RE: [legalxml-courtfiling] Recap of person object discussion; sti llneed input

["Winters, Roger" <Roger.Winters@METROKC.GOV>]

Title: RE: [legalxml-courtfiling] Recap of person object discussion; still need input

John, and others,

I have been out of the office (and still am today) and that means I couldn't go back to old email that might explain how and why we dealt with "actor" as we were finalizing Court Filing 1.1. When I get back and am able to do so, I will try to report on that. However, I agree with John that this does not affect Court Filing 1.1.

Some thoughts of mine on the subject at hand:

1) I do not see why we need "actor" because it seems to me that a "person" can have any of a number of "role" assignments, just as they can have different attributes (e.g., "hairColor," one that could change day to day).

2) I would want us to be able to designate the appropriate "role" in a court proceeding or document because it is a business need we definitely have. If the proposal before us has a clear, easily grasped and used equivalent for doing exactly that, fine. I don't believe I have seen an explanation that points to what would be functionally equivalent for "role."

3) Regarding the need to designate what the "roles" are that a given court uses, it seems to me that there must be a set of typical roles that are relevant to judicial matters that could be defined. The exact term used in the tag (e.g., whether "prosecutor" or "districtAttorney" or something else) needs to be the standard used "under the hood" in legal documents and applications, but the labels used in the forms, documents, printouts, reports, etc., will reflect local usage. The "prosecutor" tag, for example, would represent the role that means "the person who has the legal authority and responsibility to represent the governmental entity against a person in a criminal matter," or whatever the precise definition should be. How many roles can you imagine are encountered in a typical large court system? 50? 100? 500? Even if the number is 500, that is not out of reach for us to list and define. We don't have to know what 100% of all the actual and possible roles are in order to do this work. Why isn't someone making a list yet?

4) I struggled with the paragraphs in the response to John about "inheritance model" and how that relates to Schema and RDF. This is all over my head. If there is a way for someone to "dumb this down" for me and others, that might help us grasp what the issues are.

5) I don't think I care (nor should we all, IMHO) whether a corporation, building, or other thing is called a "person" or an "entity" or whatever, when assigned a role as a "party" in a case. Does the GTRI data model have ways to refer to these entities, things, organizations, constructs, i.e., non-human things? Why not assign a "thing" a "role" when that is appropriate to what is going on? Buildings have addresses, as do the persons who live in them. There's ambiguity there between what is alive and what isn't, but it doesn't matter to our understanding of what "address" means when used in context.

6) Finally, a concern I continue to have is the need for us to coordinate our work in the various TCs and other groups that have committed to being engaged in cooperatively developing standards, so we will use the same basic terms for the same basic things. I remember in November 1999 in Albuquerque when the group talked about having a "Horizontal" work group that would sort out the way to deal with what some then called "primitives," which I took to mean basic descriptive data elements like tags that help us point to and describe people, addresses, telephones, e-mail, physical locations, dates, times, directions, etc. -- the things that should cross all subject matter lines and be common (or "horizontal") for all of our work products. I don't know what happened to that work group, but I think the need still exists for it. I'm tired of seeing court experts arguing over how to deal with such basic stuff, for they should be spending their time (IMHO) working out the data elements and models that apply to litigation and related aspects of court business.

7) Finally, where we see one group taking "personID" (by the way, "ID" is a permitted abbreviation in XML) and turning it into "personIDnumber" or the like -- this is a natural tendency of people who are working on something -- most will not have taken time to go back and read every previous DTD or other source to make sure they don't create a new tag for one that already exists. This is further demonstration of the need for there to be a "Horizontal" or "Editorial" group that has the responsibility and power to make sure that mature work products are reconciled against already-agreed-upon terms, definitions, and the like. It is good to point out such discrepancies, because when there are so many details involved in an enterprise such as this, more eyes watching for such stuff can only be helpful.

I hope these comments are helpful, John and Robin. I appreciate that you are representing us in a forum where our concerns are not the paramount ones, though they deserve equal attention with those of others involved in the process. If we each were to go our own way with these matters, then we would, simply, not have standards that would be all that useful. This is, after all, the time in our history when we can create standards that will be, in retrospect, nearly as significant as standards that were brought to areas like keeping track of time, railroad track dimensions, and other such stuff that we now take totally for granted.

Regards,

Roger Winters
TC Editor

-----Original Message-----
From: John M. Greacen
To: Court Filing List
Sent: 9/2/02 2:46 AM
Subject: [legalxml-courtfiling] Recap of person object discussion; still need input

Let me attempt to moderate this discussion, answer some of the questions
that have been raised, and, once again, ask for input on the critical
issue(s) facing us.

<Snip>