A new take on the JSON structure for the Supreme Court of Virginia example

[Fabio Vitali <fvitali@gmail.com>]

Dear all, 

first of all, I provided an answer to all the questions by Thomas on the document about the feature list syntax in the wiki, at https://wiki.oasis-open.org/legalcitem/LCMReferences . Some answers lead to a change in the text, other are just plain answers in line. 

The: during our last conf call, we discussed at length the example by Melanie from the Supreme Court of Virginia, "Womack v. Eldridge, 215 Va. 338, 210 S.E.2d 145 (1974)". 

I tried to come out with a new JSON representation of our feature list, which I am posting here. At the end I'll make some comments.  

//  frames
//      FRBR levels
//          feature
//              hierarchy of equivalent values
{
    "source": {
        "work": {
            "document title": [
                ["Womack v. Eldridge"]
            ],
            "official number": [
                ["Va."],
                [215],
                [338]
            ],
            "unofficial number": [
                ["S.E.2d"],
                [210],
                [145]
            ],
            "document date": [
                [1974]
            ]
        }
    },
    "interpretation": {
        "work": {
            "document date": [
                [1974],
                [12],
                [2]
            ],
            "document type": [
                ["court document"],
                ["judgment"]
            ],
            "court": [
                ["Supreme Court of Virginia"]
            ],
            "jurisdiction": [
                ["us", "USA"],
                ["va", "Virginia"]
            ],
            "document title": [
                ["Danny Lee WOMACK v. Rosalie ELDRIDGE"]
            ]
        },
        "expression": {
            "language": [
                ["en", "eng", "English"],
                ["en-US", "eng-US", "English (American)"]
            ]
        }
    }
}

First of all, the features we should REALLY REALLY agree on are the ones in the source frame, as they represent the objective part of the reference, the facts drawn from the actual citation. The features in the interpretation frame, on the other hand, represent the additional data or corrections provided by the actor (human or automatic) that generated the reference, and may very well be subjective and in some cases even wrong. 

Secondly, I've come to the conclusion that official number and unofficial number are good names for Work-level features. My understanding is that, although each of them identifies a specific Expression, as a pair they are used to identify the Work they both are Expressions of. Individually, they identify an Expression, but when both are specified, they are peer pillars for the specification of the Work.

Finally, I may be wrong, but I decided to use a hierarchical sequence of the items of the two numbers that is different than the sequence used in the citation: in "215 Va. 338", it seems to me that the correct hierarchy is name of the collection, then volume number and then page number, and this is the order I used in the hierarchy. I would appreciate your opinion on this. 

It seems to me that the real objective of this exercise is to come forth with a reasonable list of feature names to be used for US court documents, and check how they match with actual citations and linearization syntaxes from Continental European and British courts (we could start with Catherine Tabone's document next  time we meet). 

I eagerly await your opinions and comments

Fabio Vitali

--

Fabio Vitali                                          The sage and the fool
Dept. of Informatics                                     go to their graves
Univ. of Bologna  ITALY                               alike in this respect:
phone:  +39 051 2094872                  both believe the sage to be a fool.
e-mail: fabio@cs.unibo.it                  Where, then, may wisdom be found?
http://vitali.web.cs.unibo.it/   Qi, "Neither Yes nor No", The codeless code