Using the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO): A Use-Case Driven Cooks Tour

This presentation was given by our Partner, Elisa Kendall, at the Knowledge Graph Conference 2020. Elisa is the principal ontologist behind the the Financial Industry Business Ontology.

The Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) has matured in significant areas over the last few years, but until recently there were few examples to help users understand how to interpret it and build it into their own knowledge graphs.  Since early 2019, the FIBO development team has been focused primarily on use cases to address the steep learning curve:

• How to represent businesses and incorporate data about them that is publicly available, such as identifiers, locations, ownership and control information and other details from the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), Open Corporates, state and government registries, etc.,
• How to use that information to investigate counterparty relationships,
• How to build on that baseline to represent securities (stocks, bonds, etc.) issued by these organizations,
• How to leverage those securities to represent the components of an index and track index performance, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average,
• How to use this information to represent more complex derivative instruments.

In this talk, we will take a quick cook’s tour through some of the more basic use cases and related ontologies.  The approach that FIBO has taken to build a use case stack that can be used to demonstrate the value of knowledge graphs translates well to most domain-specific projects.  The use cases, ontologies, and reference and example data are all publicly available and open source.  While some of the work is still underway, the basic building blocks are in place.  Conference participants can download and try them, and the cook’s tour is intended to provide enough of an introduction to help make that feasible.