January 5, 2008 9:52 AM
Consumer requirement for "open market"
A consumer has asked for help in finding a suitable credit card for credit score 550. How can semantic technology answer the question?
The credit report information is available to the Credit Reporting Agency (CRA), the credit card companies who want to offer pre-approved credit cards can search the protected CRA database for potential customers. The information about credit data available and accessible may be published and advertised through a Web Services Description (WSD) document. Access to the protected database may be controlled with user (the user may be an individual who has a credit record or credit company that can benefit from access to individual data) authentication and authorization. Different services may be made available to different type of users thus the database fields accessible to a user can be controlled. Federal laws for fair credit may be referred for guidelines. Credit agencies may use this data to calculate the credit score according to a proprietary formula or may use the credit score provided by CRA.
Some vocabularies may be defined to enable machine processing of natural language queries such as "Find best credit card for credit score 550" for intelligent answers. The basic vocabularies required may be described as:
- credit report vocabulary - http://www.somestandards.org/cr
- credit vocabulary - http://www.somestandards.org/credit
Some normative metadata terms that may be used to answer this query are:
"xmlns:credit=http://www.somestandards.org/credit#"
"xmlns:std=http://www.somestandards.org/ns#"
"xmlns:dcmitype="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/"
| normative metadata term(predicate) | possible values(object) | description |
|---|---|---|
| credit:csformula | beacon, empirica, fico | credit score formula |
| credit:csvalue | blank node label | credit score range and credit rate |
| credit:scoreMin | 300-900 | Minimum value of credit score |
| credit:scoreMax | 300-900 | Maximum value of credit score |
| std:rate | 0-100% | interest or premium rate |
| dcmitype:dataset | Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, etc. | Name of credit report database |
Credit Reporting Agency (CRA) may describe its service as (RDF triples):
<CRA IRI> dcmitype:service "Credit Reporting Agency"@en <CRA IRI> dcmitype:dataset "Equifax/Experian/TransUnion" <CRA IRI> credit:csformula "Beacon/Empirica/FICO"
Credit Providing Agency (CPA) such as bank, credit card, insurance etc, may describe the service provided as (RDF triples):
<CPA IRI> dcmitype:service "Credit Card"@en <CPA IRI> dcmitype:dataset "Equifax/Experian/TransUnion" <CPA IRI> credit:csformula "Beacon/Empirica/FICO" <CPA IRI> credit:csvalue _:range1 _:range1 credit:scoreMin "300"^^xsd:integer _:range1 credit:scoreMax "400"^^xsd:integer _:range1 std:rate "interest/premium"
A search engine may translate this user query into a SPARQL query as follows:
SELECT ?s ?minval ?maxval ?rateval
WHERE {?s dcmitype:service "^Credit Card"@en .
?s credit:csvalue ?bn .
?bn credit:scoreMin ?minval .
?bn credit:scoreMax ?maxval .
?bn std:rate ?rateval .
FILTER (?minval <= 550 && ?maxval >= 550)
}
ORDER BY ?s ASC(?rateval)
However the suggested semantic technology method may succeed only if CPAs publish the guidelines for interest/premium rate and credit score relationship. There may be more factors involved other than credit score that shall be used in determining the approval of credit card and interest/premium rates. The human and business factors may overrule technology. The other suggested method to find an answer to this query is to post this question to an appropriate forum. A popular forum for credit card related issues can be found by a simple query: "popular credit card forum". If the forum has included semantic annotation (RDFa) then it shall be found by the semantic Search Engine. The forum may use the following terms for semantic annotation:
<forum IRI> dcmitype:service "blog/forum" <forum IRI> dcmitype:collection "Credit Card"@en <forum IRI> std:popularity "IntegerValue"^^xsd:integer
Conclusion: Definition of Credit Report vocabulary and a data security mechanism that may control access to information shall provide enhanced logical solutions for such problems. The ability to compare how different credit card companies consider credit report and credit score shall be the answer to the consumer question. More on std:popularity property and access mechanism later.
References:
SPARQL
Credit Report
Credit Score
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