The Enterprise Data Management Council (EDM Council) has released its first standard financial industry ontology, FIBO Foundations, having received approval for the ontology from standards awarding body the Object Management Group (OMG). The council plans to release a further six ontologies that adhere to the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) open standard on a quarterly basis.
FIBO is an EDM Council initiative that provides an open standard for defining business terms and relationships associated with financial instruments, pricing and processes. David Newman, chair of the FIBO initiative and senior vice president of enterprise architecture and IT strategy at Wells Fargo, explains: “FIBO provides a type of Rosetta stone to help unlock the complexity of financial transactions and increase transparency in support of global financial system stability.”
FIBO Foundations describes the structure of FIBO, allowing banks to build their ownontologies based on the EDM Council standard. It also describes basic concepts, such as contracts and business entities, that are used universally by the financial industry and will be common to most FIBO data domains.
Development of FIBO Foundations was supported by a build, test, deploy and maintain (BTDM) methodology that was originated by Dennis Wisnosky, senior advisor to theEDM Council on FIBO, when he was the chief technology officer of the Business Mission Area within the US Department of Defense. He says: “The BTDM process promotes collaboration among financial institutions, technical experts and ontology vendors to both model the complexity of financial processes and express it in the web ontology language standard known as OWL.”
The BTDM development process for FIBO brings together subject matter experts from financial institutions, including a significant number of large banks, and semantic processing vendors that work in FIBO content teams to build out and test the FIBO ontology.
The next FIBO component to be submitted to the OMG’s standards process is FIBOIndices and Indicators, which will be delivered to the OMG architecture board for approval this month. FIBO Securities and Equities, which is being developed by a team led by Bloomberg, is likely to be next, ahead of FIBO Business Entities and FIBO Loans, which are both being developed by teams led by Wells Fargo. FIBO Business and Commerce is expected to follow and is being developed by a team led by Citi. FIBODerivatives has yet to secure a team leader, but may be developed under the auspices of State Street.
Mike Atkin, managing director of the EDM Council, says FIBO Foundations has been well received across the industry and comments: “Industry participants and regulators are paying attention to FIBO and BTDM has built confidence in the process we are using to build the ontology. FIBO will be a game changer for financial institutions that adopt it.”
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