FIBO Alignment

OpenIM builds on the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) for the semantics FIBO already carries, and adds the layer FIBO does not model. This document is the concept-by-concept alignment: for every OpenIM core entity, the FIBO concept it corresponds to — or an explicit statement that FIBO does not model it, because those silences are what OpenIM contributes.

FIBO is a lower layer. It is a formal OWL ontology of the things of financial business — legal entities, instruments, securities, funds, indices — maintained by the EDM Council and standardised through OMG, published MIT-licensed. OpenIM is a service-domain decomposition plus a canonical operating model of the buy-side firm. The alignment below is exactly that — an alignment, not a contest. FIBO is OpenIM’s most important alignment dependency.

On the identifiers below. Curies follow FIBO’s own ontology-prefix convention (e.g. fibo-fbc-fi-fi:FinancialInstrument) and resolve under https://spec.edmcouncil.org/fibo/ontology/. One boundary matters for accuracy: FIBO’s most foundational classes — LegalEntity, LegalPerson and similar — are defined in the OMG Commons Ontology Library (cmns-*), which FIBO imports and refines. Where a class is canonically a Commons class, it is cited as cmns-*, not fibo-*.

What FIBO covers, and where it stops

FIBO’s coverage is rich on the nouns of financial business:

• Legal entities — its strongest area: corporations, partnerships, branches, trusts, sole proprietorships, and a full Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) model.
• Financial instruments — a deep FinancialInstrument hierarchy: equity, debt, derivative, cash, commodity, currency.
• Securities, funds and collective investment vehicles — including, more than is commonly assumed, private-equity funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, funds-of-funds, fund managers and administrators, and the GP/LP partnership roles.
• Market indices, interest rates and FX, corporate actions, loans, and derivatives master agreements.

What FIBO does not model is the investment manager’s operating layer:

• the private-markets investment lifecycle — commitments as drawable obligations, capital calls, distributions, capital accounts, NAV as a valuation event, the waterfall;
• the portfolio-mandate and allocation layer — the discretionary mandate an asset manager runs on behalf of an asset owner;
• the classification and entity-resolution machinery — extensible time-varying classification, aliases, the golden-key cross-reference that the no-universal-identifier reality of private markets demands;
• the entire risk-operating layer — configured risk limits, scenarios, limit breaches, point-in-time risk measurements;
• directly-held real assets — FIBO touches real estate only as a securitised instrument (REITs, mortgage-backed securities), never as a directly-held operating asset with leases, development and appraisal.

That operating-and-master-data layer is OpenIM’s contribution. FIBO models the funds and the partnerships as legal and structural objects; OpenIM models how an institutional investor operates against them.

FIBO domains referenced

Core-entity alignment

Tally: 3 clean/rich (E-01, E-02, E-10) · 6 partial, FIBO has the noun and OpenIM adds the operating/temporal facet (E-03, E-04, E-05, E-06, E-08, E-14) · 10 OpenIM-only (E-07, E-09, E-11, E-12, E-13, E-15, E-16–E-19).

The shape of the result is the thesis: FIBO is rich on the nouns of financial business and silent on the investment manager’s operating model.

Specialisation packs

Public-markets (PB) — strong FIBO alignment. Listed equity → fibo-sec-eq-eq:CommonShare / PreferredShare (apex fibo-fbc-fi-fi:EquityInstrument); debt instrument → fibo-fbc-fi-fi:DebtInstrument (SEC/Debt has bonds, asset-backed securities, CDOs); corporate action → CAE CorporateAction; income schedule → fibo-sec-eq-eq:DividendSchedule (equity) and SEC/Debt coupon terms; index constituent → IND market/basket index constituents. The trade-lifecycle entities (order, execution, allocation, settlement instruction) are not in FIBO — that grain is ISDA CDM, the layer below OpenIM.

Fund-operations (FO) — partial FIBO alignment. FO-01 Fund Product partially aligns to FIBO’s fund and collective-investment-vehicle model, with a significant operating-layer gap:

Private-markets (PM) — the headline gap, stated precisely. FIBO’s SEC/Funds and BE/Partnerships modules are richer than commonly assumed: fund → fibo-sec-fund-fund:CollectiveInvestmentVehicle / PrivateEquityFund; the GP role → fibo-be-ptr-ptr:GeneralPartner; fund administrator → fibo-sec-fund-fund:FundAdministrator; legal vehicle → fibo-be-ptr-ptr:LimitedPartnership / fibo-be-le-lp:SpecialPurposeVehicle. These align cleanly. What FIBO does not model is the fund-investment lifecycle: LP commitment as a tracked drawable obligation, capital call, distribution, capital account, NAV-as-event, the waterfall, fund terms as computation-as-data, manager-succession events, and the LP allocator’s view of its fund investments. (“Commitment”, “net asset value”, “limited partner” appear only as descriptive text inside other FIBO definitions — there is no Commitment or CapitalCall class.) That lifecycle-and-allocator layer is OpenIM’s headline contribution.

Derivatives (DR) — strong FIBO alignment. Listed/OTC derivative → fibo-fbc-fi-fi:DerivativeInstrument and DER DerivativesContracts (options, futures/forwards, swaps, credit, rate, structured); ISDA master agreement → DER DerivativesMasterAgreements. The position / exposure / relationship layer above the contract — margin balance, the clearing relationship record — is OpenIM (the CCP itself is fibo-der-drc-bsc:DerivativesClearingOrganization). OpenIM remains complementary to ISDA CDM for the transaction grain.

Real-assets (RA) — near-total FIBO gap. Direct real asset, operating record, lease / tenancy, development project, appraisal — none in FIBO. FIBO touches real estate only via RealEstateInvestmentTrust (a fund wrapper) and mortgage-backed securities — real estate as a securitised instrument, never as a directly-held operating asset. The strongest gap after the private-markets lifecycle.

The identifier story

FIBO models identifiers as first-class, schemed objects — a genuine strength, and the alignment target for OpenIM’s E-14 External Identifier:

• LEI → fibo-be-le-lei:LegalEntityIdentifier, with LegalEntityIdentifierScheme and LEIRegisteredEntity. FIBO’s richest identifier model; aligns directly to OpenIM’s use of LEI as a golden-key source for E-01.
• Instrument identifiers → fibo-fbc-fi-fi:FinancialInstrumentIdentifier — the slot ISIN, CUSIP and FIGI populate.
• Registration identifiers → fibo-be-le-cb:RegistrationIdentifier / RegistrationIdentifierScheme.

FIBO answers “what is an LEI, and what scheme governs it.” OpenIM E-14 answers “which external system’s identifier corresponds to this golden key, and with what provenance.” OpenIM aligns its identifier types to FIBO’s identifier classes and adds the cross-reference / golden-key / alias layer (E-13, E-14) FIBO does not model — because private markets lack a universal identifier, OpenIM must resolve across identifiers, not merely hold them. That resolution layer sits on top of FIBO’s identifier vocabulary.

Relation-verb alignment

The section above aligns OpenIM’s entity classes to FIBO. This section aligns the relation vocabulary — the typed edges between those entities — to FIBO’s object properties. Where the class alignment answers “is this thing the same thing FIBO models,” this one answers “is this relationship the same relationship FIBO models.”

How to read a row. Each forward relation verb gets one row: the FIBO object property it aligns to (with the FIBO module the property lives in), or — when FIBO declares no matching property. The verdict follows the same three-way scheme as the class alignment:

• Clean — FIBO declares an object property that models the same relationship with a directly corresponding domain and range. Asserted in the OWL export as owl:equivalentProperty.
• Partial — FIBO declares a related object property, but broader, narrower, or framed on a different domain/range (e.g. a role class rather than the party master). Asserted as skos:closeMatch.
• OpenIM-only — FIBO declares no object property for this relationship. No FIBO assertion is made; the edge stands on OpenIM’s own vocabulary.

On the predicate choice. The OWL export attaches the FIBO alignment to each verb’s openim:<verb> super-property — owl:equivalentProperty for a clean match, skos:closeMatch for a partial one — mirroring the class-level owl:equivalentClass / skos:closeMatch discipline exactly. Alignment is declared on the forward verb; the reverse direction is reached through the verb’s declared OWL inverse. No verb is asserted as a logical equivalent except where FIBO’s property genuinely models the identical relationship — the buy-side relations run on OpenIM’s own entity classes (E-01 Legal Entity, E-03 Portfolio / Mandate, PM-01 Fund & Vehicle), not FIBO’s role classes, so most matches are honestly close, not equivalent.

On verification (non-negotiable). Every FIBO object-property curie asserted below was verified against the live FIBO source — the module RDF from the published EDM Council FIBO ontology, confirmed to declare that owl:ObjectProperty. A relationship for which no matching FIBO object property could be verified is listed openim-only, never given an invented curie — the same discipline the class alignment above runs under, applied to the property layer. The FIBO modules confirmed for the aligned set: FND/Relations/Relations, FBC/FinancialInstruments/FinancialInstruments, SEC/Funds/Funds, FND/Agreements/Contracts, and BE/OwnershipAndControl/CorporateControl.

The shape of the result — the thesis, restated at the relationship level. FIBO is rich on the nouns of financial business and rich on a handful of structural relationships (issuance, sub-fund nesting, corporate subsidiarity, contract counterparties, derivative underliers) — and largely silent on the buy-side’s operating relationships. The great majority of OpenIM’s edges — a portfolio’s holdings, a mandate’s benchmark, a commitment’s capital calls, a limit’s breaches, a goal’s progress, a document’s subject — are the investment manager’s operating model, which FIBO does not carry as object properties. That silence is exactly what the relation vocabulary contributes.

Tally. 1 clean (SUBFUND_OF) · 7 partial (FROM_TRANSACTION, HAS_COUNTERPARTY, HELD_BY, ISSUED_BY, RELATED_TO_PARTY, SUBSIDIARY_OF, UNDERLYING_IS) · the remaining verbs openim-only. FIBO carries a handful of structural relationships as object properties; the buy-side operating relationships are OpenIM’s contribution — the same shape the class alignment shows, now at the edge level.

Maintaining this alignment

FIBO moves — modules are revised and added each quarter (the Cash Flows ontology and the expanded derivatives master agreements both arrived in 2025). When a cited FIBO concept is revised, renamed or relocated (the Commons migration of foundational classes is the live example), this alignment is re-verified against the current FIBO source. The alignment is to a moving standard, deliberately.

See ../PRIOR-ART.md for how OpenIM relates to FIBO, ISDA CDM, the identifier standards, and the other adjacent standards.