Title: Supporting Crowd-Powered Science in Economics: FRACTI, a Conceptual Framework for Large-Scale Collaboration and Transparent Investigation in Financial Markets,
Abstract: Modern investigation in economics and in other sciences requires the ability
to store, share, and replicate results and methods of experiments that are
often multidisciplinary and yield a massive amount of data. Given the
increasing complexity and growing interaction across diverse bodies of
knowledge it is becoming imperative to define a platform to properly support
collaborative research and track origin, accuracy and use of data. This paper
starts by defining a set of methods leveraging scientific principles and
advocating the importance of those methods in multidisciplinary, computer
intensive fields like computational finance. The next part of this paper
defines a class of systems called scientific support systems, vis-a-vis usages
in other research fields such as bioinformatics, physics and engineering. We
outline a basic set of fundamental concepts, and list our goals and motivation
for leveraging such systems to enable large-scale investigation, "crowd powered
science", in economics. The core of this paper provides an outline of FRACTI in
five steps. First we present definitions related to scientific support systems
intrinsic to finance and describe common characteristics of financial use
cases. The second step concentrates on what can be exchanged through the
definition of shareable entities called contributions. The third step is the
description of a classification system for building blocks of the conceptual
framework, called facets. The fourth step introduces the meta-model that will
enable provenance tracking and representation of data fragments and simulation.
Finally we describe intended cases of use to highlight main strengths of
FRACTI: application of the scientific method for investigation in computational
finance, large-scale collaboration and simulation.