Invitation to participation in the FIBO W3C Community Group

Dear All,

We are very glad to see such a large number of enthusiasts in the W3C FIBO Community Group. Before publishing the Charter of our group, please let us explain the goal of the group, as well as its actions that are to be expected in the near future.

FIBO™ is the conceptual business ontology standard for the Finance Industry. FIBO™ provides a description of the structure and contractual obligations of financial instruments, legal entities, market data and financial processes. FIBO™ is released as a series of standards under the technical governance of the EDM Council. FIBO™ is being published as a family of specifications by the Object Management Group.

It is perhaps less clear what fibo.schema.org is and what are its goals. Firstly, let us explain that schema.org is a collaborative, community-based initiative whose mission is to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.

Secondly, fibo.schema.org is intended to belong to the group of “Reviewed/hosted Extensions” of schema.org. As such, if accepted, it will share types and properties with the “core” of schema.org.

In February 2015 the EDMC started a schema.org FIBO Content Team under the leadership of David Newman, SVP, Wells Fargo Innovation Group, who chairs the FIBO initiative, and Dennis Wisnosky, Founder, Wizdom Systems, who is the senior advisor to the Council. The FIBO Content Team, which included member volunteers of the EDMC, intended to identify a set of requirements that would drive recommendations for new financial terms and concepts to be proposed to schema.org that would also align with FIBO.

In September 2015 the EDMC engaged Mirek Sopek, founder and vice-CEO of MakoLab SA and members of his international team (Martin Hepp, Richard Wallis, Dominik Kuzinski, Robert Trypuz, Piotr Goetzen and Adam Lis) to further develop these recommendations and to prepare the necessary content and artefacts needed to successfully deliver a formal submission to schema.org that will be approved.

In November 2015, with support from the EDMC team, the group created this W3C Community Group in order to encourage more specialists, particularly from the banking industry, to join an open discussion about the best form and content of the extensions.

The current plan for the group is to propose a certain minimal set of types and properties describing basic financial products to be included into schema.org’s “core” vocabulary. This process will deliver a set of basic terms that shall enable webmasters to describe the most important financial products on their websites, and in other forms of digital communication. Immediately after this proposal, the group will propose a hosted extension (fibo.schema.org) that will contain much more types and properties that satisfy the needs of more advanced users.

Compliance with the FIBO Ontology will be sought during all the stages of the extensions’ creation. This may involve references to existing FIBO classes and properties, as well as proposals to the FIBO team to add certain new terms to FIBO.

We will soon publish the first result of this work – the proposal of terms to be included in schema.org’s core and will start the open discussion about it here. We are looking forward to your active participation and fruitful discussions.

The Community Chairs:
David Newman, Dennis Wisnosky, Mirek Sopek