reduced by as much as 70%. The remaining staff are focused on exceptions and the group functions that require a greater level of expertise. The resultant data can also be used as part of the firm’s counter party risk program as the holdings within a given fund are identified and a security master of these privately held firms is maintained. Supplementing that security master with data from external sources (i.e. D&B) provides a reasonable assessment of the stability of the firms in which the fund, and ultimately the client is invested.

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METATOMIX EXTENDS REACH WITH NEW STRATEGIC PARTNERS

Company’s Powerful Semantic Technology Will Complement Financial Services Solutions from Recognos Financial and Criminal Justice IS Solutions from DOBBS, RAM & Co.

Dedham, Mass., February 2, 2009 – Metatomix, Inc. www.metatomix.com, a leading provider of semantic solutions www.metatomix.com/knowledgecenter/semantic.php to justice and public safety www.metatomix.com/360applications/index.php, financial services, manufacturing and life sciences organizations, today announced Recognos Financial and DOBBS, RAM & Co. (DRC) have joined its Partner Program. Recognos Financial will base its semantic solutions for customers in the financial services industry on the Metatomix semantic platform. DRC will offer its customers the option to integrate Metatomix’s technology with their existing criminal justice infrastructure to enable far greater, more efficient data sharing.

“Recognos Financial has extensive real-world experience helping financial services customers solve sophisticated data challenges with innovative technology,” said Drew Warren, president of Recognos Financial. “With its own proven success in this industry, Metatomix brings to this equation a semantic technology solution that plays a key part in helping us address these customer challenges.”

“We are very excited about our partnership with Metatomix,” said DRC CEO Ronald B. McCrae, “and look forward to a bright and prosperous future together. DRC has developed deep expertise in criminal justice information systems through work with customers such as the IRS, for whom we implemented and maintain the State Retrieval Subsystem for the IRS’s Electronic Filing System. This partnership enables us to offer Metatomix’s unique technology, skills and experience to our own customer base.”

“Strategic partners are a critical element in our past and future success,” said Metatomix CEO Jeff Dickerson. “We continue to invest heavily in our partner program at all levels. Recognos Financial and DRC provide solutions that are complementary with our own value proposition at both the technology and business level. We look forward to working closely with both organizations to provide mutual customers with innovative technology that dramatically increases their efficiency while also cutting costs.”

Recognos Financial will use Metatomix’s semantic solution to help financial services companies correlate the very large volume of detailed data included in lengthy and numerous prospectuses. With the Metatomix solution, this data will be presented to financial services companies’ customers on-line in a highly interactive, intuitive format. Metatomix’s semantic technology will also correlate and integrate data between both internal and third party sources without requiring changes to existing systems. The end result is a solution that rapidly and intelligently integrates vast internal and external data sources in a format conducive to analysis.