The meaning of time in Akoma Ntoso URIs

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

Dear all,

I'm finding the discussion regarding time a bit confusing in our
discussions so far. For me, there are four very distinct notions of
time:

1) Enactment date or approval date. This is the date that a document
becomes official. It might be the date a vote in the legislature
approved a version of a bill or it might be the date the the chief
executive signed the bill into law.

In California, they would call the enactment date the "effective" date
although the law generally does become enforceable on this date -
that's the operative date.

2) Publication date. This is the date that a publication of the
document first becomes available in print. Often it will be the same
date as (1), but it does not have to be.

The U.S. Code is republished every six years with all the amendments
executed from the prior six years. That publication date does not
correspond to any legislative action.

3) Operative dates. These are the dates that the law comes into
operation or goes out of operation. It is not necessarily the same as
the enactment date.

Indeed, in California, while most laws become effective upon signing
by the Governor, most laws become operative (are enforced) Jan 1 of
the following year (unless declared an urgency measure).

Individual provisions within an act may have their own operative dates
(or complex conditions which we can ignore for now) that cause the
provisions to be either operative or not.

4) Point-in-time date. This is a date requesting the law as it exists
at any point in time. It is, by necessity, a date to be used as a
query as it need not correspond to any specific legislative activity.

It is my opinion that the expression date most closely corresponds to
#2 above - the formal publication date. We can argue that it should
correspond to #1, but my counter argument is that newer editions might
be produced independent of specific legislative activity on the
document.

Further, it is my opinion, that any specified manifestation date
corresponds to #4 above - a query into the XML requesting a
synthesized rendition as would be operative at the specific
point-in-time.

I don't think there is any need to specifically handle #3 above in the
URI - this is metadata used when querying for #4.

Is my understanding correct? Is our terminology aligned?

-- Grant
____________________________________________________________________
Grant Vergottini
Xcential Group, LLC.
email: grant.vergottini@xcential.com
phone: 858.361.6738