The CDM was built to align how trades and events are represented across firms and systems. The model is defined along five dimensions (product, event, legal agreement, process and reference data), and code generated from the definitions is distributed. FINOS publishes the specification.
For example, the model can represent an interest rate swap from execution to a floating rate reset in the same data form, as a flow in which trade states are created one after another.
The headword is "ISDA CDM", the short form of the page title. The FINOS documentation writes Common Domain Model, CDM and FINOS CDM. The CDM takes mapping to existing industry messaging formats (such as FpML) as one of its design principles.