FW: [legalxml-econtracts] grammatical paras necessary for "linking and retrieval mechanisms"?

["John McClure" <jmcclure@hypergrove.com>]

Hi Jason,
Sorry that my explanations weren't clear.

A grammatical paragraph is an un-captioned unit of content (text and graphic)
that is located within a captioned unit of content, and that is meant by the
author to convey a topic of information. A captioned unit of content is
indicated by the presence of a preceding caption number and or caption title,
and is meant by the author to convey an organization of its topics of
information. A topic of information is one or more subjects paired with one or
many units of content. In English, a grammatical paragraph contains grammatical
sentences, ungrammatical phrases, and associated images.... in other words, a
grammatical paragraph can be defined within a pretty common framework.

Because a grammatical paragraph exists conceptually then software needs to be
able to reference it for libraries (e.g., as the subject of reuse), for display
(e.g., as the subject of widow processing, cursoring control, and text selection
highlighting), and for metadata (as the subject of RDF statements). Like any
other identifiable "thing" in a contract, they need to be accessed using an <a>
anchor tag. The anchor tag has an href attribute that is a URI. The URI needs to
point to a single element that contains the content of a grammatical paragraph.
That element can be identified positionally, by id, or by some other attribute.
Technically it doensnt matter which device is used, however there are good
reasons to prefer that the element be ABLE TO BE identified positionally so that
id's are NOT REQUIRED to be provided on every stupid element in a file.

With regard to samples, that which you provided in the Appendix is good enough.
With regard to the lack of guarantee that a grammatical paragraph fully
encapsulates its content, well, I am interested in a standard that works, when
used correctly. When used incorrectly, well, that's their problem not mine. With
regard to who would (ever) want to link to a specific item of trailing content,
well, on the whole I agree with you that the argument of linking to trailing
content is not too compelling to me either. With regard to "poking at and
talking about" further examples, for me, well, I am at the end of my
participation in such exercise -- I know enough for my purposes to move on.

I think it's a good thing for everyone in the galaxy that XHTML 2.0 introduces
the <section> element and redefines the <p> element from a simple paragraph to a
grammatical paragraph, and we should build on it as a very compelling base for
further standardization and easy, international, acceptance of our work. I hope
we can vote about this soon.

Thanks,
John

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Harrop [mailto:jharrop@speedlegal.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2003 4:28 AM
To: Legalxml-Econtracts
Subject: Re: [legalxml-econtracts] grammatical paras necessary for
"linking and retrieval mechanisms"?


John McClure wrote:
> Jason,
> I said for "linking and retrieval mechanisms" because if a link is to be made
to
> a trailing fragment of a grammatical paragraph, using a logical XP expression
> that does not rely on id-lookup, then that fragment needs to exist physically
as
> a part of that grammatical paragraph.

??

In the simple para model, the xpath
> expression to that fragment simply cannot be stated without using #id.

Incorrect!  Though without the example i've asked you for, i fail to see why
you'd want to link to the "trailing fragment of a grammatical para" anyway.

That's
> the flaw of the simple para model: it does not encapsulate content as one
might
> normally expect,

Not that there's any guarantee the content will be so encapsulated (with either
the grammatical para models which have been proposed in the TC, nor with XHTML
2.0)

and hence it's not possible to reference the data logically --
> you're left with #id references, which I find unacceptable for
previosuly-stated
> reasons.

??


>
> As for retrieval mechanisms, if I want to retrieve the entire grammatical
> paragraph, that's simply not possible with the simple paragraph model because
> one can't know apriori the extent of SIBLING elements that are to be retrieved
> as part of the grammatical paragraph that is to be retrieved.

Very true, but please show me a compelling example with one of our benchmark
contracts as to why you'd want to store/reuse a grammatical para, rather than an
item.

Examples please, so we have something we can poke at and talk about.

thanks

Jason



>
> Hope that helps. Anyway, attached is a start of a module definition for the
four
> elements that I've mentioned.
>
> <!-- LegalXML Element Structure
>
>       <html>
>          <body>
>             <legal:instrument>
>                <section/>
>                <legal:layout/>
>                <legal:attachment/>
>             </legal:instrument>
>          </body>
>       </html>
>
>      To do:
>         (a) insert instrument, attachment, and layout into %body.content;
>         (b) insert signature into %inline.content;
> -->
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Jason Harrop [mailto:jharrop@speedlegal.com]
>>Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2003 1:25 PM
>>To: Legalxml-Econtracts
>>Subject: [legalxml-econtracts] grammatical paras necessary for "linking
>>and retrieval mechanisms"?
>>
>>
>> I think grammatical paragraps ARE a
>>
>>>	key requirement for linking and retrieval mechanisms. ...  it
>>
>>encapsulates
>>
>>>	content that can be further analyzed by specialized software.
>>
>>Please provide examples which substantiate your claim.  Examples from the
>>Hanover Lease or any other contract would be fine.
>>
>>thanks
>>
>>Jason
>>
>>
>>To unsubscribe from this mailing list (and be removed from the roster
>>of the OASIS TC), go to
>>http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/legalxml-econtracts/member
>
> s/leave_workgroup.php.
>
>
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