| Scope | Explanation | Applications |
In this section:
The repository aims to replicate a business understanding of the reality of financial instruments terms and not a technical "design" of some data structure. The only technical thing that participants need to understand is that this is not a technical view of the world.
There are two kinds of things shown in the model:
Things are arranged in a hierarchy, shown in the diagrams by upward-pointing arrows. The arrows denote that the thing in question "is a kind of" the thing being pointed to. As the name "Thing" suggests, each class of thing is ultimately derived from the most general class, called "Thing". In this way, everything in the model is committed to being something in the business world, and not a design construct.
The facts about things may take the form of relationships with other things, or they may be simple facts involving words, dates, numbers and the like.
There is also a special kind of fact which shows that two types of "Thing" are mutually exclusive. This means that anything which is defined as one of those types of thing cannot also be the other type of thing.
The spreadsheet "full" version in each section has a column showing what type of fact each line entry refers to, as does the detailed table.
Semantics technology is based on set theory. Each class of thing is defined as a set, and individual items in the real world may be classified as being members of one or more such sets.
The facts that are defined about each set define what a thing must be like in order to be a member of that set. So in order to be a member of the set of all possible debt instruments, a thing must be a kind of contract and it must relate to some amount of debt. Similarly in order to be "debt", a thing must be a sum of money and it must be owed by some party to some other party.
The sets, or classes of thing should all have one or more parent classes. These more general classes have facts about them which apply to all classes of thing that are derived from them. For example, in a hierarchy view of types of animal, all vertebrates have a backbone, so this fact would only need to be defined once. All classes of animal which are derived from the general class of "vertebrate" will inherit that one simple fact, so it does not need to be stated again.
It is possible for something to be "descended" from more than one parent class. Just as a whale is both a mammal and a sea-creature, so also a futures instrument is both a derivative and an exchange traded instrument. If two things are not shown as being mutually exclusive then any individual thing (for example an individual financial instrument) can be a member of both classes of thing.
In some cases, facts that are defined about a general class of thing are refined in statements about specific things that are descended from these. This is shown in the diagrams by the presence of a green "inheritance" arrow from the more specific fact to the more general fact. For example a financial instrument has an issuer, and this fact about financial instruments is a more specialized version of the fact that all written contracts have a party that writes that contract.
NOTE: At the present time we are seeking subject matter experts in the area of legal entities and formal legal persons, including people with a formal grounding in the legal underpinnings of these structures. This is both to complete the FIBO-BE semantic model and to identify the precise scope of terms needed for legal entity and legal entity identification related applications within financial firms and the regulatory community.
The formal "Subject Matter Expert Review" (SMER) is the mechanism by which we ensure that the content in the FIBO repository represents a full and factual view of the world as seen by the business.
Each section of the ontology is drafted to be as close as we could get to a formal representation of the business, before being presented to business domain experts for correction, validation and extension. This process embodies a key principle in the FIBO development: that it is not up to the modeler to determine what is true, rather the model provides a means for gathering the truth from those who actually know.
This embodies the engineering methodology whereby deliverables are subjected to the appropriate level of review by the appropriate audience (in this case business experts) before being deemed to be complete.
Completion of the Semantics Repository depends on the participation of business subject matter experts.
The content of the repository is reviewed in distinct stages, broken down according to instrument domain knowledge and the business functions of the industry subject matter experts. The precise timetable is agreed among the participants in each area of the model.
Any firm may participate in the review and consensus building activities that go towards completion of this Repository.
Where possible, it will help for a firm to have a "point person" who would be able to identify suitable subject matter experts within their firm for upcoming review efforts. Prior to the start of each set of reviews we also put out a "Call for experts".
A detailed timetable of reviews is published in this section from time to time.
Reviews take two forms:
The aim of the Semantics Repository is to gather an industry consensus view on descriptive terms financial instruments and their definitions. An essential part of this process is the convening of panels of industry subject matter experts to review and complete the repository. This has been taking place since September 2008.
Industry reviews predominantly take the form of weekly telephone conferences with groups of subject matter experts. In addition, anyone can return comments on the repository content at any time using the feedback forms provided in each section.
During these reviews we aim to achieve a consensus agreement on the definition of each term. A consensus is defined as having at least a 75% agreement among the subject matter experts participating in that review, whether off-line or via the conference calls. When there is a consensus agreement on all (100%) of the terms in a given section, this section is subjected to a final quality review by the EDM Council's Repository Working Group, and will then be "booked" as approved content.
Completed sections may be updated subsequently in response to changes in market practice or refinement of terms for different markets, and we anticipate that each section would be reviewed regularly to ensure it still represents the industry consensus view of that part of the financial services landscape.
In the current Semantics Repository website, the review status of each term is indicated in the spreadsheets for each section. Note that as each section is put forward to the OMG for formal review and appraisal as a proposed standard, this information is dropped. The formal OMG review process represents the next step in the quality assurance of the repository content.
The "Line No." column of the spreadsheet or table is color coded to show the status of each term in that section, as follows:
In addition, terms which have been deprecated or moved elsewhere are identified by coloring the text of the term in dark gray. This is so that the original position of a term can be identified.