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2019-05-28 Meeting notes

2019-05-28 Meeting notes

Owned by Mike Bennett
Last updated: Jul 07, 2024 by Elisa Kendall

Date

Attendees

Apologies


Agenda

  1. News
  2. FND Web Collateral
    • Wiki / mission statement and roadmap
    • Public website material
  1. Use cases
  2. Housekeeping
    • Recent Pull Requests
  1. FND FCT Roadmap
  2. AoB

Proceedings:

Website: FND FCT Description

Reviewed wording on the website for Foundations, at:

https://spec.edmcouncil.org/fibo/working-group.html

Question: Should we list all the module subject areas as currently seen here or should we try to frame a more intensional definition of what the scope and intent of FIBO FND content is?

PR: Questions whether Goals and Legal Constructs should even be there, in light of recent use case explorations.

Consensus: This suggests that the answer to the question above is ‘No’. We do not yet have a clear understanding of what the content and scope should be, so we should continue to list what is actually there. The current description is OK as it stands. 

Modularization

MB made the point that FIBO content is often surprisingly introduced at levels below where it should be placed for re-use and that for some reason implementers of ontologies in other FCTs are not identifying when some concept they need may be more broadly applicable, such that it should be in FND or FBC. 

PR points out that we can find these by monitoring the pull requests. 

MB: We have been monitoring these for changes that explicitly affect FND but we did not expect to have to monitor non FND content for these failures of imagination. Now that these pull requests have all been actioned we need to do a pass through the model to find things that might be at too low a level (like the recent example of the mathematical concepts found in IND, which we would not have looked for). Will do a pass through the content and come back to the group with any other such that may have slipped by, if any. In future, we will have to minotor all Pull Requests, looking not only at FND content. 

Web Copy Requirements

Domain Descriptions

Looked at the wiki page on FLT:

https://wiki.edmcouncil.org/display/FLT/2.+FIBO+module+and+domain+documentation

Comments:

RT: The headings outlined on that page are a guide only. Look at the page he created for LEI for an alternative to what this might look like.

Discussion: What is the nature and intent of that LEI page?

Consensus: There seem to be 3 kinds of thing on this set of headings (tree structure on the wiki):

  1. FIBO Domains (SEC, DER etc.)
    1. To-be deprecated Domains where content is to be moved into the main content Domains (e.g. Market Data, Business Process)
    2. Also the informal notion of sub domain e.g. Equity Debt, where different groups may work on content that is in a Module within a FIBO Domain
  2. FIBO FCTs that are not Domains in their own right; these deliver content into existing Domains
    1. E.g. Ratings (the first of these)
  3. FIBO-LEI
    1. This is clearly something else
    2. A use case?

The material shown for FIBO LEI is not really a use case in any recognizable sense.

JG: This could be characterized as something like ‘supporting documentation’ and would go beneath for example a use case description.

Use Cases

Reference was made to the Use Case template provided by Elisa Kendall (document OEUseCaseTemplate.docx)

Discussion:

A use case in the sense reflected in this template is a behavioral description of an application that is to be developed. It includes business process diagrams, interfaces, actors and so on. It also (rightly) reflects the nature of a Use Case as a formally controlled but computationally independent model for what an intended application is to do.

MB: Ontologies (of a sort) were introduced to complement behavioral use cases with structural data semantics, at the same level. To be something with a use case is to be an application.

What we really mean by Use Case for these FIBO FCTs was described by Robert in terms of being a description of how you might use a part of (existing) FIBO in furtherance of some business activities; it is more about the required FIBO website descriptive content, rather than a specification for an application development.

CC also circulated an email during this call that had similar comments on the usability of that template (see annex).

The basic requirement is to describe the information needed for a range of business purposes. This was also what RT was describing in relation to the LEI example. It is also what MB describes in the slides as the original remit for FIBO.

Action: MB to draft a suitable template for Business Scenarios, based loosely on the OE Template but refocused to match the requirement to define kinds of information needed for a range of business scenarios.

Competency questions: this phrase is often used exclusively to mean the questions to be answered by a Semantic Web reasoning / inference processing application. PR clarified that this was not what he means by it here. This brings everyone onto the same page: We are talking about descriptions of what data people need to carry out a range of business functions, with FIBO providing the semantics for that data. Therefore what PR means by Competency Questions in this context is the same as the above notion of the Business Scenario ‘Use Case’.

Consensus: All agreed that the template we were looking at is far too specific to behavioral requirements for application development, and that what we all mean here by Use Case is really a description of a business scenario in which data is used, integrated, reasoned over or otherwise put to work. We agreed that this would better be described as ‘Business Scenario’.

Finance Industry Use Cases / Business Scenarios

In the remainder of the meeting MB went through the slides on use cases. The current ‘internal’ use case of supporting other FCTs is well understood. The remaining slides gave a description of the broader industry business scenarios, as these need to be understood by FIBO developers, who will need support from FND in terms of descriptions of how to design FIBO in the context of these business scenarios.

Next Steps and Roadmap

We did not get to the review of Agreements. We will cover Agreements and Contracts (documentation of these, business scenarios, FIBO meanings and usage), as the first of the planned series of written documentation per Module / topic. Our Roadmap is to continue through the list of FND Modules on this basis.

Decisions:

The FND Team Description on the current website is OK as it stands - no changes. 

The template we were looking at is far too specific to behavioral requirements for application development.

What we all mean here by Use Case is really a description of a business scenario in which data is used, integrated, reasoned over or otherwise put to work.

We agreed that this would better be described as ‘Business Scenario’. 

Future FND meetings will focus on documenting how to use FIBO for the different modules within FND, based on an understanding of business scenarios for information usage. 

In future monitoring of Pull Requests we need to look not only at changes in FND, but proactively look for concepts that people have introduced without considering that they may belong in FND or FBC. 

Action items

  • Mike Bennett Come up with a suitable Business Scenario template based on the OE Use Case template but geared towards business scenario information and semantics requirements.
  • Mike Bennett Go through existing Release content for any failures to position content at the appropriate levels of abstraction