Last week’s Semantic Technology & Business Conference played host to the FIBO (Financial Business Industry Ontology) Technology Summit. The event, which saw some 60 conference participants from the semantic web, financial industry and other sectors, as well as academia, was led by David S. Newman, SVP & Strategic Planning Manager Enterprise Architecture, at Wells Fargo and Chair of the Enterprise Data Management Council’s Semantics Program, and Dennis E. Wisnosky, founder of Wizdom Systems who is providing technical strategy and operational guidance to the Council for finalizing and implementing FIBO standards.

“This was a tremendous milestone for FIBO and FIBO’s full evolution,” Newman told The Semantic Web Blog following the event. It brought “together a lot of smart people working with semantic technology for a number of years to get their insights into how to further mature FIBO, as well as how to mature the technology, so that FIBO can really resonate with the regulatory community and the financial industry, so that it will have some real solid traction, be able to truly scale to the needs of the constituencies” – that is, not only financial institutions but the entire financial system. Says Newman, “That’s a big, tall order.”

The idea behind FIBO is 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. As an open-source, global financial initiative, it is planned to bring health to the financial system, through defining a vast amount of information semantically and providing a better capability for the industry and its regulators to look at more complex patterns and relationships of information in friendlier ways than conventional technology can offer.

At a session following the FIBO Technology Summit at last week’s conference, Wisnosky, also formerly the chief architect and CTO of the Department of Defense, explained one way the financial industry should view FIBO. Today, he said, financial institutions “spend hundreds of millions of dollars gathering data for regulators, with no advantage internally. The carrot [of FIBO] is to reduce those costs.” Ignore the carrot and wait for regulators to ask for more data, and watch costs go up. Added Newman, “if information is highly trustworthy, then the perception of risk regulators have of the financial industry might be lessened, if they can govern and certify an institution aligns with a common data standard, which is FIBO in our proposal.”

During that session, Newman also brought up some of the outcomes of the FIBO Technology Summit, such as discussions that were held about challenges to defining regulatory rules that are more complex and beyond the means of OWL 2 DL and SWRL. In his conversation with The Semantic Web Blog following the conference, he provided more details.

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Image Courtesy: Flickr/Patrick Hoesly

The financial services industry is taking to semantic tech in an important way, and that’s in the form of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), which aims 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. Attendees at SemTech Biz in San Francisco will get a deep dive on the how’s and why’s, at this session, while the FIBO Technology Summit invitation event will present an opportunity for working collaboratively to continue advancing the effort that has its roots in The Enterprise Data Management Council and communities of interests.

Leading that event will be Dennis E. Wisnosky, founder of Wizdom Systems, Inc. and former CTO and Chief Architect of the DoD Business Mission Area, who was recently named to provide technical strategy and operational guidance to help the Council finalize and implement FIBO standards, and David S. Newman, SVP & Strategic Planning Manager Enterprise Architecture at Wells Fargo, and Chair of the EDM Council’s Semantics Program. (Newman, with Enterprise Data Management Council Head of Semantics and Standards Mike Bennett, will also host the SemTech FIBO session.)  Speaking of the upcoming event, Wisnosky explains that a goal is to cast a wide net to find the new tech ideas and developments that both can bring benefits to FIBO in the short term and influence the longer-term research agenda to help the financial industry.

As FIBO stands now, in June the second draft of the FIBO Foundations ontology and the conceptual FIBO Business Entities ontology will be presented at a meeting of the Object Management Group in Berlin. By year’s end it is expected that the OMG will have ratified these as formal standards. “We are on the path to turn the corner from thinking of what FIBO will be to delivering it,” says Wisnosky. Read more

Back in March, The Semantic Web Blog wrote an article about FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology that’s on its way to being an Object Management Group series of standards. There, we explored its value as an open semantic standard that can be used by financial institutions and industry regulators, both to support conformance to federal regulatory reporting requirements and for internal business processes and risk analysis.

To continue the discussion about the operational value of FIBO, we recently spoke with key participants developing the standard: David Newman, Strategic Planning Manager, Vice President, Enterprise Architecture, Wells Fargo Bank, who is lead of the industry team collaborating on semantics OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives proof-of-concept, and Mike Atkin, managing director at the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Council, where FIBO was born and is included as content of EDM’s Semantics Repository.

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What do the Open Travel Association, the Filoli historic site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Ontology Platform Special Interest Group (PSIG) at the Object Management Group all have in common? Ontologies, of course!

Starting at the most obvious point, the Ontology PSIG developed the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM), and at the upcoming SemTech conference, Elisa Kendall, CEO of Sandpiper Software, co -editor of ODM and co-chair of the Ontology PSIG, will discuss some of the latest work underway there. Of which, she tells The Semantic Web Blog, there is “a ton.”

Among the efforts underway are making ODM current with W3C specs including support for OWL 2 (which should be available towards year’s end), and others that depend to some degree on the standard and building on that baseline.

These include vertical industry efforts such as Common Terminology Services (CTS) 2 from the health care sector’s HL7 standardization body. Kendall says this builds on the first version of ODM, with the focus on using ontologies and depending on semantics for providing the terminology, translation and cross-correlation of the maze of hospital and insurance codes to enable interchange of this data among parties.

The CTS2 effort has been generalized so that it can support terminology services for other verticals as well, which the OMG Ontology PSIG group hopes will make it more broadly useful. “We’ll have to see how that plays out in practice, since it’s only just being published this summer,” Kendall says.

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