The financial industry business ontology: Best practice for big data

This article describes the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) as a set of formal models that define unambiguous shared meaning for financial industry concepts. An account is given of the history and development of the FIBO series of standards and the theoretical underpinnings of these as a business or 'conceptual' model. Some initial proof of concept work is described, demonstrating how in addition to the use of FIBO as a conceptual model, it is possible to derive semantic technology-based applications that may be used to carry out novel types of processing on data. The development roadmap of the FIBO series of standards within the Object Management Group is also described, so that readers can have an idea of what to expect from FIBO and when.