The BIRD Implementation Generator (BIG) Idea

BIRD is not an IT Solution

BIRD (the Banks Integrated Reporting Dictionary) is a description, created by a collaboration of European banks, Central banks , and managed by the ECB.

BIRD does not make technology choices/restrictions.

BIRD describes Regulatory Domain Knowledge (Data Models and Transformations) in a concise machine-readable format available from the API or meta-data extracts (CSV files).

As an analogy, BIRD is a seed that encodes the knowledge to build a tree in a concise format (DNA).

However, implementation is an IT solution

A technical implementation is the usable implementation for the domain, with the technical components that users require to do their job.

Examples of such technical components include a data store and a calculation engine.

If we imagine a the technical implementation as a tree grown from seed, we can imagine these components as branches of the tree.

Generating a technical implementation

We follow the DRY principle, Don't Repeat yourself.

Auto-generation of software artefacts from core definitions is the predominant mode of software engineering today. Gone are the days when database structures, user interface and data base communication, and data-aware forms need to be hand-crafted individually for each domain concept such as a 'loan'. Instead we define once and generate different the required technical components.

BIG Studios are software applications that enable users to run a guided set of steps to generate technical implementations of BIRD from the published BIRD artefacts.

The technical implementations are usually configurations of existing stable mature technologies that have many developers and developer resources available.

All BIG Studios are based on concepts and components described in the BIG Core .

The BIG Open Studio provides a single place with tools to automatically generate a technical implementation that creates a configuration of the mature Eclipse Rich Client Platform. This usable configuration is called the Free BIRD Platform.

Other workbenches could be created using the BIG Core to create configurations of other technical platforms.

We can consider as an analogy that a tree needs a pot of soil to grow, and that putting a seed in a different pot might grow a slightly different tree.