As we spend time profiling new sources of alternative and talking to our financial customers about what they are needing when it comes to event-driven data, we find ourselves spending more time discussing the Research Information Exchange Markup Language (RIXML) suite. A set of XML standards designed to allow for more structured and organized sharing of data across groups. Here is the concise description of what RIXML delivers, from the website:
The RIXML Standards Suite is made up of the following XML standards: RIXML Research Standard, Interactions Standard, RIXML Analyst Roster Standard, and RIXML Coverage Standard. These standards were created by a consortium of buy-side, sell-side, and vendor firms, and are modified as needed to address changes in the marketplace and to incorporate feedback from its member firms stemming from implementation projects and substantial exposure to real instance documents produced industry-wide. Using the Research Information Exchange Markup Language standard enables firms to improve the process of categorizing, aggregating, comparing, sorting, searching, and distributing global financial research, and of accurately describing interactions to facilitate compliance with MiFID II._
The RIXML Research Standard was developed to address the needs of:
– Investment research end users such as analysts and portfolio managers
– The IT departments that support these end users
– Vendors and others who create products used by these end users
We are interested in RIXML to help tame our API and data discovery efforts of three distinct audience areas:
– Content Producers – sophisticated structure enables content producers to provide exact tagging that better describes the content, which makes it more likely that it will be seen by those most likely to find it valuable.
– Content Aggregators – rich tagging expedites searching and accessing content, reduces information overload, increases efficiency, and improves access to research by standardizing sorting and filtering criteria.
– Content Consumers – standardization of tags enables development of sophisticated tools and services to address a variety of needs.
Eventually, we’d like our alternative data and API discovery work to support RIXML. The valuable data we are uncovering with each API we profile and add to the gallery would be even more valuable if it was available as RIXML. Currently, we use OpenAPI to describe the interfaces for each of the alternative data sources we are profiling, but for some of the APIs that have a higher StreamRank, it wouldn’t be too much work to use RIXML as a representation of each API’s native schema and generate RIXML output from relevant APIs.
We are working on a JSON translation of RIXML, so that we can use the JSON schema from the Streamdata.io API Gallery alongside the JSON schema for RIXML. Next, we’ll work on sample RIXML files to show what is possible with common API data sources like Twitter, Reddit, and GitHub. If you are interested in getting alternative data sources in an RIXML format (or another format), please let us know, and we are happy to shift our immediate strategy be more aligned with your goals. We are just interested in making sure the research we are uncovering as part of the Streamdata.io API Gallery is as usable and exchangeable as we possibly can.
