CCO: A Core Compliance Ontology for Modelling the Normative Structure of Regulations

CCO, a domain-independent ontology that captures commonly occurring structural patterns found in existing compliance ontologies, including norms and their deontic types, prescribed actions, applicability conditions, exceptions, role-based applicability, and temporal scope. CCO also models the agents and roles involved in issuing and complying with regulations. A two-stage evaluation strategy is used: first, competency question-based SPARQL verification checks that the required modelling patterns are present in the CCO schema; second, an LLM-assisted cross-domain evaluation examines whether clause-level requirements from four compliance domains can be structurally represented using CCO.