# A Semantic Model for Enhancing Data-Driven Open Banking Services
## 2 Background Concepts and Related Work
### Related Work  
In the past and current literature, not many studies can be found that propose ontologies dealing with the economic and/or finance domains of knowledge. However, these constitute important contributions that are worth highlighting.  
A first attempt was introduced by [PERSON] et al. in [7], where an interesting ontology-based platform was developed to integrate finance base contents and semantics in a knowledge base that provides a conceptual view of low-level contents, including navigation semantic search facilities. However, it still constitutes a preliminary proposal for which the ontology developed is unavailable, and the semantic search is limited to values of specific properties only.  
In 2008, as a result of the European Estrella protect (ESTRELLA Project [[http://www.estrellaproject.org/](http://www.estrellaproject.org/)]([http://www.estrellaproject.org/](http://www.estrellaproject.org/)) (accessed on 27 November 2022)), the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF) [2] appeared as an XML Schema for representing theories and arguments (proofs). An approach in LKIF consists of a set of axioms and defeasible inference rules. The individuals and predicates can be imported from an ontology represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Importing an ontology also imports the axioms of the ontology. Other LKIF files may also be imported, enabling complex theories to be modularized.  
Also in the domain of financial products, but with a different orientation, an ontology was proposed in [9] (2011) for annotating financial products and customers. The ultimate aim of this work was to model a recommender system for linking products with client's profiles, and so the proposal was restricted to this specific application.  
As remarked in the introduction, an important past proposal is the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) (EDM Council FIBO [[https://spec.edmcouncil.org/fibo](https://spec.edmcouncil.org/fibo)]([https://spec.edmcouncil.org/fibo](https://spec.edmcouncil.org/fibo)) (accessed on 20 November 2022)) [8] (2013), which was conceived as an ontological model composed of modules or sub-ontologies, each one for a specific purpose in the regulatory domain of finance. This ontology is aligned with LKIF, as they both focus on the legal regulation of the different actors in financial transactions. Although they do not cover PSD2 bank statement directives, they could be easily aligned to OBO with regard to classes such as _service provider_, _legal person_ or _regulatory agency_.  
More recently, in 2017, the OntoREA [19] model was proposed to cover the REA accounting UML model that conceptualizes the economic logic of accounting in terms of resources that are exchanged in economic events between economic agents. It is a mapping translation using OntoUML [20], although no OWL specification is provided and it is oriented to top-level economic concepts.  
Similarly, the COFRIS [21] ontology was proposed, also in 2017, to consider financial information systems that model accounting reports. It is also designed with the OntoUML language but with a particular orientation through financial reporting according to regulations, hence covering scopes other than open banking statements and reconciliation methods.  
In 2021, the authors of this paper [22] argued that there was a need for a semantized banking schema. They integrated existing COVID-19 ontologies in order to analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the banking sector.  
Therefore, although these ontologies describe many of the top-level concepts in the domain of economic regulation, they represent initial steps in the semantic specification of specific data-driven mechanisms for allowing advanced analysis in financial statements. The OBO ontology proposed here aims to describe one step beyond this direction, with a special focus on open banking statements and transactions.