Paul Wilton

In most cases when working with or designing an ontology I like to be able to
visualise the model. When designing an ontology from scratch I typically draw
out the model on a whiteboard or directly into a drawing tool, for example 
LucidChart [http://www.lucidchart.com] (my current favourite) or OmniGraffle.
This approach lets us rapidly iterate the model visually before getting our
hands dirty with OWL and RDF. It also allows us to collaborate on the model in a
much more effective way, and engage domain experts whom might not be familiar
with RDF.

While researching public domain models for a recent project, I explored FIBO
[http://www.edmcouncil.org/financialbusiness], the Financial Industry Business
Ontology. FIBO is a suite of building block ontologies engineered by the 
Enterprise Data Management Council [http://www.edmcouncil.org/] to

> “standardize the language used to precisely define the terms, conditions,
and characteristics of financial instruments; the legal and relationship
structure of business entities; the content and time dimensions of market
data; and the legal obligations and process aspects of corporate actions.”


The FIBO v1.0 ontologies currently consist of a set of foundation models
[https://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/] and a set of models describing the
characteristics of business entities [http://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/BE].
Future FIBO ontologies (yet to be published by EDM) will model the domain of
financial instruments and indexes.

While the FIBO ontologies are well defined and the RDFS/OWL definitions are
available for download, there is little in the way of visualisation for
consumers and developers with respect to how the ontologies work together. So it
made sense for me to create visualisations of the models to aid my own
evaluation. The first models I have visualised are the Person domain model, and
the Organization domain model. In these visualisations the symbology used is as
follows :

 * Rectangles = RDFS Datatypes (FIBO defined and XSD datatypes)
 * Hexagons = Predicates
 * Ovals = Classes

Many of the foundation predicates from the FIBO Relations ontology are specified
without formal RDFS domains and ranges in order to enable re-use. Their usages
within each more specific domain ontology are then defined using local OWL
Restrictions on classes. On the diagrams I have indicated these as virtual
domains and ranges of the predicates, clearly distinct from the explicit
rdfs:domain and rdfs:range predicate definitions that can be reasoned upon.

The name prefixes displayed follow the FIBO prefix convention and reference each
FIBO ontology as follows :

prefixnamespacefibo-fnd-rel-relhttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/Relations/Relations/fibo-fnd-utl-bthttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/Utilities/BusinessFacingTypes/fibo-fnd-aap-agt
http://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/AgentsAndPeople/Agents/fibo-fnd-gao-glhttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/GoalsAndObjectives/Goals/fibo-fnd-plc-ctyhttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/Places/Countries/fibo-fnd-aap-pplhttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/AgentsAndPeople/People/fibo-be-le-lphttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/BE/LegalEntities/LegalPersons/fibo-fnd-pty-ptyhttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/Parties/Parties/fibo-fnd-pty-rlhttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/Parties/Roles/fibo-fnd-org-orghttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/Organizations/Organizations/fibo-fnd-org-fm
http://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/Organizations/FormalOrganizations/
fibo-fnd-org-lghttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/FND/Organizations/LegitimateOrganizations/
fibo-be-le-fbohttp
://www.omg.org/spec/EDMC-FIBO/BE/LegalEntities/FormalBusinessOrganizations/The
first ontology tackled is the Person domain model and is visualised below :

The next ontology visualised is the Organization domain model as follows :

I hope these visualisations are helpful. Both images can be seen in full
resolution if opened in a new browser tab, or downloaded.
In a future post I hope to tackle visualisations for Functional Business
Entities, Contracts, Accounting Equity and the Legal domains once these models
are released.

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