KiteEdge launches The Ontology Project to bring together the Asset Management Community

London startup wants to solve industry problems using ontology and opens discussion with asset managers to help create a common solution reflecting their priorities; senior members of Stanford’s Global Projects Center and Edison Research are early supporters

KiteEdge uses Cognitive Ontology to surface connections and insight, previously hidden, within an enterprises internal and external resources; company will launch solution later this year

KiteEdge, a company providing asset managers with the tools to find, collaborate, and leverage content across complex and often siloed organizations, launched today The Ontology Project, a community initiative committed to educating sector professionals, helping them to improve ontology within the field of financial asset management. Dane Rook and Ashby Monk from Stanford University’s Global Projects Center (GPC) – an interdisciplinary research centre – are early in lending their full support, as is Edison Research.

Ontology is traditionally used within information science to name and define the types, properties, and interrelationships of entities that exist within a domain –e.g. it provides structure to help people extract value from specific information sets.

Cognitive Ontology structures information in a flexible form that is as close as possible to the way humans think, as opposed to other, inflexible, models that use predetermined structure tied explicitly to the collective summary of information within language.

KiteEdge draws upon Cognitive Ontology to interact with the end-user to understand their intent (and any unique context) to help surface connections and insight, previously hidden. By doing so, they empower individuals and groups to make better decisions and ensure that intellectual property is retained and accumulated within the organization, as knowledge is created, improved and shared.

The goal of the project is to facilitate the creation of a comprehensive ontology that represents the needs of many individuals, teams and enterprises. Individuals, teams, enterprises and asset owners are invited to sign up for the project’s newsletter to be updated on the latest events and research projects.

James Flavin, KiteEdge’s CEO, commented: “We want to show asset management enterprises how they can unlock their potential using Cognitive Ontology, as it can help them surface and leverage investment insights, and generate alpha while meeting regulatory needs and managing costs. At KiteEdge we facilitate the data mining of collective knowledge to improve individual and group actions. We are re-inventing search by combining traditionally captured Ontology with the latest technologies, providing a new approach to tagging and structuring text-based information.”

Dr. Ashby Monk, Executive Director at Stanford’s GPC, said: “At the Stanford Global Projects Center we aim to collaborate with governments and industry in pursuit of the necessary insights to develop and sustain strategic assets, both physical and intellectual, through projects that are core to modern economic growth and development with a focus on creating better investment outcomes for asset owners. The Ontology Project aligns perfectly with that since the solution Kite Edge is developing will not only help us advance our research but will also provide education to current and future investment leaders. This is completely innovative and something we have not seen anywhere else.”

Edison Research, a prominent independent research producer, is also supporting the Ontology Project by contributing content and analytical resource.

Neil Shah, Director of Research at Edison Group, said: “A key value proposition for our corporate clients is the breadth of distribution and subsequent discovery that Edison provides. In a MiFID 2 environment, that has become even more important to listed companies. We have seen dramatic growth in traffic to Edison’s website and we could immediately see the benefits of Kite Edge’s cognitive search to the users of our research. In order to organise and improve the search of our own content, we have opened up our content library to Kite Edge as part of the Ontology project and look forward to learning from the results.”

Kite Edge is currently developing its MiFID II and research management solution, Apex, scheduled to launch later this year.

Apex will enable asset managers to unlock the information already held within the organisation, allowing them to quickly find the content/insight needed to make informed decisions thereby delivering better value to asset owners.  Not only does this enable asset managers to be more effective, but they can open-up the internal knowledge held by other members of their teams and across the organisation.

Wanda Rich

Editor-in-Chief since 2011.