EDM Council Readies FIBO Specs, Works With Bank of England and Microsoft

The EDM Council and the Object Management Group (OMG) plan to release specifications June 17 for the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), their semantics standards initiative.

"This is the heart of the effort," says Mike Atkin, managing director of the EDM Council. The specifications will align FIBO with OMG and EDM Council operations, and follows on the organizations' work last week at the FIBO Technical Summit in San Francisco, which brought together financial industry firms to focus on FIBO.

"The goal was to bring these two sides together, to provide a coordination mechanism to allow the semantic community to work with the financial community to address some of the open technology issues necessary to ensure this can be adopted broadly by the involved stakeholders," says Atkin.

The Bank of England has begun working with the EDM Council to align FIBO with its liquidity reporting templates. "They recognize that there were lots of diversions and challenges with aligning and reporting to the banks from those forms," says Atkin. "So they're taking a step forward to align regulatory concepts with the ontology and separate out the definitions from the calculation and risk formula processes. Then we will work with the banks to align with that so there can be consistency of reporting."

Also, the Data Maturity Management model, a related framework for data management completed by the EDM Council in 2012, has recently been successfully piloted by Microsoft, according to Atkin. Following this, EDM Council members asked the organization to manage assessment of their data maturity, and the EDM Council has such efforts underway for three firms, Atkin adds.