[legalxml-econtracts] Data Consortium Contract Schema Requirements

[John McClure <jmcclure@hypergrove.com>]

As promised in yesterday's conference call, I have summarized 31 requirements
from the Data Consortium for eContracts -- these represent our current
objectives for the information we want to extract from a commercial real estate
lease. I have made other improvements to the schema since the last version, most
notably in the area of Charges that are levied when beginning/failing to
complete/completing/cancelling commercial events contemplated by the contract or
addendum. Please note that I reduced charges to an equation whose parameters are
financial items that can be identified within the contract. Included here are
general items for total and subtotal, and actual, estimated, and previous
amounts, quantities, and percentages. Price, discounts, escalations, pro-rata
percentages, and others are now clearly defined.

I have also begun to clarify the content model for contract terms (see Billing
and Cancellation Terms), providing extensive examples of the contexts in which
each term may be specified. In this regard, the dotted-name notation is used for
the sake of brevity. Similar treatment will be given to all other terms.
Further, I've identified a few additional terms (Construction, Modification,
Notification, Refund, Remediation, Repair, and ContractAssignment and
ContractLitigation), and dropped the PrePayment term. I have adjusted the schema
for Agent, relying now on a Principal item to indicate whom the Agent is
representing (thanks to Rolly).

For those tracking changes to the Data Consortium's DTD 2.0, you'll be
interested to know that this week we're posting a set of elements specific to
time-zones. We adopt the same approach as we do for currencies (e.g.,
<Price><usd/></Price> is a price quoted in US Dollars). The string 9:30 PM PDT
would for instance be <CreateTime><pdtz>21:30</pdtz></CreateTime>. In our RDF
dictionary we define the "pdtz" property as a subPropertyOf both "daylightTime"
and "pstz" (and of "us_tz" and of "time", which is an XML Schema thing) -- our
aim is to provide a hook into Java locale resource bundles. We needed to add the
"z" suffix to all time zones acronyms in order to avoid conflicts with standard
ISO abbreviations for measurement units, currencies, and languages. Again, the
overall objective of this DTD is to provide a fully internationalized schema
that is based on extensive use of a "names" attribute to hold one or many
dotted-names applicable to the contained text string, e.g., <pdtz
names='Document.CreateTime'>21:30</pdtz>... consistent with our architecture for
accommodating multiple info models simultaneously for a single rendition of text
content, that is, for the markup of flowed text content such as found in
commercial real estate leases.

Any comments about this material would be appreciated.
Thanks,
John McClure, Architect
http://www.DataConsortium.org
http://www.Hypergrove.com

Attachment: DCContractReq.zip
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