Overview
ISO/TR 22126-3:2023 - "Financial services - Semantic technology - Part 3: Semantic enrichment of the ISO 20022 conceptual model" is an informative technical report from ISO that surveys practices for adding semantic metadata to the ISO 20022 conceptual model. It focuses on how semantic enrichment supports maintenance of the ISO 20022 repository - both in-repository (annotating concepts with semantic markup and constraints) and outside the repository (referencing repository concepts via IRIs, OIDs, UUIDs and tracking provenance). The report is informative, not normative, and documents state-of-the-art approaches to metadata, identifiers and provenance relevant to information exchange in financial services.
Key topics
- Semantic markup and synonyms
- Annotating repository concepts to indicate synonyms across models (example: mapping a message element to an ISO 15022 value).
- Multilingual support
- Using language tags (IETF BCP 47) for translated names and definitions; RDF representations include language-tagged string properties.
- External code sets and provenance
- Marking CodeSets as externally validated and recording provenance fields (requestor, status, dates).
- Constraints
- Attaching logical expressions to concepts to restrict or validate model usage. Supported languages include CL (Common Logic), OCL, SHACL, and XPath.
- Resource identifiers
- Best practices for constructing IRIs for metamodels and model concepts; referencing using URN OID, UUID (v4, v5), and tool-specific schemes.
- Provenance and pedigree
- Using W3C PROV-O to represent the provenance of changes (change requests, authorship, timestamps) and mappings to ISO 20022 change processes.
Practical applications
- Standards maintainers and registration authorities
- Improve model governance by encoding synonyms, translations, external code validation and change provenance directly in the repository.
- Implementers and integrators
- Use IRIs, OIDs or UUIDs to unambiguously reference ISO 20022 concepts when generating RDF or other machine-readable artifacts.
- Developers of validation tools
- Apply constraints (SHACL, OCL) to validate message variants, restrict feature sets and automate compatibility checks.
- Semantic architects and data modelers
- Enrich the ISO 20022 conceptual model with metadata for interoperability, multilingual publishing and traceable change history.
Related standards and technologies
- ISO 20022-1 (metamodel)
- W3C PROV-O (provenance ontology)
- RDF / IRI / URN (resource identification)
- UUID / ISO/IEC 9834
- IETF BCP 47 (language tags)
- SHACL, OCL, Common Logic, XPath
ISO/TR 22126-3:2023 is essential reading for anyone implementing semantic enrichment, metadata-driven governance or provenance tracking around the ISO 20022 conceptual model in financial services.