Re: LRR: identifiers for divisions of a court

[Frank Bennett <biercenator@gmail.com>]

Thinking forward to the use of identifiers for legislative and
administrative materials in MLZ, I've uncovered an interesting little
wrinkle.

A legislature or a ministry can be both a law-making body in its own
right, or a scope of jurisdictions for the minor bodies that operate
under it. The difference would be expressed in the LRR syntax more or
less like this:

    ie;dail
    ie:dail;select.committee.enterprise.small.business

Frank



On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 7:41 AM, Frank Bennett <biercenator@gmail.com> wrote:
> A release of the MLZ reference manager that uses the LRR identifiers
> went out a few days ago, and there has been some feedback from users.
>
> One item of interest is the need to specify divisions of a court
> within the identifier:
>
>     https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/46508?page=1#Item_4
>
> This seems a good time for an informal explanation of the structure of
> the LRR identifiers.
>
> (The use of the identifiers in the MLZ user interface is shown in the
> attached screenshot.)
>
> ## Description
>
> Here is the identifier for Section I of the European Court of Human
> Rights under the Council of Europe:
>
>      coe.int;echr~section.1
>
> Identifiers are expressed as lower-case ASCII 128 letters, numbers,
> periods, colons, semicolons, and tilde characters. Other characters
> are not permitted.
>
> As shown in the example above, an LRR identifier consists of at most
> three elements: a Jurisdiction specifier; a semicolon-separated Court
> specifier; and a tilde-separated Court Division specifier.
>
> (1) Jurisdiction specifier (coe.int)
>
> A jurisdiction specifier is a colon-delimited list of one or more
> elements, beginning with the element having the largest scope. The
> first element may be the ISO 3166 code for a top-level national
> jurisdiction, or an arbitrary code identifying a non-national scope
> ending in ".int". Sub-elements following the top-level are not an
> expression of judicial or administrative hierarchy. At the technical
> level, their only role is to prevent namespace conflicts among
> entities that share the same Court specifier. The subelements should,
> however, loosely reflect the organization of institutions within the
> national jurisdiction, as they will be used to generate menus,
> information pages, and the like.
>
> (2) Court specifier (echr)
>
> A court specifier follows the Jurisdiction specifier, and is separated
> from it by a semicolon. The court specifier should be derived from the
> name of target institution, either as a set of initials (where these
> are widely recognized) or as a roman transliteration of the name in
> its original language. It identifies an institution with
> decision-making authority. In jurisdictions that recognize multiple
> official languages, the English form is preferred as the base language
> for deriving the identifier. This is not a reflection of priority or
> relative authority; it is simply a matter of technical convenience.
>
> (3) Court Division specifier (section.1)
>
> A Court Division specifier follows the Court specifier, and is
> separated from it by a tilde. The court division specifier is derived
> in the same way as the Court specifier. Where roman numerals are used
> in the human-readable name, arabic numerals should be used.
>
> ## Differences from URN:LEX
>
> While the LRR identifiers resemble the URN:LEX scheme, there are
> significant differences, driven by the differing objectives of the two
> systems. The URL:LEX schema is here:
>
>     https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-spinosa-urn-lex/?include_text=1
>
> URL:LEX seeks to give semantic expression to the structure of
> authority within target jurisdictions, and objective closely tied to
> the requirement that identifiers be settled by national authority
> (schema 5.2). To permit lightweight assignment of identifiers for
> referencing convenience, the LRR abandons the strict alignment of
> identifier structure with the hierarchy of authority. One consequence
> of the difference is that an LRR identifier need not change when the
> status of a sub-jurisdiction changes. For example, the code for
> Hawai'i in the United States would be "us:hi" both before and after
> statehood.
>
> In the structure of identifiers, the LRR draws a distinction between
> scope of jurisdiction (the first specifier) and the lawmaking body
> (the second specifier). This does not appear to be the case in URN:LEX
> (schema 4.4). The distinction is important in the LRR, because the two
> must be stored to separate fields in descriptive citation data.
>
> To avoid confusion between the two schemes, the LRR adopts ".int"
> rather than ".lex" as the suffix for non-national scopes (see schema
> 2.4).
>
> Finally, the LRR uses the tilde separator to specify the division of a
> law-issuing body, so that it can be parsed out and stored in
> descriptive citation data. As far as I can tell, the current draft of
> URN:LEX does not provide a means of encoding this information.
>
> Frank