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Meeting notes

BS: No value in defining an entity, because you’re just… What’s useful for us to agree upon is what format we’ll use. Otherwise we’re just bloating the standard. I recommend we standardize on the 2-letter ISO code.

JS: Any objections from anyone, or should we move this up to proposed standards? Ok, I’ll take that as a yes. Ok, moving into the security object. I had suggested the possibility of including some form of name in the object so that the Symphony platform could display a hovercard that’s useful for the security. But by then having a name and country reference in the object itself, the interface could display it in a nice way, and users could decide how they wanted them displayed. Have people had a chance to think further about that? Should country be put in with the country ID type?

BS: I understand the desire to present useful information to a user without having to lookup what the identifiers actually mean, but that’s what the PresentationML is for. If I send you an object that contains the Microsoft ticker and the Symphony name, I could trick you into buying the wrong thing. I think a better approach would be to make an agreement with some provider of financial data to be able to look up some standard code. So FactSet could offer some basic level of free service, allowing Symphony to lookup the security, and get a link to buy enhanced service from the service provider. The alternative makes the object more complicated and harder to understand. At the very least, we’d need to identify the real data and the stuff that’s informational, so it’s clear that if they conflict, the latter should be discarded.

What are the use cases here? There’s one where the user has an app installed that can look up the security based on the ticker symbol. There’s another where the user has no app installed and Symphony will render the PresentationML. If you want to be able to construct a hovercard without access to market data, even if you identify something as a ticker, you can’t do anything with it.

JS: You have more information there than I do, but I haven’t seen any apps that change the presentation of just a basic security. Like if I want to, say, buy 100 AAPL, users still want to see that it’s an Apple security and send that to their news provider, etc.

BS: Yes, but if they have a charting app installed, it will be able to tell the user that AAPL is Apple, Inc. If there’s not an app, you should just display the PresentationML. The solution to the problem you’re talking about is to extend PresentationML so that you can define hovercards.

Attendees