Refreshed FIBO Incorporates Semantic Web Standards

The EDM Council, in partnership with Object Management Group, began developing FIBO in 2015. This most recent advance incorporates Semantic Web standards including: the ability to generate unified modelling language diagrams, simple knowledge organization systems vocabulary, enhanced spreadsheets for business review, and machine-readable files in the W3C standard Web Ontology Language.

David Newman, chair of the FIBO initiative and senior vice president at Wells Fargo’s innovation group, calls the updated FIBO a “major achievement,” in a statement.

According to the EDM Council, the update will make it easier for the Semantic Web community to collaborate with financial application developers to speed up adoption.

Dennis Wisnosky, head of FIBO engineering at the EDM Council, says this update makes financial information more searchable.

“HTML supported the proliferation of the World Wide Web by providing a standard way to find and retrieve web pages. The Semantic Web is taking the next step by making industry-specific information just as simple to find and interrogate,” Wisnosky says. “For example, most publicly listed companies publish their dividend information on their websites. If they tagged that information using FIBO, then anyone could programmatically retrieve the information they wanted—the amount of the dividend, the currency, when it would be paid and to whom (holders of which class of shares on which date). It would make processing that information so much easier.”