Recognos financial

Recognos Financial was founded in 2008 by the original partners in Xcitek Inc., a well known market data vendor (acquired by IDC in 2007) and Recognos Inc., a Silicon Valley based systems development firm. Headquartered in New York, its goal is to bring together semantic technologies with financial data to provide:

• More useful data
• Greater Insight
• Increased Flexibility
• Lower Cost

In addition to being a data provider, Recognos Financial offers data centric semantic technology development services. Recognos Financial is partnered with Metatomix Inc. the world’s leading provider of semantic platforms and tools. Together they offer complete end-to-end innovative semantic solutions for all types of business issues throughout the Financial Services Industry.

Through the employment of semantic technologies, Recognos Financial has developed the ability to create structured data from unstructured documents. Unlike other vendors that employ a syntactical method, the Recognos Financial method is semantic. It was required that key data elements be extracted from text documents and made usable by both computers and humans without the need for keying data, thereby maintaining the integrity of the source data. The key difference between syntactical and semantic is that syntactical methods search for key words. The semantic approach searches for concepts and key data elements within those concepts. It understands both meaning and concept. The end result is the ability to structure and format any text document. Recognos Financial has applied this methodology to many types of documents. Any form or document within the SEC’s EDGAR database is a candidate as is any text document from any source.

As a distributor of EDGAR data, Recognos Financial has access to all documents and forms filed with the SEC. There are over 650 different forms filed with the SEC. Many of these text documents contain important information buried in the text. Recognos Financial can identify and extract these vital data points from any document providing the user with just the information they need without having to read through a lengthy document. Data can be formatted for direct input to user systems or presented in a user defined interface. Custom feeds of specific forms or data types are offered to clients in support of their particular needs.

Recognos Financial offers three distinct product sets. The first is the Data Product Set or Data Division. The second is the Technology Set or Technology Division. The third is a data Sourcing, Cleansing, and Validation Service. All of these product types are geared toward developing a three data Silo model. These Silos are repositories of semantically organized data that will be available to clients for many purposes. The first Silo is Recognos Financial data. This includes data sourced by Recognos Financial and data from other vendors that has been semantically organized by Recognos Financial. It includes both structured and unstructured data. The ability to semantically convert unstructured and/or text data to computer useable structured data is one of the key benefits of the service. The second Silo is data internal to an organization. While organizing all data for a given firm at one time is not practical, it is envisioned that smaller deployments targeting specific needs is a viable means for establishing semantic technologies in large firms. As a result, the amount of information maintained over time within a given firm will grow to ultimately include all data maintained internally within a given firm. This is the basis and approach to establishing Silo two. Silo three is intended to represent all of the other efforts that take place both within the industry and with the World Wide Web in general, that semantically organize data thereby providing a given firm with virtually unlimited data related capabilities through the ability to combine all three Silos and use all data to support all applications and functions. In actual implementation, any given Silo could be comprised of numerous sub-silos. (The World Wide Web is currently operating on Version 2.0. The World Wide Web Consortium or W3C, the governing body for the Web has mandated that Version 3.0 will be semantically enabled).

From an IT perspective, the focus of Recognos Financial is on the provision of consulting and project resources to develop and deploy semantic applications within client firms. This goal is accomplished by educating potential clients, identifying opportunities for clients, and developing/deploying semantic based applications in support of those clients. In addition to the professional services offered, Recognos Financial also offers Data Sourcing, Cleansing, and Validation Services to support the establishment and ongoing maintenance of semantic data repositories within its client firms.