EDM Council hires DoD veteran to lead FIBO standards work
Wisnosky: FIBO will lower costs and provide transparency
The Enterprise Data Management Council has appointed Dennis Wisnosky to lead the implementation process for its Financial Industry Business Ontology – FIBO – suite of standards.
Wisnosky is a veteran of the data management world, having previously acted as the chief technology officer and chief architect in the US Department of Defense Business Mission Area, part of the Office of the Deputy Chief Management Officer. In that role, Wisnosky was responsible for providing expert guidance and oversight in the design, development and modification of the federated architectures supporting the BMA.
Wisnosky focused substantially on data ontology, semantic web methods, Service Oriented Architecture and cloud computing throughout his tenure at the DoD, and brings that experience to the EDM Council to help it address “the political and technical realities associated with the FIBO standard”.
Michael Atkin, managing director of the EDM Council, said: “On-going regulatory and cost challenges have put the entire financial services industry under pressure to adopt sensible data management standards that can help mitigate systemic risk. The EDM Council and its members have worked together to bring these standards to bear, and this appointment will help us take a major step forward to making this a practical reality.”
In information science, ontology concerns the formal representation of knowledge, as opposed to data, and the relationships between concepts. The development of FIBO is intended to present the facts about financial instruments, business entities, loans, market data, transactions and corporate actions in a technology-neutral format along with precise definitions and defined business relationships.
It is an open source initiative that should standardise the language of financial contracts and promote unambiguous communications between institutions. FIBO and the EDM Council’s overall semantics initiative are based on the legal structures and obligations contained in the contracts that form the foundation of the financial industry. This has been constructed into a business conceptual ontology that formally models the reality of how the financial industry operates.
“FIBO, as it evolves, will prove to be the single business and technology solution that will both lower the cost of data management within financial industry firms, and provide the transparency to government regulators now required by law,” said Wisnosky.
One of Wisnosky’s first goals will be to finalise the inaugural FIBO standard for business entities within the governance structure of the Object Management Group (a global technical standards body) and implement a formal methodology for operational implementation.
