The ADC is a working group within the FISD. We are focused on establishing best practices and standards for the delivery of alternative data to the investment industry.
Tearsheet vendor (working draft)
Tearsheet buyer (working draft)
Data Dictionary (early draft)
The primary goals of establishing alternative data standards is to:
- lower cost for the benefit of end clients
- facilitate growth of the industry
- drive adoption of alternative data in the investment process
- promote ethical use of data
Specifically this will be achieved by:
- improving data documentation
- raising data quality standards
- unifying data pipeline management
- reduce time spent on data delivery and ingestion
- easier permissions management and authentication
- simplifying vendor due diligence and contracting
The industry is best served by having standards which are:
- open and shared, instead of proprietary and centralized
- community enabled, instead of relying on a single party
- developer friendly, instead of primarily for non-technical users
From data consumer perspective:
- investors: reduced cost for investment management services
- fundamental analyst: faster data insights, automate tasks, easier slice+dice
- fundamental pms: increased idea generation, scalability, data roi
- quantitative analyst / data scientist: better data quality, easier to assess predictive value and build strategies
- quantitative pm: reduced research time, increased data roi
- data engineering: cheaper, faster and better data pipelines
- IT: improved security and scalability
- legal & compliance: improved due diligence, faster workflow
From data vendor perspective:
- C suite: happier clients, shorter sales cycle, secure distribution
- product manager: better user experience, usage analytics
- engineering: easier to build data pipelines, less infrastructure to manage
Initially the working group will consist of mostly buy-side institutions. Membership will then be extended to sell-side institutions and data vendors.
To achieve the goals, the following should be available:
- Vendor best practices: guiding vendors on how to best deliver data
- Vendor questionaires and contracts: shared semi-standardized due diligence questionaires and contracts, similar to AIMA questionaires
- Documentation standards: consistent data documentation, similar to API Blueprint
- Data definition language: covering data schema, file attributes and quality tests, similar to Frictionless, Intake, Quilt
- Issue tracker: transparent tracking of problems and improvement requests
- Knowledge base: containing answers/solutions (including code) to commonly asked questions/problems
- Authentication provider: defining data access permissions and providing authentication
To help with adoption of standards, participants benefit from an ecosystem of tools and services compliant with the standards. If you like to be included in the list make a pull request or contact us.
Tools include:
- Adaptive: alternative data platform
- Crux: data supply chain management
- Databolt Pipe: turnkey infrastructure distributing datasets
- BEAM: common csv data evaluation
- Frictionless: generic schema standards
- API Blueprint: REST API documentation standards
- marbles: library for data unit testing
- intake: library for data packages
Tracey Shumpert <traceyShumpert-at-siia.net>
Free and open sourced under the MIT license. The documents will be publicly accessible on Github and in FISD documents.
These materials, and any other information or data conveyed in connection with these materials, is intended for informational purposes only. Under no circumstances are these materials, or any information or data conveyed in connection with such report, to be considered an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any securities of any company. Nor may these materials, or any information or data conveyed in connection with such report, be relied on in any manner as legal, tax or investment advice.