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. continued…

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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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The Object Management Group (OMG®) will be holding a Workshop and Information Day on Semantics at its quarterly technical meeting in Reston, VA. The event will take place on Tuesday, March 19^th and Wednesday, March 20^th at the Hyatt Regency hotel.

The event will give attendees the option to focus on the uses of semantics in three key industries: healthcare, finance and government.

“Semantic technologies are remaking financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and even defense systems,” said Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO of OMG. “The purpose of the Semantic Information Day is to explore how semantics can be used in these industries while laying the groundwork for future semantic-based standards.”

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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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Some commentary on this point from the panelists:

• Citi chief data officer Eric Chacon discussed the challenges of not having a single source of master data that exists for businesses that grow  through acquisitions, as well as any organization highly decentralized in nature. continued…

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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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At next week’s Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Washington D.C., George Thomas, Change Agent at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, will discuss connecting these dots in a session entitled, Realizing the GPRMA using Government Linked Data. The Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 requires that agencies publish strategic plans, which they’re often doing as Word or PDF documents, on their websites. Meanwhile, the IT Dashboard website is the space for federal agencies to provide details of federal information technology investments. “So the idea of using Linked Data to realize GPRMA suggests we can do better in connecting or linking the strategic goals with the IT resource expenditures,” says Thomas.

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This was one of the realities put forward by Dennis Wisnosky, CTO and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense, during his Keynote at the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference San Francisco. Mr. Wisnosky was speaking about how the US DoD leverages Semantic Technology across systems to meet the goal of having an “executable, integrated, consumable, solution architecture.” In particular, he spoke about using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard by OMG for their Business Process Modeling efforts, in conjunction with systems built on RDF, OWL, and SPARQL.
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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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 In this initial article, I provide an overview of my ‘version’ of SSOA. I summarize a couple of perspectives and then highlight the technical underpinnings.  I close by summarizing and supplying a projected roadmap for this column.  As a point of order, my background is with the U.S. Navy; therefore, my perspective tends toward military/government settings. However, as I will indicate in a subsequent article, at their core all organizations strive to be the best at the same process: decision making.

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