Financial ontologies
Formal specifications of financial concepts and their relationships — instruments, entities, events, exposures — with defined semantics that permit machine reasoning rather than only machine reading.
The position
Every agent system in finance is building an implicit ontology and calling it a schema. The difference matters: a schema constrains storage, an ontology constrains meaning, and only the second survives contact with a second system. FDC3's context data and FIBO already exist and are largely ignored by the agent community, which is reinventing vocabulary that has industry adoption. Read XBRL's extension problem first — it is the canonical demonstration that format standardisation without vocabulary discipline buys nothing.
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