Re: [akomantoso-xml] RE: Akoma Ntoso as a working /in-progress document

[Grant Vergottini <grant.vergottini@xcential.com>]

From my viewpoint, the there are perhaps a cascade of cases - each one following the other through the drafting process:

 

1) The initial state of a document being created. Is it possible to have a document that is valid according to the schema, which has yet to contain any information? This document could be a form of a template. Is a template a valid Akoma Ntoso document? (This is close to Monica's second case)

 

2) Is it possible to have an incomplete document, partially drafted, that is still a valid document. Sometimes it takes a long time to draft legislation and it must be possible to save, analyze, and pre-publish documents that are yet to be completed .(This is also close to Monica's second case)

 

3) Some aspects of an Akoma Ntoso document, such as the metadata section, rely on heavy analysis of a drafted document. Is the intent that this analysis will take place throughout the editing session or can it be postponed to a discrete time either before or after the document is saved or even finalized. If it is possible to postpone analysis to a discrete time, is it still possible to have a valid document even without the analysis having taken place? How strict should Akoma Ntoso be in ensuring that all the steps have been completed? Or does this check belong with the software and not with the schema?

 

4) Some aspects of the document may not initially be known and might not even be known until the bill is adopted. For example, the effective date of a piece of legislation perhaps won't be known until such time as the legislation is adopted. When this is the case, and a date is speculative, proposed, or unknown, how should this information be represented in Akoma Ntoso? Is it represented by an "unknown" date or is it omitted until it is known? (I believe this is Monica's first case)

 

Monica's fourth case is a special case to me - I think. I usually refer to these as "operational conditions" which are sometimes very hard to automate. There are many ways in which an event in time could be specified to occur. The simple case is the "operational date" specified as a fixed date which is easy to automate. But what do you do when the event occurs based on conditions which cannot easily be automated? For example, legislation that comes into effect only if other legislation is also passed, repealed, or amended. How are these conditions characterized in Akoma Ntoso? While this problem is relatively rare, it does occur frequently enough to deserve accommodation in Akoma Ntoso.

 

Regards,
   -Grant

On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 11:18 PM, monica.palmirani <monica.palmirani@unibo.it> wrote:

Dear Ashok, dear Grant,

in preparation of the TC meeting of tomorrow please find these few comments.

Thanks for opening this discussion on the incomplete document. It is a very important topic.

There are four cases, from my point of view, when a document is incomplete and so invalid to the XML validation:

- situation where the document is incomplete because some information are not available due to the legislative work-flow. It is the case of the bill where (e.g.) the time of enter into force of the document is not yet defined. In this case we need some attribute (status="undefined" date="9999-99-99") or some default values (eg. <num status="undefined">undefined</num>) for those parts that need to be treated in these cases.
The status of incompleteness is in the major of cases destined to be resolved when the document completes its legislative work-flow (e.g. it becomes act). In this case the status of incompleteness is mostly temporary.

- situation where the document is incomplete because the people is working on it in different steps. In this case we don't take care so much to the validation. However it is possible to produce some sub-schemas, one for each main part of Akoma Ntoso (e.g. preface, preamble, body, etc.), in order to permit the validation of each macro-block. It is the case when the markup task is divided between different offices of the same body. It is a feature quite interesting for the editors based on XML engine. In this case the status of incompleteness is definitely temporary.

- situation where the document is incomplete of some metadata without any other evolution. In this case the incompleteness is permanent but in Akoma Ntoso there aren't parts mandatory except for the <meta><identification> block and <body>. So you can resolve this situation using @refersTo combined with <span> or <omissis>.

- situation where the document has some parameters that are dynamic over the time and they need some integrations (e.g. conditional included inside of the normative part e.g. "1. This Convention shall enter into force on the thirtieth day following the date of the deposit of the twenty-second instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession with the Secretary-General of the United Nations." http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src="">mtdsg_no=XVIII-11&chapter=18&lang=en). For this case we need to understand if the evolution produces a new _expression_ due to the fact that only the metadata are changed, not the text.

Yours,
Monica

Il 16/11/2012 12:11, Ashok Hariharan ha scritto:

This question is coming from the discussion in the last tc-meeting.
There was a question raised by Grant (and also I believe Veronique) on
working documents - where all the information may not be available
during some stages of markup (e.g. dateTime period information ) -
some of these are mandatory for the document to be valid. The
conclusion appeared to be that the schema has to accommodate an
unknownDateTime / unknownPeriod attribute setting for such cases ( I
lost the connection towards the end - so i am not sure if there was
further discussion on this ) .    I would also think there are other
use cases of this type which we don't know about yet - what is the
recommended practice in such cases - do we leave the working document
invalid until such information is available  ?

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