Scope for Comparison

["McGibbney, Lewis John" <Lewis.McGibbney@gcu.ac.uk>]

Hi Everyone,

Having very recently joined the TC (some months later than I would have preferred), and having analyzed the list achives for the last few months, I thought it best to post to the list to say hello and to contribute some of my initial thoughts to the community.

I read the following two posts [0][1] and subsequent replies with keen interest, all the time hoping to extract some determination as to whether any comparisons between the standards within discussion, namely the use of FRBR within the expressiveness of Akoma Ntoso model, and the Akoma Ntoso model itself, have been carried out.
My reasoning behind this rather wildcard query (and I completely understand if it is interpreted as impatient), is that my approach to, and interest in both legal document/text mark-up and the TC stems from a use-case driven arrangement where a crucially important aspect for consideration w.r.t document representation (manifestation?) involves how that representation can then be queried, what features or benefits such a representation offers over other such formats, and whether the representation actually improves judgment making and subsequent decision making further downstream (to name a few considerations I care to class as important within the context of this email thread).

If we briefly consider the following aspects of the reply in [2], where the discussion passes detail that "An Akoma Ntoso file is a specific manifestation, which means that its editor chooses a specific content of a work (i.e., the product of an author) and creates the markup that best captures whatever he/she feels expressing.", I personally consider this, within the context of legislative drafting, or document manifestation as questionable practice, namely because regardless of to which legislature any such artifact of legislation belongs, my notion of improving compliance with such legal texts is to ensure that the vocabularies which describe them also restrict the scope for inconsistency to creep into such manifestations.

A particular use case which I now propose, I suppose acts both as a driver for feedback/comment as well as a direct call to arms for those literate in the expressiveness which the Akoma Ntoso data model offers to suit legal circumstances and the texts used within these circumstances from across the board.

Suppose we were to consider that as in [2], some "country has a specific delegation of power that entrusts a (government) office to create the new version of the Code with the new bits placed in", (which for my use case, is the case in Scotland), and now we also factor into the equation that the author of some expression from some particular artifact of work manages to incorporate (intentionally or otherwise) some level of inconsistency (as described above) into the manifestation... does it still hold true that creating a suitable, accurate (XML) manifestation is "easy"?

The point of view I am coming from is that if one were to consider the representation of any particular legal text (for the purpose of this exercise, please consider one from the UK) as persisted in the Crown Legislation Mark-up Language and the exact same work of legislation marked in Akoma Ntoso (two different manifestations of the same legislative work) then what differences in the data model do we witness and what knock-on margins does this produce w.r.t the resulting query model?

I think based on this, I'll close off now as it's not nice to land this kind of stuff at nearly 3pm on Friday!

Thank you very much in advance for feedback of any kind.#
Regards and have a great weekend

Lewis

[0] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legaldocml/201204/msg00009.html
[1] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legaldocml/201204/msg00012.html
[2] http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legaldocml/201204/msg00013.html


Lewis John McGibbney BSc (Hons), ICIOB
PhD Researcher Informatics in Design and Construction
School of Engineering and Built Environment
Glasgow Caledonian University
0141 331 8420
lewis.mcgibbney@gcu.ac.uk

Glasgow Caledonian University is a registered Scottish charity, number SC021474

Winner: Times Higher Education’s Widening Participation Initiative of the Year 2009 and Herald Society’s Education Initiative of the Year 2009.
http://www.gcu.ac.uk/newsevents/news/bycategory/theuniversity/1/name,6219,en.html

Winner: Times Higher Education’s Outstanding Support for Early Career Researchers of the Year 2010, GCU as a lead with Universities Scotland partners.
http://www.gcu.ac.uk/newsevents/news/bycategory/theuniversity/1/name,15691,en.html