tickerSymbol - MIC or ACR code?

Sorry, another reposts (this was the last post to the Google Group, seemingly minutes before it was shut down:).

For the record, I'm now definitely encoding tickers as "NASDAQ:GOOG" even though this neither uses the ISO15022 Market Identifier Codes (I really find it hard to believe anyone uses these outside of financial databases), nor uses a space separator.


-----

Under the Corporation type...
http://schema.org/Corporation
.. one finds the recently-added property...
tickerSymbol

In the description field for "tickerSymbol" we find this note:
"The tickerSymbol is expressed as an exchange and an instrument name
separated by a space character. For the exchange component of the
tickerSymbol attribute, we reccommend [sic] using the controlled
vocaulary [sic] of Market Identifier Codes (MIC) specified in
ISO15022."

And in the footer to "Corporation":
"This class contains derivatives of IPTC rNews properties. rNews is a
data model of publishing metadata with serializations currently
available for RDFa as well as HTML5 Microdata. More information about
the IPTC and rNews can be found at rnews.org."

And over at rNews itself (bear with me:) under...
http://dev.iptc.org/rNews-05-The-Organization-Class
... we find:
"The exchange traded instrument associated with an Organization
object. The tickerSymbol is expressed as an exchange and an instrument
name separated by a space character. The IPTC suggests, but does not
require that implementors of rNews select the value for the exchange
component of the tickerSymbol attribute from the controlled vocaulary
of Market Identifier Codes (MIC) specified in ISO15022. "

(The reiteration of the typo "controlled vocaulary" in both schema.org
and rNews suggests the former copied from the latter.)

All fine and well *except* that the examples used in rNews do not use
the MIC field of ISO15022 (actually detailed in  ISO10383), but the
ACR field.  E.g.:
rnews:name "Reuters" ;
rnews:tickerSymbol "NYSE TRI"

"NYSE" is the ACR (acronym) for the New York Stock Exchange, not the
MIC - which is "XNYS."  For what it's worth, Google News sitemaps
require the use of exchange codes as listed in Google Finance - which
accord (so far as I know) the the ACR rather than MIC values.

Is the intent of schema.org that webmasters actually use MIC rather
than ACR?  As the expected value of tickerSymbol is text, to be
strictly compliant to the instructions one would express Google as:
XNAS GOOG
... a construction so foreign to actual investors and searchers that
if you try Googling it you automatically are served results for "XMAS
GOOG."

The most common construction - and the one used by Google Finance to
boot - would be:
NASDAQ:GOOG
Note here too the colon separator between the exchange and instrument
name, which is wholly conventional (not a space, which is not).

I'm inclined to mark up symbols in the standard format.  Does anyone
see any problem with that?  Or asked the other way around, in what
scenario would using the MIC be more beneficial than ACR, given that
almost all humans AND most public code uses the latter?

A bit of further information to augment what I've already written.

In the rNews 0.5 implementation guide we find this in the code
example:

<div style="display:none">
[...]
<div rel="rnews:tickerSymbol">
NYSE NYT
</div>
</div>

Hmm.  Google in their help article on microdata says:
"In general, Google won't display content that is not visible to the
user. In other words, don't show content to users in one way, and use
hidden text to mark up information separately for search engines and
web applications. You should mark up the text that actually appears to
your users when they visit your web pages."

So this puts a webmaster between a rock and a hard place in regard to
properties like this.  Use a format web users don't use and display
it, or display the format web users use and hide it for Google -
against their advice.

Received on Tuesday, 18 October 2011 19:17:28 UTC