Global Trustee and Fiduciary Services News and Views Issue 50

Global Trustee and Fiduciary Services News & Views | Issue 50 | 2018 61 Just as Ariadne provided the thread for Theseus to navigate the Minoan Labyrinth and slay the Minotaur, so UCC’s SmaRT application, with the help of BoE and FCA subject matter experts (SMEs), provided the thread, in the form of vocabularies and rules to software engineers that enabled them to complete automated regulatory reporting tasks. SmaRT is a standards-based regtech application that can enable lawyers and legal SMEs to unpack regulations into both human- readable and machine-computable formats. The core semantic technologies in SmaRT are based on W3C and industry-standard semantic technologies. SmaRT applies the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) standard proposed by Object Management Group. SBVR enables business subject matter experts to capture and express their vocabularies and rules in a systematic way according to the precepts of first-order deontic-alethic logic, logic that is generally concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts, and with modalities of truth, respectively. The SmaRT application applies its Mercury implementation of SBVR Structured English to capture the meaning of the tagged regulatory provisions in vocabularies, where alethic logic indicates a necessity, possibility or impossibility, and in rules, where deontic logic determines what should be, specifying obligations, prohibitions, permissions, etc. The rule format follows that defined in Mercury- SBVR. The legal modality of the rule is first declared, for instance, “It is obligatory that . . .“ conditional and logical operators such as “if”, “then”, “and”, “or”, “at least”, “at most”, are employed. However, regulatory and business concepts are captured as vocabulary elements highlighted in green. These are arranged in verb concepts (basic subject-predicate- object statements) captured using verbs (blue highlighted text): firm is a RAG 3 . 11 It can be seen that the obligation is logically clear and internally consistent. It helps explain the why and how of the original regulatory provision. The output of SmaRT is persisted in an RDF Knowledge Base. This is enabled by the SmaRT Ontology expressed in the OWL or the Web Figure 2 SmaRT Rules from SUP 16.12