FIBO Alignment

OpenIM maps its canonical entities to the Financial Industry Business Ontology where the concepts have compatible meanings. This document records that mapping entity by entity.

FIBO defines financial concepts and the relationships between them. EDM Council hosts FIBO, and the Object Management Group standardises it. OpenIM uses those semantics where they fit its firm-level capability and entity model.

Each mapping has one of three outcomes. A clean mapping uses a compatible FIBO concept. A partial mapping records the shared meaning and the OpenIM extension. An OpenIM-only entry records that this review found no suitable FIBO concept.

The identifiers below follow FIBO’s ontology-prefix convention, such as fibo-fbc-fi-fi:FinancialInstrument. Foundational classes from the OMG Commons Ontology Library retain their cmns-* identifiers.

Coverage relevant to OpenIM

FIBO provides concepts relevant to several parts of OpenIM:

• legal entities and registered identifiers
• financial instruments and securities
• funds and collective investment vehicles
• market indices, rates and corporate actions

OpenIM also defines operating records for capabilities such as allocation, valuation, entity resolution and risk. The tables below assess whether a suitable FIBO concept exists for each OpenIM entity.

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.