Hi all, (01)
I have been working on a financial services ontology, which will be one
of the items being presented at today's emerging ontologies showcase. In
order to adequately capture (rather than merely assert the existence of)
the meanings of terms like Share, Bond and so on, I have defined these
as specialised versions of Contract, which is what they are. Similarly
dividend payment terms are a kind of contractual terms, and so on. More
interestingly, when we come to things like Issuer, Counterparty etc.
these are clearly parties to some contract or some transaction. (02)
The repository is at: (03)
http://www.hypercube.co.uk/edmcouncil (04)
It made sense to me, to define a whole universe of such high-level
things as our financial terms are descended from - contracts, legally
binding terms, parties, transactions, money, capital, formula terms and
so on. What started as an exercise in defining the common, necessary
facts about contracts and transactions, soon grew into an interlocking
set of defined terms and relationships from which to derive the
specialised things and properties in our specific universe of discourse,
the financial sector. (05)
It also made sense to me, to distinguish between first- second- and
third-order classes of Thing, as defined by John Sowa and others (John's
book summarises the history of those terms very well). This helps
resolve problems prevalent in some industry data models, whereby a
client or a counterparty ends up with phone numbers and things. It also
made sense to set out partitions for continuant versus occurrent things
(to model facts about corporate events, payments etc.), and concrete
things versus abstract concepts (like strategy, which is a feature of a
fund or portfolio). (06)
So, at the very top of my model I have the top layer of John's stuff, in
the form of three sets of partitions as noted above. Below that I have
the most general things I can think of - those contracts and
transactions, parties, etc., a well as mathematical, geographical,
process and other building blocks. Everything else is derived from
those. This lets me define for example the "Issued Equity" in a company,
as being the thing which is issued equity in the standard accounts
equation. (07)
So far I have basic sets of terms which I know /assume to be true, in
these different areas, but I would prefer if existing resources could be
used (for example XBRL and REA for the financial stuff). REA I can use
and will adapt to when I get a chance. (08)
What interests me, and what I am really asking here, is why is this
approach not noticeable in upper ontology resources like the Suggest
Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO)? Am I missing something? SUMO looked to me
like a single taxonomic hierarchy of classes of Thing, without these
three sets of partitions. Before I can try to reuse existing
standardisation of things and relationships, I would like to think that
they already make these distinctions, particurly the first v second
order distinction. I understand that different groups might approach
these basic ideas differently, but where are they reflected at the moment? (09)
I will address the question about whether the whole venture is
conceptually impossible, in a separate posting, as I'm sure that's a view. (010)
Best regards, (011)
--
Mike Bennett
Director
Hypercube Ltd.
89 Worship Street
London EC2A 2BF
Tel: 020 7917 9522
Mob: 07721 420 730
www.hypercube.co.uk (012)
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