| Development | Modeling Principles | Explanation |
Elements of the Financial Industry Business ontology (click through for details):
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This page describes these two aspects of the Business Conceptual Ontology:
There are two aspects to this: in order to provide a full and factual, legally rounded model of the business relaities of securities, business entities and so on, the model is framed within what's called a Basic Business Ontology.
These are the models of industry content, built on semantic principles.
Subject Matter Expert Reviews substantively complete for:
These were built using an early draft of the OMG's Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) modeling framework. For each section of the content, these are to be remodeled according to the latest version of that standard. This is part of the OMG work (see separate section). The above sections are still to be converted, but the business content is relatively stable.
There is additional information on scope and coverage in the Business tab.
There is work which remains to be done as part of the ongoing development process:
The “Most primitive” of each concept abstracted and maintained in a formal semantic structure Alignment with formal industry-led semantics where available.
Please refer to the "Global" section for details on the sets of terms in the Basic Business Ontology, the principles by which we have abstracted meaningful concepts, and the high level concepts which are used in the Business Conceptual Model.
The Basic Business Ontology (BBO) is the working title for the material collected here under "Global Terms". This is a set of ontologies of basic concepts which have been specialized and/or referred to in our financial industry ontologies. As such, these belong to other industries or to no industry. In order to promote future interoperability, and to make best use of formal ontology standards that have been developed in these other industries or communities of practice, we have developed an overall framework in FIBO that enables terms to be commonly referred to across different standards. Many of the terms here are to be replaced with formal standards material from those other communities of practice but in many cases this arrangement is not yet in place - so in those cases the "Global Terms" material should be viewed as provisional terms which anticipate standards-derived terms from those subject areas.
In order to define everything in the model as a kind of "Thing", we have taken the approach of defining a full set of general categories of things, from which to derive classes of thing that are specific to the financial industry. Ultimately it is hoped that existing standards can be incorporated into this area (for example by aligning the terms for financial accounting with those in XBRL).
This is the mechanism by which terms with similar sounding names are distinguished from one another. In a sense this is how "the meaning gets in". Written definitions form a separate mechanism by which meaning is asserted but these only get their meaning with reference to the human reader, and so these do not really contribute to the formal structure of meaning in the ontology.
Whenever there is some question about the precise meaning of a term, reference will be made to the parent classes of that term, showing what kind of "Thing" it is meant to be. For example, does the class "OTC Instrument" refer to a class of instrument that is traded over the counter, or to a bilateral contract struck over the counter between two parties? Both meanings are often given the label of 'OTC' which is why we should not confuse the labels with the meanings. By asking the question "What kind of thing is it?", we are able to identify what is precisely meant by a term. If a subject matter expert is aware of a similar sounding term that has a different meaning, this can then be added.
All classes of thing in the Financial Instruments semantic model, and most of the relationships between them, are derived from more general classes of thing that are not specific to the finanial industry. For example a financial instrument is a kind of contract, an issuer is a kind of party, and so on. So instead of simply referring to each class of thing as "Thing", they each come with their own set of high level meanings.
The terms in the Basic Business Ontology are all defined in the "Global Terms" section of this site.
Please note that some of these sections are out of date, as work is continuing on alignment of semantics across existing ontologies (e.g. for transactions, accounting, date and time). This work is reflected in the EA-based UML repository which can be downloaded in the Downloads section.
| Go to Global section (BBO) |