Reporting Requirement Metadata Vocabulary (RRMV)

1. Introduction

As EU policies evolve, the demand for data in the form of reporting requirements ("requests") from Member States and other stakeholders continues to grow. A ‘request’ is an obligation organised in a specific format that is defined by an agent (e.g. European Commission) to perform an action (e.g. to report) in a specific interval of time.This may potentially lead to an increase in the regulatory reporting burden, as stakeholders need to increasingly monitor regulations to be fully compliant with them. 

To address this issue, the European Commission, in its 16 March 2023 Communication on the Long-term competitiveness of the EU, committed to "make a fresh push to rationalise and simplify reporting requirements for companies and administrations with first proposals for each of the green, digital and economic thematic areas before the autumn. The aim should be to reduce such burdens by 25%, without undermining the related policy objectives.”

In line with this effort, streamlining regulatory reporting burdens has been identified as a critical policy need for the European Commission's proposals. The European Commission aims to eliminate redundancies and harmonise reporting requirements to assist policy officers in understanding existing frameworks in detail. By avoiding duplicate requests and considering factors such as dates and reporting frequencies, the Commission seeks to optimise new requirements effectively.

These efforts translated into the Study on Regulatory Reporting Standards (SORTIS), a combined effort of the University of Bologna, the University of Liège, and the European Commission. The project aimed to define a vocabulary to standardise and organise regulatory reporting metadata of EU legislations and to develop standard formulations to be able to identify the appropriate data of reporting requirements. The results of this study included a definition of a model known as Reporting Requirements Metadata Vocabulary (RRMV) and served as the start for the work that is presented in this page. 

Initial model created by Monica Palmirani ( CIRSFID-AlmaAI – University of Bologna), Ashwin Ittoo (University of Liege) and the European Commission on 05/09/2023 in the context of the project "SORTIS - Study On Regulatory reporting Standards.

In this page,  the contributors to the RRMV aim at presenting the progressive advancements on the RRMV including releases, updates, and ongoing developments. This platform serves as a central hub for sharing information about the RRMV, offering insights into how it can be applied to improve the drafting and management of reporting requirements within EU legislations. 

2. General description

The Reporting Requirement Metadata Vocabulary is an ontology designed to model reporting requirements, or 'requests', within legal provisions. The RRMV offers a model aiming to standardise how these requirements are drafted in legislation through the use of a metadata vocabulary. Such structured information can then be integrated into IT systems that manage registries of reporting requirements, aiding in the reduction of administrative burdens and enhancing system interoperability.

2.1. What are the benefits of using RRMV?

The solution is developed for and contributes to public policies on interoperability and competitiveness. It aims to reduce administrative burden and promotes interoperability amongst systems used for managing reporting requirements. 

The RRMV can be used as a flexible model to structure information contained in a legal text by using standardised vocabulary to draft reporting requirements ("requests"). When the specification is used to structure all reporting requirements contained in a legal text (or across legal systems), a resulting database can be leveraged by:  

1. Policy Officers: Legislative bodies can verify potential duplications or overlaps in reporting requirements during legislation drafting, aiding in more efficient policymaking.
2. Organisations: Legal informatics professionals and IT experts can integrate RRMV into IT systems to easily identify and comply with legal obligations within legal texts.