The Inferal Insurance Market Ontology is a sourced, jurisdiction-aware RDF model for buyers, intermediaries, carriers, placements, policies, representation, delegated actions, risk participation, risk transfer, and participant forms. It keeps contextual market roles separate from organizational classifications and keeps written capacity separate from the direction and amount of transferred risk. It enables data engineers, market analysts, and knowledge-graph teams to integrate buyer, broker, carrier, delegated-authority, and reinsurance records without erasing their context or evidence.
This is an unofficial 0.1 Editor's Draft maintained by Inferal. Feedback should be sent to contact@inferal.com.
The key words MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, and MAY are to be interpreted as described in [[RFC2119]]. Normative statements apply to the following actors.
The RDFS vocabulary states open-world meaning. The optional OWL addendum types classes, properties, and named scheme resources but adds no equivalence, disjointness, functional properties, keys, or closure axioms. SHACL expresses intrinsic graph well-formedness under a closed-world validation operation. The query recipes in this specification are informative inspection behavior; they do not materialize new market facts. No inverse triples need to be materialized because this module defines no inverse properties.
A stricter application profile MAY require complete market rosters, shares that sum to one, source-specific identifiers, or closed action lists. Such a profile MUST identify its completeness boundary and MUST NOT present its local closure assumptions as base ontology entailments.
Insurance records often turn a contextual label into a permanent party type. That fails when the same carrier leads one policy, follows another, fronts a third, and transfers only part of what it wrote. This ontology makes assignments, participations, transfers, authorities, and classifications explicit resources so that context, provenance, jurisdiction, dates, and confidence travel with each assertion.
The specification is intended for knowledge-graph publishers who merge broker, carrier, authority, and market records; ontology engineers who map operational standards; validators who enforce a portable graph contract; and analysts who need to distinguish incomplete evidence from a negative fact. It is deliberately role-first: a party remains the same resource while its assignments and capacity relationships change.
The module covers contextual roles and representation, program placements with multiple offerings and policies, written and retained capacity, directional risk transfer, delegated insurance actions, and evidence-backed participant forms. Its identity boundary is an assertion-sized relationship: publishers mint separate assignments, participations, transfers, authorities, and classifications whenever context, represented party, parties, evidence, or validity differ.
This module does not:
Those concerns belong to imported identity vocabularies, line-of-business modules, explicit profiles, or mappings. Their absence is unknown or out of scope—not a negative assertion.
| Question | Answer pattern |
|---|---|
| Which party plays which role, in what context, and whom does it represent? | Role assignment roster, including optional represented party, jurisdiction, validity, source, and confidence. |
| Which parties are policyholder, insured, beneficiary, payer, or claimant? | Independent role assignments sharing a policy context; no identity collapse is required. |
| Which offerings and policies form a placement program? | All placement-offering and resulting-policy edges for the placement. |
| Who writes and retains capacity, and in which role? | Risk participations with optional written and retained shares. |
| Who transferred risk to whom, in what context, and with what known share? | Directional risk transfers; missing share remains unknown. |
| Which actions may a grantee perform? | Delegated authority with actions, instruments, jurisdictions, scope, dates, evidence, and confidence. |
| Which participant form is asserted? | Participant classification with source, jurisdiction, validity, and confidence. |
The examples demonstrate each pattern. The operational query recipes return the role, participation, transfer, authority, and classification answers without treating absent optional values as false.
The preferred prefix is insm for https://ontology.inferal.com/modules/insurance-market/.
| Dependency | Reused semantics | Boundary |
|---|---|---|
Inferal Company Intelligence (ci) | Qualified relationships, sources, jurisdictions, validity dates, and confidence links. | This module does not redefine party identity, corporate structure, or source truth. |
Inferal Commercial Intelligence (cmi) | Product and service offering foundation. | An insurance offering does not become a policy, placement, or coverage contract. |
| [[PROV-O]] | Activity and entity foundations for placements and policies. | PROV entity identity does not supply insurance-specific lifecycle rules. |
| [[SKOS-REFERENCE]] | Open concept schemes, grouping, and extension. | SKOS broader links organize values; they do not create class subsumption or party typing. |
FIBO, ACORD, and openIDS are referenced rather than imported. Their nearby terms are useful mapping targets or sources, but none is adopted here as a complete replacement for the qualified role, authority, participation, and transfer contract. Mapping boundaries are discussed in the interoperability section.
An insurance role assignment binds one party, one role from the role scheme, and one context. A risk participation separately records written and retained capacity. A risk transfer records direction from transferor to transferee, so fronting and reinsurance are not inferred from a generic participation percentage. A delegated authority requires an explicit action rather than relying on an occupational role label.
Policyholder, insured, beneficiary, payer, claimant, and applicant are independent roles. Organizational and regulatory forms use a different SKOS scheme. No equivalence or disjointness is inferred among parties from those labels.
| Construct | Qualifies | Primary question | Does not imply |
|---|---|---|---|
| Role assignment | One party in one context | What role is played, and whom is represented? | Permanent party type, authority, organizational form, or risk share. |
| Risk participation | One party's capacity in one context | What was written and retained? | A counterparty or a transfer direction. |
| Risk transfer | Two distinct parties in one context | Who transferred risk to whom? | That either party wrote the policy or that the transferred share is complete. |
| Delegated authority | Grantor, grantee, and permitted actions | What may the grantee do? | That the action occurred or that the instrument is legally effective. |
| Participant classification | One party and one form concept | How is the participant organized or regulated? | A contextual role, license, solvency, or authority. |
Qualified resources are not deduplicated merely because their principal parties and types match. Two brokers can represent the same buyer in different placements, and one broker can hold two assignments with different evidence or validity. A publisher SHOULD reuse a qualified resource IRI only when it intends one assertion identity and SHOULD mint a new resource when its context, parties, represented party, source interpretation, or validity boundary changes.
Policies are minimal anchors and may have several source-local identifiers. Matching identifier strings do not prove policy identity; different strings do not prove distinct policies. Placements are activities and may connect to many offerings and outcomes. Neither edge asserts that every offering was accepted or that every policy has the same coverage period.
Roles, participant forms, and insurance actions are three independent SKOS dimensions. Core role grouping concepts organize discovery but are still concepts, not OWL classes. Extensions MAY add concepts to the appropriate scheme and SHOULD relate refinements with SKOS broader or mapping relations. A concept from one dimension MUST NOT be substituted into another simply because its label is plausible.
Qualified market assertions require one or more ci:source
values. Source identifies the evidentiary basis, not an endorsement of
truth. Optional validity dates bound when the assertion is intended to
apply; they do not describe document publication time. Optional
confidence assessments qualify evidence quality using the Confidence
ontology and MUST NOT be interpreted as authorization or probability
unless their declared scale supports that interpretation.
Jurisdiction is repeatable because a program, policy, role, transfer, or authority may span territories. Its presence identifies relevance, not licensing, domicile, governing law, or regulatory approval unless a separate vocabulary states that stronger relation.
Every role assignment MUST identify exactly one role player, one role concept, and one context. The role concept MUST be asserted as a SKOS concept in the insurance role scheme. A source is mandatory; jurisdictions, validity, confidence, and represented party are optional.
At most one represented party is permitted on one assignment because representation participates in that assignment's identity. If the same intermediary represents two parties, the publisher MUST create two assignments or use a more specific profile that defines a different relationship. Consumers MUST NOT infer represented party from Broker, Agent, Managing General Agent, or Coverholder labels.
Customer-side roles are independent. A single party may hold several, or each may be held by a different party. Their omission does not show that nobody holds the omitted role.
A placement represents the activity that seeks, negotiates, arranges, renews, or binds capacity. It MUST have a human-readable label and a source. It MAY point to multiple offerings and resulting policies. An offering is the marketed product or service; a policy is the resulting or contextual entity. These resources are not interchangeable.
A policy MUST have a label and source. Policy identifiers are repeatable source-local strings. Publishers SHOULD preserve the source that gives each string meaning and MUST NOT use an unqualified string alone as proof of global identity.
A risk participation MUST identify one participating party, one context, one role-scheme concept, and at least one source. Written and retained shares are optional decimals from zero through one. When both are present, retained share MUST NOT exceed written share.
Share absence means unknown, unreported, or inapplicable—not zero. The base contract does not require all participations for a context to sum to one because market views are often partial and roles such as cedent and reinsurer can describe different layers. A completeness profile may impose totals only after defining which participations belong in the same aggregation.
A risk transfer MUST identify exactly one transferor, one distinct
transferee, one context, and at least one source. Transferred share is
optional and bounded from zero through one when known. A consumer MUST
NOT construct a transfer solely from writtenShare - retainedShare:
that difference may reflect several transfers, commissions, limits,
accounting treatments, or incomplete data.
A classification MUST identify exactly one participant and one concept in the participant form scheme, with at least one source. Jurisdiction, validity, and confidence MAY qualify the claim. Form is evidence-bearing and time-sensitive; a role assignment MUST NOT be used as a shortcut for form, and a form MUST NOT be used as a role value.
The supplied forms are broad integration concepts. Their use does not assert a license, regulator determination, legal personality, ownership percentage, or eligibility to transact business. Publishers SHOULD use jurisdiction-specific classifications or mappings when those stronger conclusions are required.
| Term | Definition and intrinsic constraint |
|---|---|
| role player | The party playing a role; exactly one per assignment. |
| role type | A concept in the insurance role scheme; exactly one per assignment. |
| role context | The resource bounding the assignment; exactly one. |
| represented party | The optional party represented by this assignment; at most one. |
| has jurisdiction | A reusable Company Intelligence jurisdiction; multiple values are permitted. |
| placement offering | An offering sought or arranged by a placement; multiple values are permitted. |
| resulting policy | A policy produced or renewed through a placement; multiple values are permitted. |
| policy identifier | A source-local identifier. Multiple values are permitted and global uniqueness is not implied. |
| authority grantor | The granting party; exactly one and different from the grantee. |
| authority grantee | The receiving party; exactly one. |
| authority instrument | A source that records authority; at least one. |
| authorized action | An action from the insurance action scheme; at least one. |
| authorized role | An optional supplemental role from the insurance role scheme. |
| authority scope | A human-readable product, line, territory, function, limit, or business boundary. |
| participating party | The party in a risk participation; exactly one. |
| participation context | The placement or policy bounding a risk participation; exactly one. |
| risk role | The role-scheme concept describing participation capacity; exactly one. |
| written share | An optional decimal in [0, 1] for the share written by the party. |
| retained share | An optional decimal in [0, 1], no greater than written share when both are known. |
| transferor | The party transferring risk; exactly one. |
| transferee | The distinct party accepting transferred risk; exactly one. |
| transfer context | The resource bounding a transfer; exactly one. |
| transferred share | An optional known decimal in [0, 1] transferred between the parties. |
| classified participant | The party being classified; exactly one. |
| participant form | A concept in the participant form scheme; exactly one. |
Insurance role scheme is the open SKOS scheme accepted by role-valued properties.
Insurance participant form scheme classifies form independently from contextual role.
Insurance action scheme is the open SKOS scheme used by delegated authority.
Intrinsic node shapes target resources typed as each of the eight public classes. Validators SHOULD load the base ontology and its declared imports and apply RDFS entailment before target selection, so instances typed through a subclass remain reachable. The shapes are not closed: additional properties are allowed unless a stricter profile says otherwise.
ci:Source; jurisdictions are checked as ci:Jurisdiction.xsd:decimal values in the inclusive interval [0, 1].xsd:date values, with at most one start and end per qualified resource.SPARQL constraints reject equal authority parties, equal transfer parties, retained share greater than written share, and a validity start later than its end. These checks compare terms inside one qualified resource. They do not reconcile totals across several records or decide whether two differently named parties are actually the same legal entity.
SHACL conformance proves only that the selected graph satisfies this structural regime under the supplied ontology and entailment settings. It does not prove factual truth, legal effectiveness, source authority, roster completeness, policy identity, or that capacity totals reconcile. A graph with no transferred share can conform because the share may be unknown. A graph with only 60% known written capacity can conform because the remaining market may be absent from the publisher's view.
RDFS subclass statements allow a reasoner to infer that assignments, participations, transfers, and authorities are Company Intelligence relationships; placements are PROV activities; policies and classifications are PROV entities; and insurance offerings are Commercial Intelligence offerings. Property domain and range statements also infer the corresponding subject or value type when a property is used.
The ontology intentionally does not entail:
The OWL addendum declares no functional or inverse-functional properties. Therefore repeated values do not cause identity merging, and maximum counts remain validation behavior rather than OWL equality consequences.
These informative queries illustrate how consumers can answer competency questions without fabricating missing values. They assume the graph has already been validated or that the consumer is prepared for duplicate and malformed rows. Optional columns remain unbound when the fact is absent.
This query returns one row per assignment, jurisdiction, and source combination. Multiple sources or jurisdictions can therefore produce multiple rows. An unbound represented party means it was not stated; it does not mean the player represents nobody.
Participation and transfer are queried independently and combined only
for presentation. The ?kind column prevents a consumer
from mistaking transfer direction for a capacity role. Missing shares
remain unbound. No arithmetic derivation is performed.
[[FIBO]] and OMG Commons provide financial and agreement foundations, but mappings MUST NOT equate policyholder and insured without genuine bidirectional semantics. A FIBO or Commons agreement resource may be a useful target for a policy mapping, but this module's policy is only a minimal contextual anchor and does not claim the complete contract semantics needed for OWL equivalence.
[[ACORD-STANDARDS]] is a broad operational standard rather than an open RDF ontology. [[OPENIDS]] is a non-RDF source model and requires a declared transformation. A source-to-RDF mapping SHOULD preserve source identifiers and provenance, MUST state how assignment and transfer IRIs are generated, and MUST disclose fields that cannot be represented without a line-of-business extension.
Logical alignments, RDF projections, and non-RDF transformations are different artifacts and MUST identify their kind. Processor code is not itself a semantic mapping, and ordinary SHACL Core shapes validate data rather than transform it.
A publisher MAY add a narrower role, action, or form concept to the
corresponding open scheme. The extension SHOULD have a stable IRI,
label, definition, and source, and SHOULD connect to the nearest core
concept with skos:broader when the broader relationship is
accurate. Adding a concept to a scheme does not make it equivalent to a
core concept. Cross-scheme mappings require explicit semantic review.
Operational source models frequently collapse insured and policyholder, combine fronting and reinsurance percentages, or encode authority as an organization type. Transformations from such sources MUST NOT invent the distinctions absent from the source. They SHOULD omit unknown facts or attach a reviewable confidence assessment, and SHOULD document whether the resulting graph is a partial market view.
Roles, identifiers, representation, authority, and transfers can reveal sensitive commercial relationships, planned transactions, counterparties, or personal benefit arrangements. Publishers SHOULD apply access control, minimization, purpose limitation, and jurisdiction-appropriate retention. They SHOULD avoid publishing source-local identifiers when a less identifying link is sufficient.
Source IRIs can disclose confidential document locations or internal systems even when the documents are inaccessible. Confidence and authority assertions can also be security-sensitive: a high confidence assessment does not authorize disclosure, and an authority record must not be used as an access-control decision without checking current legal status and the full instrument scope. Consumers SHOULD expect stale, revoked, contested, or jurisdiction-limited assertions and SHOULD apply current operational controls outside this ontology.
Public term IRIs are stable once adopted. Compatible concepts MAY be added to the open schemes, and validation may be clarified without changing existing meaning. A term whose meaning is replaced MUST be deprecated rather than silently repurposed, with migration guidance and the weakest accurate mapping to its successor.
Future revisions MUST NOT make representation implicit, collapse role and form, conflate participation with transfer, equate policyholder and insured, or reinterpret a source-local policy identifier as globally unique. Detailed coverage, licensing, claims, accounting, and regulatory semantics belong in separate modules or explicit profiles. A proposal that closes a scheme, requires complete capacity totals, or changes an assertion's identity boundary requires maintainer review because it can invalidate previously conforming partial graphs.
The model deliberately treats insurer, reinsurer, cedent, fronting carrier, and managing general agent as contextual roles rather than intrinsic organization classes. It also treats stock, mutual, captive, reciprocal, risk-retention-group, and Lloyd's syndicate as sourced form classifications. These choices preserve evidence and jurisdictional variation instead of settling every legal definition globally.
The role, form, and action schemes are open extension points, but their dimensions are normative. New concepts that blur those dimensions, claims of OWL equivalence with external standards, or universal rules about representation and authority require consensus review. Publishers with more specific legal or regulatory requirements SHOULD define a profile or mapping instead of changing the base meaning.