DOPE stands for "Database Objects for Pricing Everything", and the aim of this project is to define an open database schema that can be used as the basis of building a financial/econometric system. We also aim to provide a complete set of support data that can be used to populate your financial database.
Whenever you build a financial system - whether it be a trading system, a risk management engine or pricing framework - you deal with a lot of basic data. Things like countries, currencies and currency pairs (for FX systems). You might need a list of financial exchanges for each country. For each financial exchange, you might need a list of financial instruments traded on that exchange. Other bits and pieces are important - such as holiday calendars, and the default quote convention for currency pairs. The purpose of The DOPE is to define an open database schema to represent all these bits of data. We also want to populate the database with everything you need to get started in building your financial system. For example, the country table is populated with the 3 letter ISO country code, the country name, the geographic sub-region, and the currency ISO code for that country.
All the schemas and source code within the DOPE project are distributed under an Apache License, which is a very liberal open source license that allows you to modify the source code and also use it within proprietary systems.