To date, virtually every application programming interface (API) used in conjunction with market data distribution software provides an anonymous field and/or record based interface. Applications must iterate over fields and provide internal logic to determine what type of message the collection of fields actually represents. For some types of applications, such as graphical display applications (GUIs), it is not necessary for the application to understand the content of the collection of fields; it only needs to display each field on a particular part of the screen. Other types of applications, such as program trading, tick capture, analytical, and smart order routing applications, need a deeper understanding of the meaning of each field in the message and, indeed, what type of message the update as a whole represents.

Classification of market data messages is not just restricted to high level message types, such as quotes, trades, order book updates, security status updates, fundamental data, etc., but also to subtypes of these messages types: regional vs. consolidated quotes, regional vs. consolidated trades, trade cancels/errors/corrections, out of order trades, etc. The field based approach to accessing market data requires a great deal of logic to classify data correctly.

Wombat's Middleware Agnostic Market Data API (MAMDA) provides a rich set of market data related data structures to address these shortcomings of field based APIs. This object oriented (C++ and Java) API does the tedious work of deciphering field based data into various types of messages and provides convenient interfaces for applications to process the different types of data.