Tuesday, May 20, 2008
02:00 PM - 05:00 PM

• Provide insight and discussion of niche tools and applications for financial services related purposes;
• Investigate possible areas of cross-utilization and application, collaboration, and cooperation between customers, developers and researchers;
• Enable networking opportunities for financial services oriented members of the community who are interested in semantic technologies.

Following the scheduled Dow Jones, JP Morgan and Guardian Life presentations on the morning of Tuesday, May 20, the Financial Track will continue into the afternoon through this panel and forum. Developers and customers will briefly present their semantic implementations/solutions as applied to the financial space, followed by facilitated Q&A.

The perspectives of these presenters are expected to be quite varied, from EDI and transaction-related processes within the sector, to information collection/harvesting, classification, and storage – while others are front-end oriented, in terms of access and usage of information, custom content generation and publishing. The participants are expected to come from a range of perspectives, including banking, insurance, publishing, asset management and related consulting services.

For the presentation portion, to ensure the addressing of a wide range of ideas and solutions, each presenter will be restricted to 10 minutes to provide an overview of their particular context and describe the application of their solution.

Note: All Sidebar participants must be registered attendees of the conference. The Sidebar panel/forum is distinct from the conference’s Semantic Solutions sessions, in that the Sidebar will be more intimate, informal and conversational. This is not a "regular" presentation, but rather a sharing of ideas and perspectives around focused application possibilities – with interactive participation to investigate those possibilities.

Through examples, this session will examine how, and in what process categories, semantic capabilities are being leveraged within the Financial Industry. We will then discuss where else, within the broad context of the financial space, these approaches may be applied.

2:00-3:15 * Introduction and Ground Rules

* What are People Doing Semantically in the Financial Space Right Now?

Each presenter provides a brief (10 minute) overview of their perspective (where are they in the space, how/why are they leveraging semantic technology, and to what end). (Participants grouped into category to which they’re applying SemTech: Messaging / EDI / Transaction / Execution; Data Harvesting; Storage / Architecture / Authentication; Product Creation / Delivery; Search / Matching / Interpretation; Front-end Usage / RealTime Retrieval, Custom Content/Publishing/News, etc.)

3:15-3:45 * BREAK

3:45-5:00 * Conversation

Led by a Facilitator: Discussion around the variety of ways the participants have demonstrated they are applying semantic technologies within the financial community. What are the issues and opportunities in/for the Financial Sector? How can some of the examples be applied to other areas of interest within finance. Are there opportunities for cooperation? Do people want to cooperate? Are more standards needed? If yes, what are they? What tools are needed? What limitations are there (antitrust, perceived competitive advantage, etc.).

Eric Hoffer is a connector who aligns people, technology, and business needs – using information services to increase efficiency, strengthen performance, and propagate satisfaction. He co-founded Second Integral in 2006, following 20 years in the financial and business information industry – to research and apply methodologies from information services, user experience, value network analysis, and semantic technologies, in order to find and bridge gaps between needs, processes, and capabilities.

YY brings strong operational leadership and experience to her position at FirstRain. She leads engineering, product marketing, and professional services in the US and India. Under her guidance, FirstRain's teams develop new software capability and provide professional services to their customers. YY was most recently vice president of worldwide services at Cadence Design Systems, leading that business into profitability. Prior to that, she co-founded the software company Aqueduct. After successfully building that business, the company was acquired by NetManage, which she joined as a director of engineering. She has also worked at Bell Labs, Integrated Information Technology (IIT) and Synopsys. YY earned an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University.

Prior to becoming the Co-CEO of NetBreeze in 2002, Leo was the Co-Head of Management Consulting Company A.T. Kearney and a Member of Athur D. Little's Executive Group in Switzerland. Leo has a master degree in natural science/chemistry of the ETH Zürich and in Organization Development. In his 30 years consulting career he won in-depth insight into many industries like Finance, Media, ICT, Pharma & Health Care, Food&Beverage, Construction etc. With NetBreeze he could develop sustainable client relationships with FSI Companies like UBS, Credit-Suisse, Munich Re, Swiss Re, Zürcher Kantonalbank, Bank Vontobel, Sal Oppenheim/BHF-Bank, Allianz, Zürich FS. He was – together with his partner Francois Rüf - significantly involved in the development of more than 10 different products for FSI-Clients.

Dr. Christian Halaschek-Wiener is Chief Technology Officer of investment firm Clados Management LLC. Previously, Christian received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focused on developing content syndication frameworks using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to represent published content, enabling finer-grained filtering of information through automated reasoning not possible by widely used frameworks such as RSS. He addressed the real-time performance requirements of this application by developing algorithms for incremental reasoning and demonstrated the results through collaboration with a major provider of financial news. While conducting his academic research, Dr. Halaschek-Wiener also served as a consultant for numerous companies, aiding them in developing and deploying Semantic Web-based applications.

Thomas (“Tom”) Tague leads Thomson Reuters Calais initiative, spearheading strategy, product development and partner relations efforts. He also oversees the Calais developer community at OpenCalais.com, evangelizing the Calais Web service and working closely with commercial and non-commercial developers alike. Previous positions include EVP, Client Solutions for Darwin Partners and co-founder and COO for Tessera Enterprise Systems, as well as senior roles at Epsilon and Electronic Data Systems (EDS).

Mr. Cohen is one of the original founders of XBRL and the founder and chief architect of the XBRL Global Ledger Framework (XBRL GL). Mr. Cohen also serves as an ambassador of XBRL to other standards organizations, and served as the Chair of the OASIS Tax XBRL Liaison SC. Mr. Cohen collaborates with numerous academicians and researchers to facilitate research and study of issues like continuous auditing, data/data level assurance, XBRL and Web services and other important areas, and serves on working and study groups of the CICA and the AICPA on assurance and XBRL-related topics. A noted speaker and author, Mr. Cohen wrote the first major book about the relevance of the Internet to the Accounting profession, "The Accountant's Guide to the Internet", and has written hundreds of articles on XBRL and other relevant areas of accounting and business technology. Mr. Cohen received an MBA from what is now the Simon School of Management, in Public Accounting and Marketing. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the New York State Society of CPAs.

As Guardian Life Insurance’s Senior Technical Architect, Jonathan Mack guides the company’s re-engineering project implementing SOA and BPM across Guardian’s group insurance business. As lead architect exploring Web 2.0 technologies for the office of the Chief Technology Officer, Jonathan is responsible for exploring an implementing semantic technologies at Guardian. In his previous position as Senior Architect at 1-800-Flowers, Jonathan led the e-commerce leader’s efforts to service-orient its retail and supply chain initiatives. Earlier in his career--at Adecco, an international staffing firm--Jonathan led one of the industry’s earliest efforts to implement business-to-business (B2B) integration. Through these experiences, Jonathan has garnered insight into the opportunities and risks involved in transforming enterprises from siloed, legacy environments to agile service-oriented architectures. With the battle scars to prove it, he knows what strategies and tactics are most likely to prove successful.

John has more than ten years of experience in Information Architecture, Semantic Web, search, and metadata development. From his 1995 online dissertation, research and eventual publication, focused upon ancient Sanskrit and Vedic texts, led to the successful design and deployment of the first XML-based electronic thesis and dissertation system at the University of Iowa, later published for the Big Ten. He co-authored one of the first books on XSLT, for Prentice Hall, subsequently translated into Chinese. John was hired at Sun Microsystems where he deployed the first intranet search and browse taxonomy and led the swoRDFish metadata program. John joined Keane Architecture Services after resigning Sun in early 2006 to work for a year as an independent metadata consultant and a fulltime Emergency Medical Technician in the Boston area. Subsequently, he chose Digitas/Prodigious among several opportunities. He is Vice President and Associate Director for Content Management Services.

Christine Connors joined Dow Jones in 2007 as Global Director, Semantic Technology Solutions. Her primary responsibilities are for Synaptica product development and overall metadata strategy, in partnership with the Business Champions of the Factiva and Dow Jones Newswires family of offerings.