2015-04-21 Meeting notes
- Dennis Wisnosky
Date
Attendees
@
Anthony Coates Bobbin Teegarden DanG David Newman Dennis E. Wisnosky Dennis Pierson Kristin Hochstein Mike Bennett Olivier Schlatter Pete Rivett Wes Moore
Proceedings:
FIBO-BE FCT 2015_04_21
MB Comment (slide 2): there will be issues down the line with naming of some of these
concepts for example isAffiliatedWith versus isAffiliateOf. Need to think about this. Or, if this intended to represent something that is coequal with the other entity, it should probably be isAffiliatedWith.
Other comments / perspectives on naming: Is this property symmetric? Yes. So it would be appropriate to use "with" as part of the naming when a relationship is symmetric ("of" implies a more single direction). So we should probably come up with a formal convention. However this is also considered to be clunky. isAffiliateOf could also work as a label for such a symmetric relationship. Also, is has other implications in technical modeling. Why not hasAffiliate? This was discussed previously, and seemed to imply less of a symmetric relation than the other proposals. The label is less important to the semantics, than the assertions in OWL, including the assertion that the relationship is symmetric. We wanted to find the words that best represented the concept of symmetry. "is" implies a Boolean, from a technical modeler perspective. Meanwhile 'has' does not imply symmetrical.
Comment from a legal perspective: there are no legal implications for any of these labels.
David proposes isAffiliateOf. There would be lots of affiliation relationships, i.e. one entity may have dozens of
other entities of which it is an affiliate, so the label should not imply otherwise.
Decision: isAffiliateOf agreed by consensus.
Regulationspecific definitions: we previously agreed we would have different ontologies covering different regulations, where people could mix and match what they needed. A sub property as proposed, could be in a regulation specific module or ontology. Conversely, need to consider whether there is enough content to justify a separate module, for some of these.
Decision: The original thinking is unchanged: we would partition regulation specific concepts into separate modules, as previously agreed. Meanwhile, this is more of a technical conversation, for the separate technical sessions.
Sole Proprprietership and Sole Proprietor will both be included (one as an independent thing, one as a relative thing). Details to follow at a future meeting. (Slide 2, Sole Proprietership). David explains the removal of the concept of legal personhood in the latest BE ontology. Will explain this in detail later in today's session.
LEI: Outline of the requirements for uniqueness: LE having only one LEI and LEI representing only one LE. Notes that in the real world there are reasons that a Legal Entity may end up with more than one LEI although this is not the intention. This is an error condition, and the Global LEI Foundations has processes to handle this. The question of whether the ontology should represent what should be, or what is to be found in the data. This is a conversation for the technical call.
Decision: That LE has exactly one LEI but an additional property to optionally track and manage duplication LEIs. Because, There is a facility whereby after a time one LEI will be the unique LEI, while one or
more other LEIs would be published through the registries as a duplication LEI.
Action: Whether we want to define a mechanism to define an object property to allow users of LEI to identify in their records that one of their LEIs is a duplicate, which they may have used over time already.
Comment: there will be many entities which fall under the scope of Legal Entity that have no LEI at all. There are entities which have not registered. There will always be new entities that exist before they are registered. Therefore
"exactly one" is wrong. There may be 0.
David regards this scenario as well as the duplicate scenario, as edge cases and proposes we would introduce additional properties to manage them, rather than changing the cardinality of the existing relationship between entity and LEI. In order to perform a trade, an entity must have an LEI.
Question on Scope: is our scope only the subset of entities which trade, or the entities as a whole?
Decision: Consensus - the ontology has to be the broader set of things which exist, since there may be future regulations which would require us to talk about these. AML would be such a use case.
Anthony Coates to David Newman, “in terms of your "one and only one" LEI comments, it's maybe worth noting
that in an "open world" view you can't really enforce "one and only one" anyway (there might be another that you simpler don't have in access to yet), so even if the ontology indicates "one and only one" that shouldn't necessarily constrain a data representation from having multiple LEIs for an organization, if that has happened for some unexpected reason. Talk to OFR the who and the what. Their target is all of the broader relationships that currently don't exist but that could change tomorrow.
Kristin recommends that the scope of FIBO-BE is as broad and generic as possible. All agree.
Comment: We need to identify that there is business value in the ways we propose to use the ontology.
PR: thought that for BE we were going to address the issues that Randy Coleman came across, namely gaps where the ontology did not allow information in the registry to be represented. DWiz: propose we have Randy on the next technical discussion. DWiz - One of the people at the NYC EDM Council meeting, noted that the LEI does not just take you to one place, also need additional measures to identify that the legal entity you got to from the LEI, is the one you think it is. Additional concepts are needed for that.
Question: Would the introduction of different object properties to support the different state ransitions, support Randy's requirement? No, these are another issue, namely data fields in the registry for which we don't have
a corresponding element in FIBO.
Decision: Once we find out what these things are, we need to identify if these are something to include in this release. Or are they things we can live without until the next release?
Action: Dennis will talk to Randy tomorrow and find out what is missing.
Action: David to arrange a separate call with attorneys look at definitions as per previous decision.
Review of the hierarchy as shown in the Protege view.
DN notes we are no longer constrained with certain entities being sub classes of Legal Person as we had before. This is replaced with a logical union, to group types of entity together. The two major classes within the logical union are LegalEntity and NaturalPerson
Question to clarify: are these things of which the union is a union or are they sub classes of the logical union? David asserts these are the same. Therefore the members of the union are subclasses of the union. Pete disagrees (as does Mike). This will be taken to the technical discussion.
The union LegalEntityOrNaturalPerson is the label for this union discussed above. In the future this will also include SoleProprietership, which will not be a Legal Entity in the sense of something with an LEI. So we need a name which has more business meaning than the above label, while also accounting for the suggestion above, that more things might become members of this
Proposal: Make this LegalEntiteAndNAturalPerson
However that means an intersection: only the things that are members of both sets (this will likely will be an empty set)? Pete says that the Answer is No. David confirms that SolePropetership would also be added into this union. Also there are other things that David has in mind to add. Mike comments that this means we can't ask people to come up with a meaningful name now, for something the extension of which has not been fully defined.
What if for instance we replaced NaturalPerson with SolePropertership? Why are we even making the distinction between Sole Proprietership and Natural Person? Previously we had Sole Propriertership as a Functionally Defined Entity (specifically a Business, whose hasIdentity relationships was restricted to being only Natural Persons). Dan - Don't understand the merits of putting these into the same type hierarchy since there is no intrinsic difference between Natural Person and Sole Proprietor, just a difference in activity. David agrees that they are the same and therefore proposes that we replace NaturalPerson with SolePropertership in the union. Where SolePropertership is a business entity is the natural person. Also, natural persons can enter into contracts who are not sole proprietors, e.g. loan borrowers.
We also need to distinguish between "business" and non profits. Note that some churches trade swaps. In these cases, they have an LEI. In each case, they are legally constituted organizations, so are covered in the existing model We also have Juridical Person, which would also cover this, now that JuridicalPerson is no longer a kind of LegalPerson. In fact, FormallyConstitutedOrganization also covers this. This is anything that has some formal agreement among its principals. So it seems that whatever a church of synagogue etc. would use to trade swaps, can be one of the kinds of legal form we have already defined.
Originally there was an issue with legal personhood for Foundations, which required (a) more research into the nature of foundations, and (b) more thought about how to model these. Simply assuming that the label "Foundation" will always refer to the same kind of ontological thing may be the case, or it may not.
Mike warns against assuming that Foundation will unpack to one kind of ontological thing across civil law and common law jurisdictions. It probably will, but we would be advised not to assume this a priori. Not all words always reference the same kind of ontological thing across all jurisdictions.
Question: What about Government? Would instances of Government, such as State Government, Local Government, Federal Government would these always get an LEI? Yes, we would expect this. Government might relate both to kinds of legal entity, and formal organizations. The label "Government" may be applied both to sovereign and state as legal persons, and formal organizations that carry out some function on behalf of a government, as a government agency. Both of these kinds of thing should be expected to have LEI (Pete found some examples of both, as things having LEIs today). Not everything that has the label "Government" will roll up to the same class of ontological thing.
There are 2 separate matters: did the LEI and GLEIF structure anticipate or expect we would have to support these kinds of entities, and do we, separate from the LEI initiative, think differently about how to handle government, government agencies, government structure and so on.
Action: Kristin will do more research on this. Will consider whether some of these things fall under Legal Entity and / or Formal Organization. From Kristin's firm TR has a government model they have looked at.
The FIBO Government model is very incomplete as we recognized the complexity of these issues and left only stubs, to distinguish between sovereign legal persons (The People; The Crown) and government agencies. So Kristen's work will fill a gap which we deliberately left open for future work.
Trusts: The diagram being shown on screen gives further insight into the kinds of entities that banks are interested in: Includes a lot of additional kinds of trust e.g. Estate Trust, Universities and so forth.