Common Ontology for Real Assets
Making real assets standards interpretable by machines and interoperable by meaning.
Real assets data has always required reconciliation. What has changed is that interpretation can no longer remain manual.
CORA is a vendor-neutral coordination layer for real assets data standards. It provides the shared semantic infrastructure that allows existing standards, systems, and institutional workflows to preserve meaning across asset classes, ownership structures, capital stacks, geographies, and time.
CORA does not replace existing standards. It gives them a common frame.
- Vendor-neutral
- Global by design
- Publicly available
- Openly licensed
What CORA Is
The real assets industry does not lack data standards. It lacks a way to interpret them together.
Over the past two decades, multiple credible standards have emerged for specific audiences, workflows, and reporting obligations. CORA connects that work rather than replacing it.
CORA is an ontology. It defines shared classes, relationships, identifiers, and provenance for real estate and infrastructure data across equity, debt, infrastructure, and operating contexts.
Horizontal tools — analytics, BI, AI — move data without knowing what it means. CORA supplies the real assets meaning they need to preserve.
CORA Is Designed As
- A common ontology for real estate and infrastructure data
- A coordination layer above existing data exchange standards
- Shared classes, relationships, identifiers, and provenance for the domain
- A foundation for agent-readable real assets data
- Global by design, with extension points for local market and regulatory variation
- Openly governed, openly licensed, and publicly available
CORA Is Not
- A new transport protocol
- A replacement for existing standards
- A vendor product
- A compliance mandate
- A closed membership initiative
- A standard limited to one asset class, geography, or layer of the capital stack
Two structural contributions
Existing standards bodies already do the foundational work of defining, maintaining, and distributing their own standards. CORA is not designed to duplicate that work.
Its role is narrower and connective: to maintain cross-standard mappings and a longitudinal record of how real assets definitions evolve across standards, versions, and market contexts.
Cross-standard mapping
A neutral record of how concepts correspond across multiple standards, schemas, and data models. Individual standards bodies maintain authority over their own work. CORA provides a shared mapping layer so those meanings can be interpreted together.
CORA maps between standards. It does not host, govern, or supersede them.
See the mapping fragment →Longitudinal record of standards evolution
A public record of how real assets standards evolve over time, including where definitions converge, diverge, or change across versions.
Individual standards bodies track their own evolution. CORA provides the cross-standard view.
See the drift fragment →Scope of v0.1
Real assets data does not break in one place. It breaks across three recurring dimensions: the capital stack, the asset class, and the jurisdiction.
CORA v0.1 is designed to model those intersections. Data aggregates up from assets to portfolios, funds, and allocators. It disaggregates back down for valuation, operations, risk, reporting, and audit. At every handoff, meaning changes unless it is explicitly modeled.
The problem compounds because the planes intersect.
A global investor does not manage geography, asset class, and capital structure as separate planes. A vertically integrated real estate firm does not either. The same semantic friction appears inside the organization, across regions, business lines, acquired entities, and operating systems.
CORA v0.1 begins where the industry needs common ground: a global foundation, stable enough to coordinate across contexts and extensible enough to support sector and jurisdictional variation over time.
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.
CORA spans the full real assets capital stack: capital allocators, fund sponsors, asset managers, owner-operators, property managers, fund administrators, lenders, servicers, valuation and forecasting providers, data providers, and technology platforms. The ontology models the entities, relationships, and data flows required to consolidate information from property-level operations up to portfolio, fund, and investor reporting, and to disaggregate it back down for analysis, operations, risk, and audit.
CORA is global by design. Real assets data changes meaning across jurisdictions: legal entity structures, lease conventions, valuation standards, regulatory regimes, currencies, and reporting obligations all vary by market. CORA provides extension points for regional and jurisdiction-specific requirements across North America, EMEA, APAC, and Latin America. Specific mappings to regional regulatory and industry frameworks will be developed through the Standards Mapping working group.
Subsequent versions will extend coverage through public review and transparent governance.
Currently in Formation
With the initial release of v0.1 now open for public review, the formation period continues across five workstreams: the v0.1 specification, governance principles, mapping CORA to existing real assets standards, the longitudinal record of standards evolution, and the public review now underway.
Why Now
Reports tolerated semantic drift because humans supplied the missing interpretation. Agents do not. They read data directly and reason from it, which is why the next generation of real assets infrastructure cannot rely on human judgment as the integration layer.
CORA Inquiry
Use this form to ask a question, register interest, or share relevant institutional, technical, or standards context.
Public review materials and contribution guidelines are available with the v0.1 initial release.
The inquiry form is intended for questions, relevant context, and public review interest. Formal contribution guidelines are available with the v0.1 release.