The Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) has a deep hierarchy of object properties that connect its classes. In the FIBO Data Model, they become Associative Entities. (Associative Entities connect two or more base entities. E.g., Person has an Email address)

The image is a screenshot of the FIBO import into the PowerDesigner data modeling tool. There are 2293 base entities and 747 Associative Entities in the latest Normative model version.

The Concept Hierarchy diagrams are the most popular FIB-DM download.

Subtyping Associative Entities is a standard Entity-Relationship modeling pattern. The IBM Banking & Financial Markets Data Warehouse Model, for example, has deep hierarchies of data-concept relationships (e.g., IP-IP, IP-AR, AR-EV). Likewise, the semantic model, the FIBO has a deep rdfs:subPropertyOf Object Property Hierarchy.

In FIB-DM for PowerDesigner and other modeling tools, Associative Entities have the like-named Stereotype to facilitate reporting and downstream ETL platforms. The diagrams depict them in blue, whereas base entities are shown in yellow. The example shows the generic FIBO-derived “has” association with a few of its subtypes. “has Address” connects an Agent or Role to its physical or virtual location. The associations mimic the subtype hierarchy of the Address base entity.

Finally, as a quality check, we run the PowerDesigner Model Check to ensure that the FIBO Data Model meets the highest quality standards.