Re: [legaldocml] Public Comments

Dear Monica, Flavio,

I am surprised. Our objective is to achieve meaningful conformance rules to Akoma Ntoso, identifying in each case the exact action on your side that, if taken, leads to a satisfactory resolution of our comment.

Our key concern is that the question of interoperability of the identifiers (= naming convention) must be independent from the question of interoperability of the document structure. Compliance to one must not be a prerequisite for compliance to the other, though anybody who so wishes, can use them in combination. In this sense Akoma Ntoso should just follow the best practice of DocBook, a very successful OASIS standard, Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and many other document formats.

Your proposal does only partially reply to this concern. This is also at the very core of the National Archive's comment that it must not be mandatory to provide a converter from a functionally equivalent naming convention syntax to the Akoma Ntoso equivalent.

From a technical point of view, building an architecture that binds compliance to an XML document structure to the presence and operation of specific technical components (resolver and converter) is the very opposite of a robust design for interoperability. However, compliance to the document structure of Akoma Ntoso _is_ one of our goal. In this sense, the question is not the presence of "one additional element", it is the coupling of two different concerns and dependence on third-party software components. Already from a long-term archiving perspective – a key concern at least for the OP – having formal validity depend on such an external mechanism is a no-go.

These comments originate from the ELI Task Force and so focus on the concerns of ELI, but they equally apply to other identification schemes such as URN:LEX or (for case law) ECLI

In CEN and ISO we have used comment resolution meetings to come, if possible, to a mutually agreed disposition of comments. Of course, we would be available for such a meeting, is you consider it useful

Best regards

Marc

From: monica.palmirani [mailto:monica.palmirani@unibo.it]
Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2016 11:59 PM
To: KUSTER Marc (OP)
Cc: 'Fabio Vitali'; Catherine Tabone; 'Søren Broberg Nielsen (957sbn)'; Patrice Platel; 'Gerry''; Jean-Michel THIVEL; 'Nina Koch (957nko)'; ''aki.hietanen@om.fi'; SCIARRINO Valeria (OP); KOENIG Kurt (OP); MALAGON Carmen (OP); SCHMITZ Peter (OP); PAPPALARDO Roberto (OP); KARDAMI Maria (OP); BAGOLA Holger (OP); 'John.Dann@scl.etat.lu'; FRANCESCONI Enrico (OP); legaldocml@lists.oasis-open.org; legaldocml-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [legaldocml] Public Comments

Dear Marc, dear ELI group,

that was a fairly disappointing answer to our compromise proposal. In fact, we felt it was not even a search of compromise, but a hardening of reciprocal position of distrust. It would be very sorry if that was the case. We would have welcomed counterproposals and discussions, rather than a plain and cold yes/no judgment on individual items.

The proposed compromise was meant exactly to accommodate a number of other naming conventions, including country-specific ELI implementations as well as URN:LEX and others. This was meant that ELI implementations could be used transparently within Akoma Ntoso documents with a modicum of effort (ONE ADDITIONAL ELEMENT, that's all).

This shrill reaction seems to mean that you are not interested in considering the compatibility with Akoma Ntoso, but only in excusing yourself from finding good reason to look carefully into it.

In summary:

Thanks for taking up the idea of the functionally equivalent naming convention. However, currently the ELI naming convention seems to be only partially accommodated but subject to AKN conditions as opposed to being on “an equal footing” and this will need to evolve significantly.

We never meant to introduce an equal footing for the ELI naming convention specifically. We aimed at allowing reasonably sophisticated naming conventions different from the native Akoma Ntoso to be used everywhere an URI ref is allowed. Nothing specific for ELI, but we fully expected that most ELI Implementations that we are aware of, including UK, EU, FR, and others, could immediately apply.

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:

 [ELI + OP] Disagree with most of these requirements. Why are they needed? Some of these requirements are highly subjective (when is something "memorizable", "global" etc.)? Who would measure these and decide on the possible compliance as functionally equivalent naming convention?

It may be difficult to follow this, but compliance cannot be requested nor enforced. Akoma Ntoso does not have guns, and no institution is emitting licenses allowing one to use Akoma Ntoso if an only if some requirement is followed.

You can use the Akoma Ntoso XML vocabulary and your own naming convention in it and nobody will sue you.

The only thing we can do is to provide a series of guidelines on how to use the language. These guidelines are only meant to guarantee interoperability of tools and datasets. Adopting only part of these guidelines means only that you admit that you do not care very much for interoperability of tools and datasets. Which you are absolutely free to do, but it is not fully compliant with LegalDocML OASIS conformance rules that we intend to provide to the world.

Any naming convention that declares itself to be functionally equivalent, is persistent and well publicly documented must qualify.

1)  *recognizable*: a syntactical means exists to recognize the specific syntax used for the URI (e.g., a specific prefix);

[ELI + OP] This would largely be the case for ELI (and ECLI), but why this requirement? Also the /eli/ part is _not_ a mandatory part of the ELI identifier syntax (and the UK doesn't have it…).

No part of ELI is mandatory, not even the eli prefix itself. In fact, we do not look at ELI, which in our mind does not even exist for exactly this reason, but to individual ELI implementations, which usually DO adopt such prefix. In an interoperable world (which is where we would like to exist), recognizing that a URI is, in fact, a UK uri as opposed to a French URI is interesting. This is the reason to require such a syntactical means.

[KUSTER Marc (OPOCE)] This is inbuilt into ELI by the very fact that the hostname of the http-URI will always be specific to a data provider (and, of course, this part _is_ mandatory, as each ELI is a complete http URI)

2)  *published*: a sufficiently detailed description of the syntax is publicly available and backed by a recognizable institution;

[ELI + OP] OK (assuming that "recognizeable institution" = relevant stakeholder). Otherwise, badly defined

please provide a better definition. We did not plan to define it at all, we only tried to find a common ground. Simply sying "Not enough, try again" does not help the cooperation.

[KUSTER Marc (OPOCE)] Indeed, we did implicitly suggest one: replace "recognizable institution" by "relevant stakeholder"

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.

[ELI + OP] Why is this relevant at the identifier level? As it is formulated, it is unclear if ELI complies to this or not

actually ELI conformance rules do not exist. Many individual ELI implementations, including UK, EU, FR, as far as we are aware of, do comply.

As to the reason for this: FRBR is FUNDAMENTAL everywhere in Akoma Ntoso. It is one of the basic building blocks of Akoma Ntoso. We are NOT going to requiring a good support for FRBR just because within the ELI group you were not able to reach a consensus on its meaning.

[KUSTER Marc (OPOCE)] Leaving aside the question of ELI conformance rules, this does not answer the question why this is relevant _at the identifier level_ (ELI itself is, of course, built on FRBR for the structuring of its metadata). In fact, the question of conformity to the Akoma Ntoso XML vocabulary must be orthogonal from the question of any possible structure, FRBR or otherwise, of an identifier

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;

 [ELI + OP] OK

      2. Global: all relevant documents by all relevant bodies must be represented;

 [ELI + OP] What does this mean? Documents are globally accessible or the scheme is globally applicable? If the last, why?

What are "all relevant bodies"?

As explicitly specified, we are mentioning a third party document (CEN Metalex, ftp://ftp.cen.eu/CEN/Sectors/List/ICT/CWAs/CWA15710-2010-Metalex2.pdf ) which existed before this naming convention. This document lists in a very generic form a set of requirements for CEN Metalex compliancy. The Akoma Ntoso Naming Convention, in the mind of its proponents, does its best to comply with them. Functional equivalence, in our mind, means exactly that the candidate naming convention must have the same consideration for the CEN Metalex requirements that we had.

The actual answers can and must be found in the CEN Metalex document, if anywhere. Both questions you raise, nonetheless, are easy to answer:

1) The scheme must be globally applicable to all documents to which it claims to apply. Easy.

2) The relevant bodies are all organizations emitting documents for which the candidate naming convention claims to apply. Also easy.

[KUSTER Marc (OPOCE)] Thanks for clarifying the definitions, they are OK as this (and not at all evident when looking at your previous definition)

Please note that the term "global" is defined in Metalex in a quite different sense, namely that "the index of the element is unique within the entire document (e.g. the third table in a (sic!) act" (3.2.1).

      3. Memorizable: names should be easy to write down, easy to remember, easy to correct if they were written

         down wrongly;

[ELI + OP] In principle OK, though subjective

Ok.

      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;

 [ELI + OP] OK (but what does freshness mean)

Our take: in a versioned document, it should be possible to make assumption about the actual version you are interested in.

      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;

 [ELI + OP] OK

      6. Guessable across document classes: references to different instances of the same document type must

         be similar; and

 [ELI + OP] OK

      7. Guessable across document components: references to different components of the same document at the

         same level must be similar."

 [ELI + OP] OK

4)  *active*: at least one working, accessible, available, robust resolver must exist that provides dereferencing of URIs/IRIs according to the specific syntax;

 [ELI + OP] No resolver must be required, unless this includes is the general http resolution mechanism

IF the resolution of your identifier can happen through the general http resolution, THEN you automatically comply. This is NOT the case for ALL candidate naming convention, so we felt the need to add this requirement.

[KUSTER Marc (OPOCE)] If clarified in this sense, then OK. In this case please add the following clarification after "syntax": "Dereferenceable http URIs are automatically considered to comply to this requirement."

5)  *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;

[ELI + OP] In this case the Akoma Ntoso Naming convention is the privileged partner and not a choice on "an equal footing".

In practical terms, who would maintain such a converter?

Being an Akoma Ntoso document means BOTH using the Akoma Ntoso XML vocabulary AND being part of a network of document collections that talk to each other. This is probably NOT a requirement for ELI, but it is one for Akoma Ntoso.

Interoperability, thus, means that a resolver should be able to resolve URIs regardless of the naming convention used, and in particular source documents using internally a naming convention which is different than the one used by the document base where the destination document is stored should be able to access the destination document anyway.

The opposite, i.e., requiring that the author of the source document KNOWS which naming convention is used in the destination document collection, hardly seems robust and interoperable.

[KUSTER Marc (OPOCE)] Disagree for the reasons mentioned above

6)  *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.

[ELI + OP] Unacceptable. As an effect of this everybody would have to support the Akoma Ntoso naming convention in any case, the only difference being that in this case ELI is the primary schema and Akoma Ntoso the obligatory second one. In this, the Akoma Ntoso naming convention retains a privileged position and is not at all "on an equal footing"

Equal footing, in our mind, does not mean ignoring each other. It means actively looking for a compromise situation where the syntax may differ, but the functionalities stay the same. Interoperability is the MOST IMPORTANT functional requirement for being part of the Akoma Ntoso world. You cannot have interoperability if you do not allow resolver to access documents using a different naming convention that the source document uses. This is the only justification for this requirement.

In practice, this requires that ONE element per FRBR level (THREE element total) are added to an Akoma Ntoso XML document to be compliant with this requirement. All links, all components, all references, all annotations

As said, you can use Akoma Ntoso XML documents with no legal consequences. Nonetheless, if you want OUR resolvers to access your documents, you must allow them to discover the Akoma Ntoso equivalent URIs.

[KUSTER Marc (OPOCE)] Equal footing does mean that you can use any one identifier system without necessarily being aware of the other ones

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.

[ELI + OP] Using the prescribed syntax must not be requirement for compliance to Akoma Ntoso nor for the use of the eId / wId attributes. If desired, an additional compliance level could be defined for those users of Akoma Ntoso who want to use a resolver. The use of a resolver must not be forced on users of the schema who have no interest in using this functionality. So, usage of a predefined inner identifier structure should be an option (CAN), not an obligation (MUST), except perhaps in said specific compliance level

This is exactly the case it is now. You can use GUID attributes at the first level of compliancy. Using eId and wId is only at the second level of compliancy. but IF you use eId and wId, we insist on you adopting the syntax provided for these attributes. This guarantees that the resolution can take place with no ill effects and without misunderstandings, especially in the case of renumbered fragments in a versioned context.

[KUSTER Marc (OPOCE)] Well, no. The request is exactly that, if you use eId and wId, you must not be constrained to use any specific identifier structure.