Minutes Draft from the OASIS Legal XML Member Section Electronic Contracts Technical Committee Secretary (File id: @@2571)

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

               Minutes of Teleconference, August Seventeenth 2005
              OASIS Legal XML Member Section eContracts TC

Present:
Dave Marvit$ 
Peter Meyer$ 
Laurence Leff$ 
Zoran Milosovic$ 
Daniel Greenwood

started 18:07:56 Eastern Time

The upcoming meetings will be on Wednesdays at 18:00 Eastern, at 
least through January.

You will recall that Dr. Leff, as secretary, was charged with contacting
the representatives of the various host schema.

Dr. Leff outlined contents of the letter Microsoft, Antoine Leblond,
Vice President, Office Program Management sent in response.  
They would like to work with
us.  For example, their letter included the adjective "delighted."
They believe their license terms would be open for use by our Technical
Committee.  They also liked the idea of processing foreign tags in
the Wordprocessing ML.

Also, Dr. Leff relayed that the chairperson of the Open Document Technical
Committee sent two communications to the membership.  The first
listed the URL's for the evaluations of this host schema by Mr. Chambers
and Dr. Leff.  The other specifrically mentioned concerns of the TC
regarding numbering of paragraphs.

We outlined the issues recognizing the importance of Microsoft Word
in the marketplace.  We also realize that the only technical evaluation
of Microsoft's Wordprocessing ML as a host schema was done by Dr. Laurence
Leff.  It was noted that our Technical Committee's Web Site's documentation 
section has a folder will all the host schema evaluations submitted.

Our technical committee discussed the possibility of working with both
the BNML submission from Elkera and Microsoft.com's Wordprocessing ML:

Is it a bad architectural decision to simply say "do both" when one cannot
decide what one should do?

Should we have two separate specifications, one aimed at the back end
market and one aimed at those working with contracts using a
more conventional Word Processing approach.

Do we need compatability between the two specifications?  
   One could specify the tags that are needed specifically for contracts.  
   Then, one could specify embeddings of this into various host schema 
   such as BNML and Court Document.  

   We recognized that at this point, we only have a few tags such as 
   signature blocks and  the party data, which one member referred to
   as "metadata" on the call.   These would be the only things that
   would be embedded first.  Of course, hopefully, at some later point
   we would have more contract specific tags such as those from
   deontic logic or what one member called "semantic data" on the call.

   OASIS does not create or architect systems.  It creates standards
   and lets the "market decide."  There is an advantage for
   "genetic diversity."

   We have not determined what the market needs.  We are not faced now
   with the situation that there are two groups that have adopted
   different specifications or approaches. 

The consensus is that we will:
  a) move forward on adapating the Elkera Schema, recognizing synergies 
     between what they are doing and the contract domain.
  b) We will get back to Microsoft and arrange a teleconference with them.

We discussed the issue of transferring the Intellectual Property
from Elkera.  Both Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Meyer have been sending
electronic mails to Mr. McGrath of OASIS.  There is discussion of OASIS
offering Elkera a business membership in exchange for transferring the
intellectual property.

This led to a discussion of switching our TC's Intellectual Property
policy.

The agenda for next week's meeting would be
1)  Discussing establishing or using a new IP policy for our TC as a whole
2)  Issues of transferring the IP--hopefully, this would be a short discussion
3)  Begin discussion of BNML  -- we had a brief discussion of what members 
    could and should do to prepare for that meeting.

The Technical Committee also discussed what will be needed to get BNML
to be a specification.  It was agree that it needs to be written as a 
specification.  Also, the Technical Committee might only wish to
use a subset of the work as its specification For example, the BNML submission
includes "document" and "correspondence."   The TC may wish to "carve"
these out.

One member reminded the TC that they were concerned about "coordination"
with the Document Subcommittee of the OASIS Legal XML Electronic Court
Filing Committee.  There was a brief discussion of exactly when and how
the subcommittee would be contacted.  (It was noted that Dr. Leff
already contacted Rex McElrath from that subcommittee unofficially.)

The meeting closed at about 18:58 Eastern time.