STTR Phase II: Disciple Technologies for Development, Utilization, and Maintenance of Regulatory Knowledge Bases

This Small Business Innovation Research (STTR) Phase II project as a continuation of the Phase I effort, will develop alpha versions of the Regulatory Knowledge Base (RKB) products. The Regulatory Knowledge Bases will be tailored to classes of compliance problems within the financial services space, such as broker or trading compliance, or anti-money laundering. Addtiionally, they will include a complex regulatory ontology specific to the financial services industry and rule bases that reflect the latest regulations and best practices that govern analysis of alerts and compliance cases. The Regulatory Knowledge Base products will be sold in various formats and standards so they can be directly deployed on various commercial off-the-shelf reasoning engines. Regulatory demands, as well as the increasing costs associated with financial crime, are placing increasing cost pressures on financial institutions. The burden of compliance is driving up operational costs. Financial services firms are seeking to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and return on investment of their compliance and risk management systems. The current knowledge management technologies and software tools cannot offer efficient customized procedures to deal with specific compliance cases. Therefore, there is a need for flexible knowledge-based systems, like Disciple-FS, and for Regulatory Knowledge Base products, that can offer help in solving specific cases while ensuring compliance with all the rules and regulations. These systems should also be capable of acquiring reasoning skills of their users to adapt their capabilities to deal with new cases. The prototype built during Phase I proved that the Disciple Technologies have the required functions and abilities to support development, utilization, and maintenance of regulatory knowledge bases. The prototype also helped to identify research and development goals for Phase II that we present in this proposal.