Clarifying Ossie’s relationship with FIBO and the financial-services semantic stack

[Joker-of-Gotham]

Hi Ossie maintainers and community,

First, thank you for pushing forward an open, vendor-neutral semantic interchange specification. I am especially interested in the financial-services direction and the recently announced Financial Services Semantic Working Group.

I would like to better understand how Ossie is expected to relate to existing financial reference ontologies, especially FIBO.

From my current reading, the projects appear to operate at different layers:

• FIBO seems to act as a financial-services reference ontology: a formal OWL/RDF-based conceptual model for financial business concepts, relationships, and definitions.
• Ossie seems to act as a semantic model and interchange layer: a YAML/JSON-oriented specification for exchanging datasets, fields, metrics, relationships, ontology concepts, mappings, AI context, and related semantic-layer metadata across tools.
• BI tools, AI agents, data catalogs, query engines, and governance platforms would then consume or produce Ossie-compatible semantic models, potentially with mappings to reference ontologies such as FIBO.

Is this layering a fair interpretation?

More concretely, I would like to ask:

1. Is Ossie intended to complement FIBO, rather than replace it, in financial-services use cases?
   For example, should FIBO be treated as a reference ontology layer, while Ossie provides an interoperable semantic-model exchange format that can reference or map to FIBO concepts?

2. Does the Financial Services Semantic Working Group plan to publish FIBO-aligned examples or templates?
   For instance, examples around trades, positions, instruments, accounts, entities, exposures, claims, transactions, or risk metrics.

3. How should an Ossie model reference external ontology concepts?
   Should Ossie concepts carry external ontology IRIs, such as FIBO class/property IRIs?
   Should mappings be represented as first-class mapping objects, extensions, annotations, or a separate alignment package?

4. How should Ossie distinguish between conceptual ontology semantics and implementation-level semantic models?
   For example:

   • FIBO defines a conceptual class such as a financial instrument, legal entity, contract, exposure, or position.
   • Ossie defines datasets, fields, metrics, relationships, and AI context that may be backed by warehouse tables, APIs, or BI semantic layers.
   • A production system maps physical data elements and metrics to those concepts.

   Is this the intended chain, or does the project see a different architecture?

5. How will versioning and governance work when mapping to FIBO?
   FIBO is governed and released as a formal ontology. If Ossie models reference FIBO terms, should an Ossie model record the FIBO version, namespace, release date, or profile used?

6. Will the project provide conformance or validation guidance for ontology mappings?
   For example, checking that a dataset field mapped to a FIBO concept has the expected type, relationship, multiplicity, or semantic role.

7. Where should benchmark or industry-specific semantic packages live?
   Should financial-services templates become part of the core Ossie repository, a separate examples repository, or domain packages maintained by working groups?

I am asking because the distinction seems important for adoption. If Ossie positions itself as the open interchange layer that can align operational semantic models with domain ontologies like FIBO, then it could become a very useful bridge between reference ontology work, modern semantic layers, and AI-agent-ready business context.

Thanks again for the work on this project. I would be very interested in any guidance, roadmap notes, or recommended modeling patterns for FIBO/Ossie alignment.