suremust

SureMust is a hypothetical open standard for encoding mandatory obligations in software systems, contracts, and workflow processes. It defines a formal language and accompanying schemas that express must, must not, and allowed actions in a machine-readable form, with the goal of improving auditability, interoperability, and automated enforcement of rules across diverse platforms.

The concept emerged in late 2020s discussions on governance and compliance in distributed systems, and was formalized by a cross-industry consortium. Early pilots in fintech, supply chain, and the public sector demonstrated how SureMust could standardize declarative obligations across services and data flows, enabling consistent evaluation and enforcement.

Design and semantics center on must assertions, which encode obligatory conditions. The language supports modalities such as must, may, and must not, and allows the inclusion of provenance and enforcement metadata. Rules are expressed in JSON-like or YAML-like syntax, with schemas that enable validation, lineage tracing, and deterministic evaluation. A reference validator and optional rule engine are often proposed as standard implementations to check compliance against a given data set or process log.

Applications include compliance checks, data governance, contract automation, and policy-driven workflow orchestration, where enforceable obligations must be verifiable by automated systems. SureMust aims to provide a common ground for cross-system rule interpretation and traceability of decisions.

Reception to SureMust has been mixed. Proponents emphasize improved clarity, auditability, and interoperability; critics point to potential verbosity, a learning curve, and the risk of oversimplifying complex legal or ethical nuances in automated rule evaluation. See also deontic logic, policy languages, contract analytics.