The credit crisis of 2008 illustrated the data problems associated with unraveling the complex and globally interconnected world of the financial industry. We didn’t know precisely how some of the more esoteric financial instruments worked. We couldn’t link derivatives to their underlying assets. We had a difficult time unraveling ownership and control relationships of legal entities. We didn’t fully understand who was obligated to whom and who would be left holding the obligation when financial processes were unraveling. It was a devastating problem then and it is not much better now.

Conventional approaches aren’t working. There is only one real solution – data harmonization across federated systems, aligned to contractual meaning and expressed in RDF/OWL. In this presentation, we will put the data challenges associated with linked risk analysis into context and explain the pathway moving forward using the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO).