Re: [legalxml-econtracts] Data Consortium Contract Schema Requirements

[Jason Harrop <jharrop@speedlegal.com>]

Thanks for posting your scenario John.

I hope to get a chance before i get on a plane this weekend to pose a 
few questions based on our past email exchanges which I'd expect your 
scenario to address.

In the meantime, two things...

1. Your scenario statement says:

"What does the real estate professional do, today, with the executed 
lease contract? .. Most databases in the commercial real estate industry 
today are relational databases, .... In short, the industry transfers 
selected fields of information from the contract to databases that drive 
facilities management and accounting functions.

Clearly, this process can be improved by converting the contract into a 
database itself that drives the facilities management and accounting 
functions of a commercial real estate management company. In order for 
this to happen, however, all information in the contract must be 
annotated with XML tags. .. By doing so, introduction of new or improved 
services will no longer depend on the information abstracted from a 
contract, because that step will have been eliminated. "

There are analogies here with contract management systems (with which 
I'm guessing your application has considerable overlap).

Are contract management system vendors also looking to eliminate the 
transformation to relational data by using XML contracts?

If the answer to this question is an emphatic yes (Barry?), then as you 
say, we need to be able to capture everything of interest to the CMS in 
the contract.

(If the answer is yes, then how is additional information pertaining to 
performance of the contract (eg breach of service level on dd/mm/yyyy) 
captured on an ongoing basis?  If this is captured relationally, or in 
some other way outside the contract XML document, then what is so 
compelling about keeping the rest in the original XML?)

If the answer is no, then it would be acceptable to capture a useful 
subset in XML, which could be augmented by manual data entry at the time 
the contract is entered into the CMS.

2.  I'm sure you have some sample leases, purchase contracts, and 
renewals which you have used for your analysis.  Can you post some of 
them to the list?  (I will be posting URLs for some of the contracts 
we'd like to see covered).

thanks

Jason