Follow up: In regards to LegalXML E-Contracts Draft Specification and Electronic Court Filing

["Rex McElrath" <mcelratr@gaaoc.us>]

Attached and below in plain text format is a draft version of a report
about LegalXML EContracts TC's Draft Specification and the impact or
overlap with the LegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC's work.  The report
was produced by Dr. Laurence Leff and Rex McElrath.

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Report on Discussions Regarding Reconciliation of ECF 3.0 and
E-Contracts Draft Specification 

Issue:

Are there areas where the E-Contracts and Court Filing Technical
Committee's work overlap or conflict?

Response Summary:

At this point, it does not seem so, as it appears that the work of both
Technical Committees is complimentary to each other.


Explanation:

* An E-Contracts document could easily be a document used in
transmitting a message using ECF 3.0
* E-Contracts is more focused on document oriented markup that data can
be extracted from and the Court Filing Documents Subcommittee is more
focused on data oriented markup that documents can be extracted from.
	** Data V/S Document Orientation Reference:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#purpose 

At this point, the work of the E-Contracts TC and the Court Filing TC
seem complimentary.   The Court Filing TC's ECF 3.0 Filing Message could
be used to transport an E-Contracts marked-up document, and the
Documents Subcommittee's work is looking at Documents from a different
angle.  To illustrate the differences in the approach to document
markup, below are examples of the two different types of document markup
approaches:

Example of E-Contracts Markup showing document oriented markup:
Text:
You or Your means an individual or entity exercising rights under this
License.

XML:
.. . . (preceding XML)
<definition>
 	<terms><term>You</term> or <term>Your</term></terms>
 	<block>
  		<text>means an individual or entity exercising rights
under this License.</text>
 	</block>
</definition>
.. . . (following XML)


Note:  
The markup is in line and well suited for use in existing word
processors and for marking up free form documents, but would be more
difficult to use for data exchange packages following GJXDM and NIEM
guidelines.

Example of GJXDM Compliant Markup of same text, showing data oriented
markup:
Text:
You or Your means an individual or entity exercising rights under this
License.

XML:
.. . . (Preceding XML)
<j:Person id="p1">
	<j:PersonName id="p1n">
		<j:PersonGivenName
id="p1gn">Christina</j:PersonGivenName>
		<j:PersonSurName id="p1sn">Edwards</j:PersonSurName>
	</j:PersonName>	
</j:Person>
<local:LicenseDefinition>
	<local:DefinitionText>You or Your means an individual or entity
exercising rights under this License.</local:DefinitionText>
	<local:DefinitionPersonReference ref="p1"/>
</local:LicenseDefinition>
.. . . (Following XML)

Note:
The markup is well suited for data exchange using GJXDM or NIEM
structures, but makes markup in a document more difficult as the
document needs to be machine analyzable to know where to place data.
May require custom editor to ensure data is written in form that is
analyzable into data structures.


 
Further Information of Interest to the Electronic Court Filing Technical
Committee:

 1.	The definition of and distinguishing between "machine-readable"
and "narrative" which is proposed to be used to standardize the words
used for this issue throughout the LegalXML Member Section.  The
definitions proposed by the eContract TC are descriptive and help
distinguish what is being discussed with these issues.  For example,
textual information could be considered "machine-readable" in a broad
sense of the term in that text can be parsed and displayed using a
computer, but the definition used by eContracts makes the term to mean
not only information that the computer can parse, but also information
that the computer can assign value or meaning to.  In this view a
difference between parsing a phrase for either storage or display and
reading a phrase to be able to place the phrase into a semantically
meaningful context, such as "$1.00" versus "$1.00 is owed to John Doe",
is distinguished.
 1.1.	 Quote of definition from eContracts Draft Specification:
 a)	machine-readable information - 
..	This is information in the contract document that refers to
information about contract rights, obligations, or states, that can be
extracted from the document by a computer system. It includes
information represented in deontic contract language, contract metadata
and embedded data values. It does not refer to the computer readable
characters in the text unless the meaning of that text can be determined
by a computer system. For example, a monetary amount that can be read
from the text is not machine-readable information unless the system can
determine useful information about the statement of that amount in the
contract such as who must pay it, to whom it must be paid, and at what
time is it to be paid for what purpose is it paid.
 1.2.	 This definition of "machine-readable" is useful in talking
about the issues that come up on LegalXML and may help in our
discussions.  It may be confusing to some persons who have worked with
data parsing who use the more broader meaning for "machine-readable" but
in the context of LegalXML, where a goal is to be able to use marked up
text in such a way as it to be meaningful and useful, it is a fitting
definition.
 2.	The eContracts technical committee looked at the issue of using
a "host schema."   The concept of a "host schema" is to use an existing
schema to represent document-related information such as paragraphs and
lists and to which would be added markup for concepts and items specific
to the legal domain.  eContracts TC identified and evaluated several
possibilities for "host schema" including our own Court Documents 1.1
standard, DocBook, Open Document Standard from OASIS, and Microsoft's
WordML.  In relation to the Electronic Court Filing TC, our "host
schema" for documents would be the ECF 3.0 core set of schema or a
GJXDM-based schema which we would use for a base to hold information and
data.
 2.1.	Western Illinois University did work, as requested by the
Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee, on how one relates
narrative and machine-readable information. Western Illinois University
prepared several examples of how one marks up domestic violence orders.
This  was done based upon sample documents from several jurisdictions of
protection.  As a result of the work, The International Journal of Law
and Information Technology anticipates publishing an article about the
work in 2007.  The research included investigating embedding GJXDM
elements in a Court Document or other host schema as well as putting the
text inside the GJXDM document; however GJXDM does not currently have
markup for narrative text.
 2.2.	In the Documents Subcommittee of Electronic Court Filing, we are
looking at extending the GJXDM and to enable the capturing of narrative
text in a structured manner and including the document-related
information as a Lead or supporting document in an ECF 3.0 filing.
 3.	The eContracts TC developed the concept of an XML element deemed
"field" to use in the markup of documents to denote a field which is to
be filled from a database or other external data source.   The "field"
form is an embedded XML tag within a narrative of a document that
denotes that the section is to be filled out using external data and to
reference the id of the type of data. eContracts hopes that the use the
of the eContracts standard and of this element will become a standard
practice for markup of documents in the legal field to help with having
a common standard for document markup.
 3.1.	 In relation to the Electronic Court Filing TC, this proposal
would not effect the ECF 3.0 specification, but would be related to
creation of forms that could be filled out with data from an ECF 3.0
filing message or other data source.   
 3.2.	 In relation to the Electronic Court Filing Documents
Subcommittee, this concept may not be applicable as the entire contents
of the view of the data that meets the court specified formatting
requirements could be drawn from the data source of the XML, therefore
specifying sections to be filled would not be necessary.
 4.	The eContracts TC noted that links between two separate
documents could be represented using XML ID's or Resource Description
Framework, or RDF.  
 4.1.	 In relation to the Electronic Court Filing TC, a recent
proposal from Maricopa County and Georgia to the TC proposes the use of
ID's to relate two documents to each other to show that they contain the
same content but are of different formats and ECF 3.0 currently includes
a ID to relate a document in current filing with a previously file
document.
 4.2.	The findings by both TC's seems to strengthen the case for use
of XML ID attributes and elements to relate to each other and the use of
the GJXDM and NIEM RDF-like association structures with element ID's to
relate information structures.



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Writeup-ECFAndEContracts.rtf