Semantic Metadata Management Leveraging Intuitive Ontologies Developed with Best Practices

The OFR strives to deliver high-quality financial data, standards, and analysis for the FSOC, its member agencies, and the public. In our mission, we face the challenges in managing massive information from disparate data sources in varied formats with some supported by financial data standards for efficiency, but the data are in silos, not transparent nor interoperable for financial stability research. The solution must include ontologies. Ontologies consist of classes and explicit relations that connect classes to represent knowledge. Classes are key terms to describe universals in reality in domains of interest to provide the data with meaning in an unambiguous, transparent, and consistent way. Ontologies are indispensable for any use or reuse of data, including integration of data from multiple and distributed sources. They empower the intended users to find and understand the data. Reliable queries using intuitive and flexible ontologies will impact efficiency for working with data and integration.

Information, Data, and Metadata
Data Models and Financial Data Standards
Ontologies (semantic data model) and Taxonomies

W3C Standards (OWL, RDFS, and RDF) and components
Best practices in ontology development and governance

Semantic Metadata Management and Regulatory Data Ontology project

Demo: ontologies and queries

Next steps and Q/As

Dr. Liju Fan, a Senior Standards Specialist at the OFR Data Center, leads the development of ontologies to provide unambiguous meaning and common understanding of financial regulatory data to facilitate data integration. She also works on semantic metadata management in developing and applying proper ontologies that are intuitive and flexible. Before joining the OFR, she was the owner of Ontology Workshop, LLC, where she added valuable contributions to projects developing and applying ontologies in the government and public sectors for financial and non-financial data. Her previous employers include Varen Technologies Inc., Semantic Strategy Inc., Council for Logistics Research Inc., FujiFilm Medical Systems USA, and KEVRIC. Demonstrating usefulness and applicability of her expertise, her experience encompasses information security, enterprise architecture, financial management, medical imaging, patient safety, public health, and clinical and bio-medical research.