Reporting Requirement Metadata Vocabulary (RRMV)

1. Introduction

Effective policymaking relies heavily on monitoring, as assessing the impact of legislation and policies is crucial to determining whether specific objectives have been met. However, lack of coordination when setting reporting requirements can lead to legal interoperability barriers that then lead to inefficient policy measures, and to duplicated and overlapping requirements, data duplication, and unclear data location.

To address this challenge, the European Commission announced in its Communication on the Long-term competitiveness of the EU (16 March 2023) that it would "make a fresh push to rationalize and simplify reporting requirements for companies and administrations." The Commission aims to introduce initial proposals for the green, digital, and economic thematic areas by autumn 2024, with the goal of reducing administrative burdens by 25% without compromising related policy objectives.

In support of this initiative, the European Commission has identified streamlining regulatory reporting as a key area for reducing administrative burden. By providing policy officers with a detailed understanding of existing legal frameworks and enabling them to leverage these frameworks, the Commission seeks to eliminate redundancies and harmonize reporting requirements, ultimately reducing the complexity and burden associated with regulatory reporting.

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. 

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 that can be used for modeling and representing reporting requirements set in legal resources. 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 can be used to model legislative data to identify administrative burden and to create interoperability amongst systems used for managing reporting requirements.