RFC Work in Progress

The RFC specification was submitted into the OMG process in order to give people a chance to look at it as soon as possible. A number of key aspects of the specification remain “Work In Progress” and will need to be completed before a final version of this RFC can be supplied. The 4 week deadline date for OMG RFCs meant that the document sent in was a snapshot of this work at that moment in time. The following aspects of the specification are still “In Progress” at November 14, the date the RFC was sent in:

1. Business Entities Model Content 2. Report on the Model Content 3. ODM Implementation 4. Additional Metadata for Annotations 5. Shared Semantics Treatments 6. Change Management / Submission material

In addition there are minor references and document-level features to be improved upon, namely:

Formal references to the standards referencedReference to organizations who support the submission, organizations which took part in the workDetails of the 6 main “In Progress” items are as detailed below. We hope to bring all these matters to a successful conclusion ahead of the December OMG Quarterly Meeting.

1. Business Entities Model Content

The final SME Review session on the Business Entities content was completed this week, Wednesday 30 November. A couple of minor additional actions were agreed. We may also decide to change the packaging structure of this content, to segregate ownership and control relationships, and types of business entity defined by function. Once the ‘Annotation Metadata’ aspect of the work is complete, the content of the model will be refactored to make use of that metadata for definitions and modeling notes, provenance etc. before exporting this in XMI for import into the metadata repository and for creation of OWL.

2. Report on the Model Content

The report provided in this RFC draft was generated directly from the existing model repository in Enterprise Architect. This is not the format in which the final version of the report will be made available, since this is to be produced from the metadata repository. It has been noted that aspects of the EA report are not compliant with UML. In addition, the report includes unpopulated tagged values, and many of the notes are a detailed capture of our review session discussions. Since the Enterprise Architect tool is not the one we will use to provide the final formal report, there is no reason to look at these in detail. These simply provide a snapshot of the model in its current state and from its current environment, for the record. In addition, no diagrams have been provided. Diagrams in this specification are not normative, only the requirements for the diagrams are. We will take a view as to whether to include some diagrams for guidance to the content in the final version of this RFC, and if so which diagrams to provide.

3. ODM Implementation

The precise implementation of the Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) standard is still being finalized. Since publishing this “snapshot” of the specification, we have decided to deprecate the use of Named Graphs in this specification and therefore will remove the entries for those. Discussions are ongoing within ODM on some details of the representation of “facts”, that is, instances of OWL Annotation Properties. I believe we have a solution for this as of now which will work for us. This was not in place at the time of this snapshot. Other aspects of our ODM implementation are believed to be complete.

4. Additional Metadata for Annotations

In addition to ODM itself, we have been working on additional metadata for various kinds of annotations to the model. These include formalization of the non OWL terms which we introduced to the modeling, formalization of the content of what is currently in ‘Notes’ fields in the UML model (definition, further notes), formalization of our “Term Origin” and “Definition Origin” metadata, additional mapping metadata, change management metadata, and contextual meta-terms such as “Classification Facet”. This work is almost complete, and was waiting only on finalization of the ODM implementation of ‘fact’ which has now been dealt with. The 14 November draft RFC covers these metadata terms and may require updates for these as this work progresses.

5. Shared Semantics Treatments

At the time of going to press with the draft RFC we had not quite completed the descriptions of the different formal treatments for identifying the semantics of terms in our “Global Terms” section with reference to semantics in other ontologies and standards. Since going to press we have made two changes to date: - Removal of the treatment using SKOS Match (UML cross reference will use the new metadata instead) - Removal of the Named Graph treatment. Work is ongoing, for example on how to implement the XBRL Abstract Model and use this to reference the semantics of the XBRL Global Ledger material.

6. Change Management / Submission material

We are working closely with the Object Management Group “Policy and Procedures” experts to propose a full, formal change management process that is suitable for the submission of frequent changes to the content of content-specific standards, of which this FIBO set of standards would be an example. This work is not yet complete. A section of each FIBO RFC specification will contain material which describes the application of the not-yet-written OMG P&Ps for content, to the specifics of the FIBO standard, and the specific requirements of ontologies. We were advised to make this a “Section 0.” For Submission information, so that it has no effect on the numbering of the remainder of the document.

Other Matters

There are some other matters on which we may still need to make decisions. In particular: - What is normative and non normative around the “Global Terms” sections? o The current RFC assumes that all Global Terms material should itself be Normative, however that is not a hard and fast decision, and we may change this with further guidance from others at the OMG. o The Global Terms material is not intended to be normatively a part of the Business Entities content per se, but we do consider that many of the terms there are vital to normatively and completely articulating the meanings of the normative Business Entities ontology terms. We have also received a number of detailed and valuable comments from people who have looked at this specification. Except where these comments relate to matters that are (or were on 14 Nov) in progress, we expect to implement these comments or address any concerns that they bring up.