OFR Holds Contest for Identifier Linkage

The Office of Financial Research (OFR), a unit of the US Treasury dedicated to promoting adoption of the legal entity identifier (LEI), is holding a contest for service providers and academia to offer solutions for linking numerous existing identifiers with the LEI.

The contest, operated in conjunction with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland, has eight entries that met a May 15 submission deadline. The organizers will present their evaluations of the entries in San Francisco on July 1 in the Data Science for Macro-Modeling with Financial and Economic Datasets event that is part of the Sigmod Pods conference hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery.

"We will have an open discussion about what worked and what didn't," says Mark Flood, research principal at the OFR. "The point is not to have a ribbon-pinning for a winner. It's to have a conversation. We're trying to foster a research community around this issue."

The entrants are FactSet Research Systems, Hasso Pattner Institut, IBM Research, ISMB & Eurecom, Penn State University, Tahoe Blue, Thomson Reuters and the University of Texas at Austin.