Hello everyone - I have a financial information gathering/presentation system that I wish to integrate into OpenACS and I am wondering whether or not it is a good idea to build this on top of the CR or if it might be best to build this outside of the CR. It would seem that using the CR is desirable, but as I look at some projects built with OACS some have chosen to implement outside of CR (Unidos project for example). So being new to OACS, at this point I am a bit confused. 😟 I would really appreciate any guidance/opinions that any of you can provide. This is what I wish to implement:
Project Description
The project consists of gathering and presenting to subscribers data for various classes of financial instruments. These go from stocks and bonds to currency and options as well as other more exotic asset types. The idea is to implement a large range of asset classes over several projects, so the data model that I have built is extensible to support the addition of various financial
instruments over time.
The data currently being gathered is quite extensive. For example, for fixed income instruments we are gathering, bid, ask, various yield types, various analytics including duration, mod duration and many others. Total number of data types stands at 50 over various bond classes. For stocks, there are about 25 data types.
The price/analytics data is dynamic ("end of day" as well as "intraday") while the information describing the assets is quite static. The number of records for intraday data will reach several thousand per day across all the
various asset classes being contemplated since much of this data will be streaming into the system and updating every couple of minutes in some cases. The intent is to purge this data after summarizing it every couple of days.
The various instruments each have a unique identifier and each belongs to at least one group. The main groupings are regional. One grouping for example is Latam Bonds which groups together bonds belonging to countries in South & Central America.
Integration with other content types is a must. For example a macro data db will be implemented. It is critical that searches can be built using this data. For example - give me all corporate bonds for countries whose GDP > X and has < Y population. A typical publishing paradigm will also exist on the site where relevant stories will be available.
Viewers will be able to subscribe to one or more asset groups (data view - Latam for example) to view data for the group(s) they have chosen. Would it be best to handle permissioning for each "data view" via the permissioning system or would it be best to permission a user to have access to the "Fin Data Package" and then simply provide the view subscribed to without necessarily going
through the permissioning/priviledges system for this?
Longer term, various applications will be built on top of this. For example a portfolio application.
My main concern right now, as I mention at the beginning, is if it is recommended that something like this be constructed using the CR or whether it is desirable to bypass the CR completely. It is critical to have full integration into the various OACS services
like templating, search etc. One more goal - once finished, I intend to release the application under the GPL and make it freely available either as part of the OpenACS main distribution or as an add-on outside of the main distribution packages as the community thinks best. With this in mind, it seems wise to have the package as fully integrated into the OpenACS core as possible as I think this will make it more useful to the general OpenACS community. (right?) I look forward to any guidance anyone can provide on these issues. Many thanks!
