Elements of the Financial Industry Business ontology (click through for details):

FIBO Developent Roadmap

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Overview: The 'Moving Parts' and FIBO Development Roadmap

FIBO is a thing of many moving parts. Put simply, we have created something which is intended as a formal representation of the business facts - that is, a full and legally accurate representation of those things which are of interest to our community (securities, other financial instruments, legal entities, holdings, other regulatory and reporrting requirements). At the same time, we rendered this information in a form which is gaining traction as a means to new and interesting 'semantic' applications.

To gain the maximum value from the semantic web applications, one would design a specific Semantic Web "Ontology" which contains only those terms which are of relevance to that specific application. This is distinct from a full and factual 'Conceptual model' of the subject matter. The overall conceptual model will represent all the legal facts and nuances that give a term its meaning, without reference to whether it will be needed in the application. This is a simple restatement of the role of a conceptual model in any development process or methodology.

In the same way, the overall conceptual model released through the OMG process need not cover all of the concepts which are true about an item. We have sought to release, as a set of industry standards, ontologies which contain only those terms which are relevant to at least one business application (or 'Use Case') which is realistically needed within our community.

Meanwhile, we are constantly seeking new and better ways to represent the business content to a business audience. The format which is presented here on the Semantics Repository website is the best that we could do with conventional CASE tooling (UML tools), and makes extensive use of the OMG's Ontology Definition Metamodel in order to do this - and while it is streets ahead of the level of business presentability that can be achieved with Semantic Web tooling, it is still not ideal - and is not at all interactive. To plug this gap, we have partnered with the Adaptive Corporation to find new and better ways of presenting this content and allowing business audiences to interact directly with the terms, find definitions and navigate relationships.

These, then, are the 'moving parts' of FIBO: a fully nuanced conceptual model of the business facts; a suitable sub-set of this which will be released as a set of OMG standards to meet financial industry requirements, a set of operational ontologies targeted at individual business use cases, and a presentation layer corresponding to the material in the OMG specifications, through which business domain experts can explore and navigate through the business ontology content.