Re: [legaldocml] Redlining Discussion Slides and Background Info

[Fabio Vitali <fabio@cs.unibo.it>]

Dear Mark, 

> And it sounds as though Grant may well have even more complicated edits in Californian law. Would milestones not be a better option here? Or is this an option in the current Schema allowing someone to decide to implement this approach rather than segmentation?

on the one hand, I am perfectly fine with milestones to describe separately the beginning and the end of ranges that overlap the basic structures of an XML document. On the other hand milestones, while apparently easier on the eye of the reader of the XML source, have the problem that do not capture containment (i.e., the content of the element must be found out by determining everything that is after the starting milestone and before the ending milestone, which is considerably more complicated than juxtaposing the content of the individual segments in the segmentation scenario) and most importantly do not allow discontinuous overlaps. 

Now in your example you have a situation of non-contiguous overlap:

> <section>
>    <num>1</num>
>    <p>
>            Some text [start of pm1.....[start of pm2..... some more text.
>    </p>
> </section>
> <section>
>    <num>2</num>
>    <p>
>             Some text .....end of pm1].....end of pm2] some more text.
>    </p>
> </section>
> 

In this case, element <num>2</num> would end up being part of the content of the milestoned element, which most probably is not intended nor appropriate. Using segmentation, on the other hand, would allow you to specify that the <num> element belongs to neither fragment, and belongs to the basic structure of the document, which I believe is the correct approach. 

Ciao

Fabio


--

Fabio Vitali                            Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly,
Dept. of Computer Science        Man got to sit and wonder "Why, why, why?'
Univ. of Bologna  ITALY               Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land,
phone:  +39 051 2094872              Man got to tell himself he understand.
e-mail: fabio@cs.unibo.it         Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), "Cat's cradle"
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