System for Integrated Financial Data Based on Data Services Dragan Radeski 1, Andrea Kulakov 2 1
Clearing Interbank Systems KIBS AD Skopje, Kuzman J. Pitu 1, 1000 Skopje, Macedonia,
[email protected] 2 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, University Ss Cyril and Methodius, Karpos II bb, 1000 Skopje, Macedonia,
[email protected]
Abstract. The subject of this paper is to propose a model of a system for integrating publicly available data from the banking sector in the country, called MKFinInt system. By publishing the banks information via data services and collecting it at one place, there is an opportunity for bank’s clients to search and compare relevant financial data in an efficient way. Having information transparency and competitive offers, MKFinInt also creates a chance for the banks to attract new customers for their services. Keywords: ADO.NET data service, bank data collecting, web application, REST, URI addressable resource
1
Introduction
One of the basic principles at which the idea for semantic web resides is data availability over Internet and their organization in standard manner, understandable for computer programs. The ultimate goal is to systemize and unite the knowledge from today’s unstructured web. Microsoft ADO.NET data services [1] [2] promotes this principle, although strictly speaking, the Atom format [3] at which information is represented is not identical to the standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) format [4] which is a semantic web standard adopted by the W3C consortium [5]. Microsoft ADO.NET data services implement Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture [6] [7] to build web services. One of the main characteristics is unique resources addressability which enables data access by standard HTTP operations (GET, PUT, POST and DELETE). On the other hand, special methods described in Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) are required to access data from Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) web services. A possibility to represent data through distinctive Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) web addresses by using widely used development tool is a good starting position to develop a web based integrated information system for certain economic branch. This study proposes a system for integration of public information from financial sector (MKFinInt) that provides richer information for the users. Classic web search
engines cannot give complete and relevant results from client perspective, because they seek from presentational and not data oriented content. In the next chapter the system architecture is presented along with the basic assumptions it relies on. Then the implementation of the three basic modules in the MKFinInt system is described: banks data service, application for collecting information and web application for data search and presentation. The final chapter gives a conclusion of the study.
2
System deployment
2.1
System architecture
The main deployment diagram of the system for integrated financial data (MKFinInt) is presented in Fig. 1:
Fig. 1. MKFinInt Deployment Diagram
The system consists of three basic modules: Data services published by every bank which participates in the system Service application (MKFinInt_Collector) that collects the newest information and stores it in its local database Web site (MKFinInt_Presenter) for presentation and search of the classified data, used by the banks customers to find information they are interested in.
The functions for the collector and presenter theoretically can be merged, so that the data would be drawn while searching. However, by separation of the collecting application and its local database, there is a gain in the performance and independence from current availability of the bank data services. 2.2
Basic requirements and assumptions
In order that MKFinInt is successfully implemented, banks need to agree that their information for public usage should be exposed as data services, desirable having published the same groups of data. This condition is not a big requirement, because such agreement could be achieved within the bank cluster or some other familiar organization. On the other hand, resources that have to be provided by each bank are relatively small – one local public information database and one web site for the appropriate data service to be published. For the realization of the demo, it is assumed that the number of banks is five (Bank 1 to Bank 5), and the demo values are maximally generalized. The access to the services is limited to the operation Read, while Insert, Update and Delete are not allowed. The banks are publishing and updating data about their branch offices, ATM machines, financial information and exchange market. For application development Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is used, under Windows XP SP3 operating system and IIS 5.1 web server.
3
System implementation
3.1
Bank data service
Using its local database, the bank creates ADO.NET data service by opening new Visual Studio 2008 project of the type of ASP.NET Web Application. To connect to the bank data from the local database, a new ADO.NET Entity data model should be added. Then the suggested wizard is used to link the data to the data model, which produces the tables containing the public bank information, as it is shown on Fig.2:
Fig. 2. Tables containing bank public information
After adding a new ADO.NET Data Service item to the project, the final steps in creating bank data service are defining the entity that publishes the data and administration of privileges, as it is shown in the following code: Public Class BankaN Inherits DataService(Of [BankaNEntities]) Public Shared Sub InitializeService(ByVal config As IDataServiceConfiguration) config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.AllRead) config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("*", ServiceOperationRights.AllRead) End Sub End Class The bank publishes its data service on a web site, so that every data can be obtained from a standard HTTP GET method because it is accessible via Uniform Resource Locator (URL) addresses. To access the service from Internet Explorer, it is necessary to turn off the option “Turn on feed reading view” in Content tab. Taking into account that every single data from the service is located at a unique Internet address, it is possible to use sort, filter, logical and other operators, given in [1] [2]. For instance, the existing information for the currency EUR in the bank N can be obtained by entering the following string in the Internet Explorer address bar: http://localhost/BankN/BankN.svc/ExchangeMarket?$filter = Currency eq 'EUR' 3.2
The collector of data MKFinInt_Collector
MKFinInt_Collector is a time scheduled application that has references to all bank data services. By using Language Integrated Query (LINQ) it collects the information and stores them into the local database of the MKFinInt system. For example, the equivalent LINQ to the previous URL Query would be the following code: Dim ban As New BankaNEntities(New Uri ("http://localhost/BankN/BankN.svc")) Dim linqQuery = From c In ban.ExchangeMarket Where c.Currency = "EUR" For Each record In linqQuery Console.WriteLine(record.Currency & ", " & record.Buying & ", " & record.Selling) Next linqQuery = Nothing ban = Nothing
3.3
Information presenter MKFinInt_Presenter
MKFinInt_Presenter is a web application that presents the integrated financial information to the Internet users interested for bank services. It offers a number of searches, selection criteria and sorting. Several different results are shown on the following figures as an example of application usage. The report shown on Fig. 3, which contains the financial data for certain year sorted by the field Dividend, can be interesting to the future shareholders of the banks, while the search for banks branch offices in Ohrid results in Fig. 4:
Fig. 3. Financial indicators for all banks sorted by the highest dividend
Fig. 4. List of all bank branch offices in Ohrid
EURO currency list sorted by its selling value for all banks is shown in Fig. 5:
Fig. 5. The comparison list for EURO currency for all banks in ascending order
4
Conclusion
By implementation of MKFinInt system, bank customers can get quality information about all banks at one Internet access point. The system offers searches of integrated financial data by different criteria of interest for the users of the financial services. At the same time, it offers an opportunity for the banks to represent themselves via concurrent services and transparency. It would be important that all banks participate in this system if they want to draw customer attention.
References 1. John Shaw, Simon Evans: Pro ADO.NET Data Services: Working with RESTful Data, Apress 2009 2. Mike Flasko: Using ADO.NET Data Services, Microsoft® Corporation 2008, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc907912.aspx 3. The Atom Publishing Protocol, IETF Network Working Group, 2007 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt 4. RDF/XML Syntax Specification, W3C, 2004 http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/ 5. W3C Semantic Web Activity, W3C, http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ 6. Fielding, Roy Thomas: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2000, pp.76-106 7. Roger L. Costello, Building Web Services the REST way, http://www.xfront.com/RESTWeb-Services.html
