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Financial Industry Business Ontology

The EDM Council is the author and steward of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO).  FIBO is a collaborative effort among industry practitioners, semantic technology experts and information scientists to standardize the language used to precisely define the terms, conditions, and characteristics of financial instruments; the legal and relationship structure of business entities; the content and time dimensions of market data; and the legal obligations and process aspects of corporate actions.
 
FIBO is being released as a series of standards under the technical governance of the Object Management Group (OMG).  FIBO is based on the legal structures and obligations contained within the myriad of contracts that form the foundation of the financial industry. We have constructed this content into both a business conceptual and fully operational ontology that formally models the reality of how the financial industry operates. 

		The umbrella for this activity has been designated as the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO).

Current Status

FIBO-Foundations and FIBO-Business Entities are in the process of being submitted to the OMG’s Architecture Board to make FIBO a formal standard in June 2013.  We have aligned on the standardization of FIBO in RDF/OWL.
 

FIBO is an open source standard accessible via a metadata manager donated to the Council by Adaptive Inc. Following FIBO-Foundations and FIBO-Business Entities, we will release the FIBO business conceptual ontology for securities, loans, derivatives, time/date (market data), corporate actions and transactions. FIBO will be available as serialized UML for use in model-driven development and as a set of OWL files for use in semantic technology applications.

The Benefits and Use Cases of FIBO

FIBO presents knowledge about financial instruments, business entities, market data and corporate actions in a technology neutral format along with formal definitions and defined business relationships. FIBO standardizes the language of financial contracts and promotes unambiguous shared meaning among all participants in the financial industry. Use cases and benefit areas include:

1. Common reference standard for aligning multiple repositories of data: FIBO provides the mechanism for data consistency and comparability. It facilitates data integration, supports business process automation and enables consolidated views across the financial industry.
2. Standardized language for internal and external communication: FIBO is a business language and facilitates precise communication (in place of ad hoc spreadsheets and technical models) about data requirements between business stakeholders and IT developers of applications, message schemas etc.
3. Derivatives POC: Council members are invited to participate in a working group on the use of FIBO for OTC product classification and analysis. The current focus of these meetings is on the technical implementation of an operational ontology showing the intersection of interest rate swaps, credit default obligations and legal entities.
4. Mortgage and Loan POC: The Council is working with members to align FIBO with the MISMO XML schema and to validate the loan section of the ontology.
5. Transitive Exposure POC: The EDM Council has an operational demonstration showing the potential of inference-based processing to query legal entity ownership and control relationships; align FIBO with external taxonomies; define instrument contractual requirements; provide quality assurance capabilities for contractual conformity; and support trading/counterparty analytics.  The operational demonstration is viewable via a visual interface and shows how to link FIBO to regulatory rules à XML schemas à external reference documents using metadata annotations.
6. FIBO Subject Matter Review: The Council holds regular meetings with financial industry practitioners and IT experts to evaluate the logic and structure of the business conceptual ontology.

FIBO Working Activities

EDM Council members are invited and encouraged to engage in the ongoing work associated with FIBO. Areas of activity include:

1. OMG Standards: The Council holds weekly conference calls to address issues related to the technological modeling framework, shared semantics, alignment with SBVR, adoption of date/time vocabulary and to complete the ontology.
2. Operational Deployment: The Council is available for individual briefings on the expression of FIBO in RDF/OWL and in using FIBO as a semantic layer for relational databases. This is about the use of FIBO for data alignment, model driven development and mapping.
3. Derivatives POC: Council members are invited to participate in weekly conference call on the use of FIBO for OTC product classification and analysis. The focus of these meetings is on the technical implementation of an operational ontology for interest rate swaps and alignment with the ISDA taxonomy.
4. Mortgage and Loan POC: The Council has an ongoing project to align FIBO with the MISMO XML schema and validate the loan section of the ontology

FIBO Meeting Schedule

Recordings from many of these sessions are available here

June 17-21, Berlin,Germany (June 18, OMG Technical Meeting)
Event Details

For more information on FIBO and these working activities, contact Mike Bennett, Head of Semantics and Standards at the Council offices in London (o) +44 (0)20 7917 9522 or Dennis Wisnosky, Strategic Consultant to the Council for FIBO implementation (o) 630-240-6910.