Business Entities (BE) is a FIB-DM package that standardizes definitions, relationships, and structures for organizations, legal entities, and ownership. Derived from the likenamed FIBO modules, it provides the entities and design patterns for identifying legal persons, corporate structures, and governmental entities in financial services.
Business Entities are formed under commercial law to engage in business, including corporations, partnerships, trusts, and sole proprietorships. The packages cover legal entities, corporate structure, ownership and control, and functional entities like non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government bodies.
Package hierarchy
The diagram shows the three hierarchy levels and package dependencies.
BE-Legal Entities defines the generic concept and supertypes for entities in the other packages. Ownership and control define relations between Business Entities. Functional Entities are defined by what a Business Entity does rather than by its legal structure. There are specialized packages for government entities, corporations, trusts, partnerships, sole proprietors, and private companies.
Entity-Relationship diagrams
Package descriptions
The package comments in FIB-DM derive from the ontology annotation properties.
Functional Entities
The package for data model objects derived from the Functional Entities ontology module. This ontology defines the fundamental concepts for entities defined by their function, such as the relationships to the various forms that a given functionally defined entity may take. It also includes a number of basic entity types defined by function, such as business and non-profit. The concepts in this ontology are intended to be extensible to other ontologies, which may be dedicated to specific kinds of functionally defined business entities or organizations.
Legal Entity Identifiers
The package for data model objects derived from the LEI Entities ontology module. This ontology defines concepts around contractually capable business entities. The terms defined here are those that are relevant to the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) work. The term “legal entity” in that work is defined as a formal organization recognized in some jurisdiction as capable of incurring liability, whether or not it is a legal person as understood by the legal community. This is labeled as a contractually capable entity to avoid confusion with the accepted legal term for Legal Entity. Such entities are recognized as requiring an LEI, but the identifier itself is assigned to the formal organization recognized as contractually capable.
Corporate Bodies
The package for data model objects derived from the Corporate Bodies ontology module. This ontology defines the basic constructs for corporate bodies, including for-profit and not-for-profit corporations, and includes fundamental concepts for companies incorporated through the issuance of shares.