Contract Terms and Interest Rates

I was not sure whether to create a JIRA issue for FND or DEBT, it impacts both.

There are different ways to think about and model contract terms.  In English, some things that count as loan contract terms are:

1. The loan maturity period is 360 months

2. The interest rate is variable

3. The interest rate is 4% and cannot be raised before 12 months passes

4. There is no pre-payment penalty

5. A particular loan payment schedule

Simple obvious ways to model these include:

1. LoanContract hasMaturityPeriod some Duration

2. LoanContract has some VariableInterestRate

3. VariableInterestRate 

   1. hasRateValue some decimal

   2. hasEarliestInterestRateChangeInMonths some Duration **

   3. LoanContract  linked to a yes/no property with the value no.

   4. Instance of LoanPaymentSchedule

However, none of these involves an explicit instance of ContractualElement.  We could make an instance of LoanPaymentSchedule also be of rdf:type ContractualElement. But the others are not so easy.  For 1-4, the instances of ContractualElement are logically assertions (i.e. triples) which takes us into meta-land. Not what we want.

Thus I am inclined to not use ContractualElement or ContractTerms at all – unless there is a good way to do so that I am not aware of.

When WOULD a good time be to use these classes? How would that work?

** I need this for the loan ontology.