RE: [legalxml-courtfiling] Preliminary List of "Roles"

[John McClure <jmcclure@hypergrove.com>]

Hello,
The attached XML file is a view on the "Actor" hierarchy as defined within the
Data Consortium Dictionary, an RDF dictionary that you can access at
http://search.dataconsortium.org or download from http://www.dataconsortium.org.
The attached file is meant to be viewed using Internet Explorer, not Mozilla. I
am making no claim that the attached is complete or correct -- it is the result
of our work to-date to organize those terms of interest to us -- but it is
offered here in the spirit of contributing to this discussion. After I finish my
current project, I'll be redirecting my attention back to refining its
hierarchies of terms and adding associations between the terms, that is,
identifying the properties/attributes in our view relevant to each of the terms.

In our dictionary, each term is defined as a "class" -- any name for a class may
also be used as an XML element name, and thus we can generate XML Schema from
this dictionary -- and for each class we identify what it is a subClassOf (that
is, its 'parent' classes). This information can be easily used by applications
that want to know for instance that a 'CircuitCourt' is a type of 'Tribunal'.

In our Actor hierarchy, we carefully distinguish between qualified-terms and
terms that represent 'concrete actors'. Our 5 types of concrete actors are the
same as defined by the Dublin Core -- Person, Institution, Company, Group, and
Organization. These 5 are all 'subclasses' of the Actor class. We add one
additional subclass: QualifiedActor. QualifiedActor is broken down into
QualifiedPerson, ..., QualifiedOrganization. To this we have added one
additional subclass: Role. A Role is broken down into RoleQualifiedPerson, ....,
RoleQualifiedOrganization. At this level, we found it necessary to add
GenericRole and QualifiedRole.

We explicitly created our qualified actor hierarchies in a manner that aligns
with the North American Standard Industrial Classification (NAICS) -- we expect
certain important benefits from doing so. Thus, a Judge is a
PublicAdministrationOccupation, which is an Occupation, which is a
QualifiedPerson, which is both a Person and a QualifiedActor, both of which are
Actors. If you're still reading this, you might want to know that a Court (a
Tribunal) is a PublicInstitution, which is an Institution, which is an Actor. If
desired, one could create a subclass of Tribunal called QualifiedTribunal, where
additional terms may be placed.

Another hierarchy exists for types of Events, such as a CourtProceeding (which
could have CriminalTrial as a subclass) and so on. Eventually we'll relate the
Roles that are involved with each of those event types. I mention this so as to
note that a hierarchy of actors should be independent of their relationships.
There are exceptions to every rule of course -- in our dictionary, a FirstParty
term is supposed to have a match to a SecondParty term.

Now, John Messing mentions 'Party' as a candidate "role" -- prompting this
note -- which in our dictionary is defined as a "LegalParty" having FirstParty,
SecondParty, and ThirdParty as subclasses. Examing the terms under these 3
subclasses, it's pretty clear that this part of the dictionary should be
re-structured to distinguish between parties to a (legal) proceeding and parties
to a commercial transaction. But then again, I've been waiting somewhat for
ebXML to sort out what "class" metadata is going to look like for the roles they
have identified for commercial transactions -- first though they have (had?) to
come to grips with what they mean by a "class" in the first place. I don't know,
maybe the concept of "class" has been deleted altogether from their spec.

Anyway, I hope this material is useful to you.
John

Attachment: ActorIndex.zip
Description: Zip compressed data