Agenda OASIS Legal XML Member Section Electronic Contracts Technical Committee Meeting from Secretary (File id: @@2545)

["Dr. Laurence Leff" <D-Leff@wiu.edu>]

                 Agenda OASIS eContracts Technical Committee
                             July 20th 18:00 Eastern Time

18:00:00 Wednesday July 20, 2005 in America/New_York converts to
22:00:00 Wednesday July 20, 2005 in GMT 

1-641-297-5400  (St. Marys, IA) 
PIN CODE 84759

Agenda:

We'll use the time to try to finish the initial 
analysis of each alternative schema and come to consensus on an approach. 

Mr. Peter Meyer will contribute a more detailed analysis and summary of BNML 
schema (Elkera's) that Dr. Leff started; and provide a side-by-side 
comparison of DITA/DOCBOOK/XHTML2/BNML (which will overlap with some 
work we've already done, but perhaps add some more light and 
perspective),  and also will send a copy of the final version of BNML to 
the TC and is willing to contribute the IP underlying that schema to 
OASIS as the basis of standardization, if it is the will of the TC to go 
with that approach.  Further explanatory documentation illuminating BNML 
will also be made available in the weeks to follow, on the same terms to 
OASIS.  The discussions we had were around making the IP freely 
available, with no restrictions on use, no royalty or otherwise. 

Further discussions at the end of the July Sixth teleconference outlined 
some other issues.

They amplify requirements we have.  Possibly, the TC may wish to make
these explicitly in their requirements documents:

1) At its June Sixth teleconference, the OASIS Legal XML Member Section 
   Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee decided to look into 
   "fully-tagged forms and other court documents for justice system documents"    
   It "intends to return to the  ... Court Document 1.1 standard."  
   
   At some point, our TC  may wish to contact them and harmonize narrative 
   markup with the work done by this, and possibly other, Legal XML Technical 
   Committees.

   Section 2.5 of our host schema evaluation asks if "clause and paragraph
   level objects" can be used for other legal and business documents?

   And, do we want to explicitly add to our requirements that law firms 
   can use only one schema for both contracts, litigation documents, and other
   legal documents?

   Dr. Leff, in his individual member capacity, will be
   writing to the Chairperson of the Electronic Court Filing
   Technical Committee and its Legal XML Steering Committee
   Representative about this issue.

2) It is desirable to that a specfic document be marked up in only
   one way.  This is known in computer science as the "canonical form"
   issue.  Thus, if several people were asked to use our Host Schema
   to mark up a particular document (perhaps working from a printout),
   would they end up using the same XML tags.

3) One of the members with experience with two DocBook toolchains observed
   that they would sometimes generate Java exceptions or hit infinite loops
   when preparing PDF documents from XML.
   This is even after the XML was passed by validation against the DTD.
 
   Possibly, toolchains for other markup such as Text Encoding Initiative would
   have the same problem, particular in view of their complexity.

   Assume a user submit Contract   XML to the toolchain to prepare a 
  "high quality print rendition." Is it a requirement that a reasonable 
   printout come out and that the toolchain software never hang.   
   Obviously, this assumes that the contract XML is validated first against
   the appropriate Schema or DTD.

P. S. Also, we created a document folder on our TC's web site for the Host 
Schema evaluations.  In there are two evaluations from Mr. Chambers 
and several prepared by Dr. Laurence L. Leff.