Extracting information from a vendor's data feed into common desktop applications can only be done with custom software. A class of products called integration platforms has been developed to ease this problem. Integration platforms convert vendor data into their own proprietary models so their specialized application set can make use of data from many vendors. Most if not all market data vendors have solved the problem of data modeling by developing simple models which allow them to carry an ever increasing variety of information without making changes to their infrastructure or simple display applications. There are two broad classes of representation, which here will be referred to as pages and records.
Pages are unstructured collections of data formatted for display in a fixed sized window.
A record is a set of properties each containing a piece of information related to that record. Even when vendors' wire protocol represents information in fixed sized structures, it is still conceptually sets of properties. Pages themselves can be, and often are, distributed as sets of properties - containing the page's width, height, text, color attributes in separate properties. Other types of information can be represented as sets of properties, but tend to have more complex request parameters, and usually contain repeating rows of data. Examples are news headlines, historical trades, and options and futures chains.