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.