Common Ontology for Real Assets
A vendor-neutral ontology for real estate and infrastructure data.Spanning the full capital stack, from operator to allocator and back.Being organized as a multi-stakeholder industry collaboration, global by design.To be openly licensed and publicly available.
What CORA Will Be
The real assets industry has accumulated multiple credible data standards over the past two decades. Each was developed for a defined audience and a defined use case. None was designed to provide the ontological layer that connects them, and none was designed for the workloads now arriving: agent-based reasoning systems that must interpret real assets data with semantic consistency across asset hierarchies, ownership structures, capital stacks, geographies, and time.
CORA is being organized to address that gap. The specification will define classes, relationships, identifiers, and provenance primitives for real estate (equity and debt) and infrastructure (data centers, renewables, transport). It will span the full capital stack from limited partners and general partners through asset managers, owner-operators, and service providers, and will be applicable globally. It will be vendor-neutral, openly licensed under Apache 2.0 and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, and machine-readable in OWL, JSON-LD, and SHACL. It will sit above existing data exchange standards as the semantic layer that allows them to be interpreted consistently, rather than replacing them.
CORA Will Be
- A common ontology for real estate and infrastructure data
- A specification that spans the full capital stack, from LP to owner-operator
- Globally applicable, with extension points for jurisdictional variation, and equally applicable within firms as between them
- A vendor-neutral semantic layer above existing data exchange standards
- A foundation for agent-readable real assets data
- A multi-stakeholder collaboration governed in the open
CORA Will Not Be
- A new data exchange format or transport protocol
- A replacement for existing real estate data standards
- A vendor product or a commercial deliverable
- A mandate or a compliance requirement
- A closed initiative, or one that requires membership fees
- Specific to a single asset class, capital stack layer, or geography
Scope of v0.1
Real assets data reconciliation breaks along three planes. v0.1 is designed to cover each.
The three planes compound. A global, diversified institutional investor lives at the intersection of all three. A vertically integrated real estate firm lives at the intersection internally, with the same friction occurring across business lines, acquired entities, and regional operations within a single organization. v0.1 is foundational and global from day one; sector-specific and jurisdiction-specific extensions follow in subsequent versions.
Real estate, equity
Multifamily, office, industrial and logistics, retail, hospitality, healthcare and senior housing, student housing, self-storage, and mixed-use. Direct property and portfolio structures, fund-level entities, ownership hierarchies, lease and operational data, valuation, transactions.
Real estate, debt
Mortgages, CMBS, mezzanine and preferred equity, construction lending, and other loan-level instruments. Servicer and lender entities. Securitization structures.
Infrastructure
Data centers, renewable energy assets, transport infrastructure, with defined extension points for additional sectors.
The ontology spans the full capital stack: limited partners and other capital allocators, general partners and fund sponsors, asset managers, owner-operators, property managers, fund administrators, and other service providers. CORA models the entities, relationships, and data flows that support consolidation from property-level operations up through portfolio, fund, and investor-level reporting, and the disaggregations required for analysis in the opposite direction.
Global by design. The ontology accommodates jurisdictional variation in legal entity structures, lease conventions, valuation standards, regulatory regimes, and currency. Extension points support regional reporting requirements across North America, EMEA, APAC, and Latin America. Specific regulatory mappings, including those required for AIFMD, SEC, INREV, NCREIF, and equivalent regional regimes, are developed as part of the Standards Mapping working group.
Future versions extend coverage through community contribution and committee approval.
Currently Underway
CORA is being organized as a multi-stakeholder standards initiative. The work in progress includes:
Why Now
At every layer of the real assets stack, data crosses systems that were not built to be interpreted together. The friction has always existed, but for two decades it was tolerable: the readers were human, and humans tolerate ambiguity. The next generation of consumers cannot absorb the semantic drift that human-mediated reporting absorbs by default.
Get Involved
CORA is being organized in the open. Select the inquiry type below — submissions are recorded privately and a member of the formation group will respond directly.