Context Data & Intents Discussion group - 6 Jul 2023

[mistryvinay]

Group overview

At the FDC3 Use Cases Roundtable London, October 5th 2021 participants agreed that the FDC3 lexicon needs to be expanded, both with additional intents and context types to support Use Cases, but also to include more primitive data types in order to construct complex types. A number of participants also agreed that now is an appropriate time to expand the Lexicon.
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See #455 for full details of the meeting outcomes.
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This group is being convened to discuss and arrange work to contribute further Context types and Intents to support Use Cases being implemented by participants.

Relevant issue tags

Current open issues that relate to the discussion group:

Issues will also be tagged with the labels:

Meeting Date

Thursday 6 July 2023 - 9am EST / 2pm GMT

WebEx info

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• Meeting number: 2556 257 8293

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Agenda

• Convene & roll call, review meeting notices (5mins)
• Review action items from previous meeting (5mins)
  • Context Data & Intents Discussion group - 8 Jun 2023 #1011
• Discussion of open issues (35mins)
  • Should we split context & intent out of the main FDC3 standard? #940
    • Continuation discussion from last month
    • Draft Proposal Copying markdown docs for contexts into schema files #1020
    • Google Doc tracking proposal
• Issues requiring a PR (5mins)
  • Actionable Notifications via Intent & Context #828
  • Question: What use cases and Intents related to Orders, Trades and Positions are there? #904 (SWG - Consent received to add @experimental Order and Trade basic context types to FDC3 2.1
• CD&I 2.1 Consolidated PR (1min)
  • Consolidated PR for Context Data & Intents (CD&I) updates for 2.1 #994
• AOB & Adjourn (5mins)

Minutes

• Should we split context & intent out of the main FDC3 standard? #940
  • Requirement for a new approach to proposing, documenting and publishing intents and contexts that's more efficient. Something that doesn't require as many meetings and can be uncoupled from the FDC3 Standard, so we can release more quicker
  • Incorporate the ability to publicise proprietary types so that people can advertise the fact that they integrate with FDC3. It will also give us a bit more information to look for common denominators to standardize
  • We think we will need to build some machinery for FDC3 to facilitate this.
  • Currently you have to do several things to get something published into the standard
    • You need to raise a GitHub issue
    • then you need to raise a PR
      • Within that PR, you need to implement JSON schema defining the type
      • Then need to implement documentation in the website defining the type again
      • Duplicative effort which is unnecessary
  • Proposal
    • We should not take away the JSON schema files as they are a great tool for an accurate definition of what is going into an object, and can be used to validate that one is correct.
    • FDC3 uses typescript to define the API even though they're intended to be implemented in other languages.
    • Primary type is a JSON schema. We already have machinery that can generate typescript types from that for people to use.
    • These then go into the NPM module
    • Various other people are looking at making concrete objects for .NET, Java and other languages.
    • What isn't handled well is the documentation.
    • There's lots of good information in the markdown files for documentation, but it can be put into a schema file as well
    • There are tools for generating documentation from schema files that we could build something based on
    • Copying markdown docs for contexts into schema files #1020
      • Bring in the documentation so pretty much everything that's in that documentation page can make it into the schema.
        • We've added in a description and documentation of the individual field, so a title and description for each field.
        • These will become comments and field names in generated source code. But it's just really demonstrating that you can put all of that information right the way down to the examples in a schema file.
        • Next step is to use tooling for rendering documentation pages out of these schema files to generate HTML pages
        • We can generate markdown that we could bring into the FDC3 website.
        • Simplifies process as there's only 1 file, the JSON schema file. It will generate documentation page, when it goes in.
        • We generate all source code for other languages from it, we generate our documentation for it and we build tooling.
          • That means somebody could perhaps do this with a form rather than having to learn JSON schema
        • So we should be able to get to a place where somebody could submit a schema as a proposal for standardization that could become an @experimental type quite quickly if it doesn't conflict with other things.
        • Freeing up the Context Data & Intents group meetings for just governance purposes.
        • @nemery-flextrade the reference to FIX where it is often better to refer to the messages that you've actually seen across the wire than the specification. With this being largely driven through the standard, it shouldn't, in theory, vary too far away from it. So I think generating it from a sample message is a good way to go about it. You get all within one file that it would really streamline it as well.
          • @kriswest We will still have to make sure it goes through the Easy CLA process of course. Because they will represent contributions.
• Question: What use cases and Intents related to Orders, Trades and Positions are there? #904
  • Proposed to the Standards Working Group, to include some empty objects, basically giving them a type FDC3 Order and Trade. Include some Id fields, as the absolutely lowest possible common denominative to these types.
    • Mark them as @experimental so that we can keep adding to them, this allows us to release them in the FDC3 2.1 release
    • Propose to build an Order and Trade object based on the below.
      • They will both have id fields as their primary content.
      • We won't include any predefined keys (in the id object) initially. However, firms with products used externally with names for the Ids may propose somr to include.
      • There will be an optional product field on the Order type, which is of type Context.
        • @dominicgifford stated that his firm processes orders without a product for cash raises.
        • A Product context type has yet to be defined and will potentially be highly complex (as demonstrated by the existing attempt to do so: Context Proposal: Order #644), hence, we initially propose a place to put it before defining it later.
      • On the Trade type, there will be a Product field of type context, but it will be required there (as trades will always relate to a product.
      • Finally, we would allow the objects to have additional properties until they're no longer experimental.

Action Items

• @kriswest to work on building Trade and Order types for submission into the 2.1 release
• @mistryvinay work with maintainers to proposal for governing Context and Intents
• @kriswest request to raise a PR for Actionable Notifications via Intent & Context #828 (for after FDC3 2.1)

Untracked attendees

Full name	Affiliation	GitHub username

[robmoffat]

Rob / FINOS 🚚

[kriswest]

Kris West / Interop.io 🚀

[hampshanubs]

Andrew Hampshire @ UBS

[milindchidrawar]

Milind Chidrawar / Singletrack

[dominicgifford]

Dom / S&P

[mistryvinay]

Vinay Mistry / Symphony 🎵