It’s been a couple of weeks now since the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon, and since then the media and others have been questioning whether there was an intelligence failure at the FBI. It’s not an easy question to answer, given how many suspicious persons and activities government agencies must have on their radars, and all the data there is to deal with.

It’s undeniably hard work. Semantic technology does come into play to help the government connect the dots on information related to threats and other intelligence issues. For example, Dennis Wisnosky, formerly CTO and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, discussed semantic technology’s role in that institution at SemTech in San Francisco in 2011. (Wisnosky now is spending more time with FIBO in his role providing technical strategy and operational guidance to help the The Enterprise Data Management Council finalize and implement Financial Industry Business Ontology standards – see story here.) It’s also been reported that the FBI and CIA are practicing and developing semantic processing techniques to analyse social media to improve situational awareness and identify emerging threats.

Semantic tech is being applied by military intelligence, too, in services like the Air Force and Marine Corp., which are testing or have live deployments of semantic systems developed by Modus Operandi.  The Air Force is involved with analyzing email traffic on a 24/7 basis, while the Marine Corp. works with it as part of the cyber portion war games exercises. The Office of Naval Research also is utilizing it as part of its lab exercises, says Modus Operandi president Rick McNeight.

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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

Dennis Wisnosky is on-board to lead the standards implementation process for FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology that is a joint effort of The Enterprise Data Management Council in conjunction with the Object Management Group.

The data management standards can be used by financial institutions and industry regulators to support conformance to federal regulatory reporting requirements and for internal business processes and risk analysis. Wisnosky, who previously was Chief Technical Officer and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, has spearheaded the U.S. DoD’s use of semantic technology across systems to meet the goal of having an “executable, integrated, consumable, solution architecture.” (See story here).

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Recently, we published Yefim “Jeff” Zhuk’s article, “IT of the Future: Semantic Cloud Architecture.” The paper has been a very popular free download (available here).

One of the readers, Lev Gorodinski (CTO, EPaySpot), approached Jeff directly with some questions and the two engaged in a conversation filled with insights that they wanted to share with our readers. They are kindly allowing us to republish the thread in its entirety.

Lev Gorodinski: I’ve read the article and have some bigger picture questions and comments which likely warrant several discussions. Overall, I am interested in methodologies which aim to bridge the gap between knowledge and its technical manifestation and am therefore interested in the subject matter.

The term “sandbox” in BASE may create the impression that it isn’t a production level system. I think that both the goal of BASE to “Decrease the number of manual operations required for business changes” and its notion of a “playground” are essential to making it ready for production. This will allow an agile and iterative development and exploration process.

Jeff Zhuk: The primary purpose is setting a common ground where business analysts and developers can collaborate on real business tasks. For some companies this ground can serve in production and other companies might feel more comfortable to use it as a playground for safe development and testing before copying to production. The role of the playground will be growing without growing maintenance cost.
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On Friday, May 11, a group of Semantic Technology thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about Semantics in the Financial Services Industry, and “the Linkers” were joined by special guest, Lee Feigenbaum, VP Marketing & Technology at Cambridge Semantics. Lee shared insights gained over many years working in the semantic technology field and with numerous customers in the financial services industry.
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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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Photo Courtesy: Flickr, epicharmus

Credit default swaps. Collateralized debt obligations. Moral hazards. The average person might find the financial services sector and its language as mystifying as some of those involved in the industry might find semantic technology. An event hosted by OMG and the EDM Council in New York City yesterday was aimed at demystifying the latter for Wall Street. But putting the technology to work there might help clarify the discourse around financial instruments for a wider audience, including the regulators who want to deal with concentration of risk issues that played a big role in the Wall Street meltdown.

One part of the picture is FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology, which was the subject of two sessions at the event. An advance discussion of the topic with Thematix principals Elisa Kendall and Jim Rhyne, who was a panelist at the event, set the stage for us here at The Semantic Web Blog. “The primary practical use for an ontology like FIBO that is descriptive of various kinds of financial instruments, including so-called exotics, is that regulators and financial market participants get a common language to talk about things,” Rhyne explains. This is important, given that financial regulators try hard to be collaborative with the industry, pointing out the need, he says, for careful management of financial instruments, including recommendations about capital buffers to deal with downside risk and asking for timely reports of information that would allow them to assess the possibility that a systemic problem could occur rather than directly intervening by stopping trades.

Especially in the derivatives marketplace, there is a lot of “funky terminology,” he says, and not all of it is as well-understood as it should be. Different parties and different parts of the marketplace may call the same instrument by different terms, and one of FIBO’s aims is to provide a common vocabulary.

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