Defining a Model for Content Requirements from the Law: an Experience Report

This paper reports on the experience of building
a content model in collaboration with a national financial
supervisory authority, with the goal of automating the compliance
checking activity performed by the agents of the supervisory
authority on fund documentation. The work is focused on
modelling content requirements found in the law, i.e., deontic
rules prescribing that some information is contained in an official
document. For such requirements, the main modelling effort
revolves around the required content and its information types.
We therefore designed a process to build a content model,
elaborating design criteria for the model which partly depend
on the use case encompassing compliance checking. We built the
content model through iterative interactions between a knowledge
engineer and domain experts designed to ensure that the model
is not limited to representing only the letter of the law, but rather
represents the relevant distinctions in the practice of compliance
checking. We drew lessons learned regarding the need for setting
up classification criteria for information types and handling the
trade-off between expressivity and maintainability of the model.