[legalxml-courtfiling] Minutes of our November 5th telephoneconference call

[John Greacen <john@greacen.net>]

Here are Dr. Leff’s minutes of the last conference call.  Our procedure is that the decisions made in the call are deemed ratified by all members of the Technical Committee unless a member objects to a decision on the list.  Please review the minutes with this process in mind.

 

                Minutes Teleconference of November 5th

 

The OASIS Legal XML Member Section Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee

 

Present

 

Donald Bergeron

Rolly Chambers

Tom Clarke

Shane Durham

Charles Gilliam

Robin Gibson

John Greacen

Daniel Greenwood

James Keane

Catherine Krause

Laurence Leff

Diane Lewis

John Messing,

Mary McQueen

Robert O'Brien

Dallas Powell

Tony Rutkowski

Roger Winters

 

John Greacen called the official Teleconference to order.

 

Note: Hereinafter I will refer to the minutes of the meeting October 4th and

5th 2002 in Boston as the "Boston minutes."

 

Dallas Powell announced that the State of Utah will provide an

interoperability test of the Court Filing 1.1 Specification.  (Note, the

meetings of the October 3rd Face-to-Face indicated that Mr. Greacen would

determine whether they would be involved in an interoperability test.)

 

There were no comments on the minutes of the Boston Meeting.  They are approved.

 

(Hereafter, the phrase "Joint Technology Committee"

includes the National Consortium for State Court Automation Standards,

a subcommittee of the Joint Technology Committee of the Conference of State

Court Administrators (COSCA) and National Association for Court Management

(NACM)) 

 

John Greacen said that Query&Response and Court Document 1.1 will be be

transmitted to the Joint Technology Committee since there were no comments

by the deadline.  Mr. Roger Winters will put this in the appropriate template,

but Mr. Greacen will transmit them in their current format due to the time

pressures to get the document to that committee.

 

 

Ms. McQueen reported that she had telephone discussion with Bill Vickrey, Administrative Director of the California Courts, expressing concerns about California's decision to develop its own XML standards. Mr. Vickrey agreed to look into the matter.  Ms. McQueen has not heard back from him. 

 

Christopher Smith, representative to the Technical Committee from California, stated in an electronic mail to Mr. Greacen that any Legal XML

member is welcome to participate in the California specifications development effort as an Observer.  Mr. Greacen has been in in contact with Tom Smith about the Intellectual Property terms of the California project.  We have been told that the terms posted on the California website are under review.

 

Mr. Rolly Chambers said he will post to the list his current version of a list of roles.  (This was part of the work on the

schema for criminal justice for the Justice XML Data Dictionary Schema Tax Force (JXDDS) sponsored by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) See the Boston Minutes.)

 

Mr. Dallas Powell discussed his document:

EFC 1.1 Conformance levels for Interoperability testing and issues at

each level. 

(http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legalxml-courtfiling/200210/doc00010.doc)

 

In that document, he posited five levels:

1)    Basic validation

2)    Communication layer

3)    Required elements for case initiation and case updates

4)    Required elements for filing fees

5)    Security Model

 

The group decided that levels one and two would be collapsed while

levels three through five would remain separate.

 

The Court Filing 1.1 has a documentContent element in which the content of the document is attached, encoded in Base64, known as the "blob." The Technical Committee also decided that would not to require these interoperability tests to see if the software will handle correctly an XML document being sent as the blob.

 

Mr. Powell will forward a revised copy of the document to the list.

 

John Messing announced that the ABA electronic filing committee that he chairs will meet on the evening of December 10th in Las Vegas and that all

members of the Court Filing Technical Committee are invited

to that meeting.  Ms. McQueen pointed out that the issue of authentication is an important one to consider in court filing; chief judges and

court administrators are particularly concerned. 

 

Mr. Shane Durham discussed versioning rules for Technical Committee specifications.  He recommended a three-level version numbering scheme.  Changes to the first number would indicate non-compatibility with prior versions.  Changes to the second number would indicate that the newer version would parse prior versions, but not vice versa.  Changes to the third number would reflect insignificant changes, such as adding content to replace holder other changes

that do not reflect a change in the XML.  A trivial example would be adding a space or comment to the DTD.  Ms. Robin Gibson pointed out that some documents may not reflect this new rule and their version numbers will NOT be updated. 

 

Mr. Durham will write this up, Mr. Winters will edit, and it will be sent to the list. 

 

Ms. Gibson, our liaison to JXDDS, gave a report on their work.  They are developing a Document Dictionary Structure and are currently drafting a model object for person.  They anticipate working on Organization and Location objects.  The Location corresponds to address information. They are also creating an  object comparable to

our "Actor" structure.  The name is tentative.  There will be references

between Person, Organization and Location.  Also, at the next meeting, to be held November 14th and November 15th, will be a property object.  This will be used for Personal, Real and intellectual property. They will not distribute drafts until narrative and rationale sections are complete.  Tony Richkowski discussed international issues including

the European government initiative and LexXML.  However, it was pointed out that this effort is funded by the United States Department of Justice and providing interoperability and a useful work product for others may not be in their mandate.  Mr. Greacen noted that Mr. Richkowski

will be able to circulate the materials developed by the JXDDS to international groups as part of the Technical Committee's own review of them.

 

Mr. Donald Bergeron is working on diagrams for the documentation effort for a more complete architecture for the various products of the Technical Committee.  He has posted a suggested revision of the requirement for Court

Filing Policy.

 

The next item of discussion was a Statement of Work filed by Dr. Laurence Leff for the "Order of Protection Prototype Effort." 

(http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legalxml-courtfiling/200211/msg00001.html)

There were concerns expressed about whether the Technical Committee should sponsor a software development effort.  (The Statement of Work discussed the software prototyping to ensure that any proposals were sound.  However,

it clearly stated that the "software will be disposed of outside the

Technical Committee.")

 

Ms. Mary McQueen announced that the National Consortium for State Courts Automation Standards will, in the future, accept the specifications of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards Legal XML Section directly, without requiring additional review by a Joint Standards Development team.

 

Ms. Robin Gibson, the TC Webmaster, announced that each topical area has its own web page with content.  Information can be forwarded to her for the web page by the Technical Committee co-Chairs, the authors of the document, or the Subcommittee Chair.  She will not post material to the web site until someone requests same and sends her the correct document.

 

Mr. Keane discussed the importance of mapping and bibliography to enable people to find information easily.  And, he said it would be "neat" if it were in XML.  There were concerns about whether the staff members at the OASIS office could handle bibliography information in a database format.

 

Mr. Greacen invited all of us to the Face-To-Face in Las Vegas December 12th and December 13th 2002.  Information on meeting location is on the web site.  Information on lodging will be available at that web site. Or members needing help with lodging arrangements may also page

Dr. Leff at 309 367 0787.

 

 

 

John M. Greacen

Greacen Associates, LLC

505-780-1450