Dear John & John,
during the last LegalDocML TC, on June 29th, the group has analyzed your comments and discussed about a possible way to satisfy both your concerns and our need to preserve the consistency of our overall design of the Akoma Ntoso proposal.
In this message we would like to advance to you, informally, the gist of the solution, and once we receive your approval, proceed to actually draft and emit a new version of the documentation for the formal approval procedure.
Briefly, the most relevant and pivotal comment is on the naming convention and on your request to allow "on an equal footing" other naming conventions than Akoma Ntoso's own one. We understand the request and the underlying need, and we are inclined to accept that as long as we can express a few simple and reasonable requirements.
In brief, we would like to adopt your concept of "functionally equivalent naming convention" (FENC), specify that only FENCs are acceptable in Akoma Ntoso XML documents, and provide a few reasonable indications of what we mean by functional equivalence.
A functionally equivalent naming convention is defined as follows:
1) *recognizable*: a syntactical means exists to recognize the specific syntax used for the URI (e.g., a specific prefix);
2) *published*: a sufficiently detailed description of the syntax is publicly available and backed by a recognizable institution;
3) *FRBR compliant*: A full distinction between "distinct intellectual creations", "specific intellectual forms", "physical embodiments" and "exemplars" of relevant documents must be explicitly supported and aligned with the FRBR conceptualizations. Support for items is not necessary nor requested.
4) *CEN Metalex compliant*: the seven rules in CEN Metalex requirements (section 6.1 of [1]) must be fully implemented:
"To allow for the discovery of IRI identifiers, names must be:
1. Persistent: names at all levels must maintain the same form over time regardless of the political,
archival and technical events happened since their first generation;
2. Global: all relevant documents by all relevant bodies must be represented;
3. Memorizable: names should be easy to write down, easy to remember, easy to correct if they were written
down wrongly;
4. Meaningful: names should mean something; It should be possible to make assumption about the kind, freshness
and relevance of a citation by looking only at the document’s name;
5. Guessable across levels: references to different levels of the same document must be similar; e.g.,
given a reference to an _expression_ a user should be able to deduce the name of the work;
6. Guessable across document classes: references to different instances of the same document type must
be similar; and
7. Guessable across document components: references to different components of the same document at the
same level must be similar."
5) *active*: at least one working, accessible, available, robust resolver must exist that provides dereferencing of URIs/IRIs according to the specific syntax;
6) *equivalent*: at least one working, accessible, available, robust converter must exist that converts URIs/IRIs according to the specific syntax into equivalent URIs/IRIs according to the Akoma Ntoso Naming convention;
7) *evident*: Akoma Ntoso XML documents identifying themselves (in <FRBRUri> and <FRBRThis> elements) using a FENC URI, must also provide equivalent <FRBRalias> elements with the URI ref corresponding to <FRBRThis> according to the Akoma Ntoso Naming Convention, one for each of the first three FRBR levels.
Any Naming Convention that complies with these requirements is termed a *functionally-equivalent Naming Convention* and its URIs can be used in any situation where Akoma Ntoso URIs/IRIs are appropriate.
Finally we resist at allowing custom syntaxes for inner-document ids in eId and wId, because
a) inner document identifiers are a reflection of the overall XML structure, which is still Akoma Ntoso, and not of the document-level URI syntax adopted,
b) allowing multiple syntaxes for the same attributes would create havocs in any decent resolver and editor trying to deal with documents coming from different sources, and
c) a good destination for custom ids already exists, attribute guid, that has exactly the stated purpose and allows custom ids without polluting the id space expressed by eIds and wIds.
[1] ftp://ftp.cen.eu/CEN/Sectors/List/ICT/CWAs/CWA15710-2010-Metalex2.pdf
We plan to work on a new draft including this kind of flexibility, and would appreciate your opinion within the next week.
Thank you for your comments and opinions on this.
Monica and Fabio
Il 21/06/2016 08:48, John Dann ha scritto:
Dear members of
the LegalDocumentML
As Chair of the
ELI Task Force, and on behalf of
· Denmark
· Finland
· Ireland
· Luxembourg
· Publications
Office of the European Union (comments also sent
individually)
· United-Kingdom
(comments also sent individually)
· France
we would like to
send the following comments.
Constructing a
universal naming convention, given the differences in
national legal systems, is very complex and does not
cover all national legislation cases and especially
hinder existing naming conventions.
In line with the
principle of proportionality and the principle of
decentralization, each country and company should
continue to operate its own national Official Journals,
Legal Gazettes or legal databases in the way they
prefer. We should therefore carefully consider not to
impose a naming convention in order to respect the legal
and constitutional differences between countries, and
authorize on equal footing other naming conventions,
e.g. URN-Lex, ECLI, ELI etc.
This flexibility
would help the implementation of the revised version of
AKN.
We therefore fully
support the comments of the Office of Publications of
the EU sent earlier by email.
Best regards,
John
John Dann
Directeur
LE GOUVERNEMENT DU GRAND-DUCHÉ DE LUXEMBOURG
Ministère d'État
Service
central de législation
43,
bd Roosevelt . L-2450
Luxembourg
Tél.
(+352) 247-82961 . Fax (+352) 46 74 58
E-mail : john.dann@scl.etat.lu
www.legilux.public.lu