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FpML (Financial Products Markup Language) is an XML-based language for describing derivative instruments in the financial industry. Its aim is to standardize the external representation of those kind of instruments and thus to enable a streamlining of the trading and processing of such instruments between financial institutions as well as to open new business opportunities with regards to the Internet.
The development of FpML is financial industry driven and was initially a collaborative effort between J.P.Morgan and PricewaterhouseCoopers. It is moving to an open process with the establishment of committees composed from financial institutions and vendors.
In the initial development phase of FpML many technical decisions and tradeoffs were made. This talk is about moving those before an expert XML audience in order to initiate a two-way dialog: explaining how we used XML and what difficulties we encountered, and getting feedback from others with similar experience.
The main areas we like to discuss in this talk are: expressing object-oriented data, element composition, and validating options. Taken together, decisions in those three areas largely shape our representation of financial instruments in FpML, and will, in our opinion, shape the representation of complex data structures in other XML based data representation languages as well.
XML and its usage are still evolving; on one axis this means moving from a document centric point of view towards a data centric point of view. This will put pressure on certain areas that were originally not as crucial. We hope this contribution opens up some of those areas for discussion.