New Business for upcoming meeting

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

Dr Leff.
I have this submission as "New Business" for the next meeting - thanks.


Upcoming this week is the W3C's next draft of the XHTML 2.0 spec. Their spec
will establish, for the first time, the specific relationship that will exist
between the RDF and XHTML -- very important to the history of web standards. The
design of this portion of their spec is being done by Steven Pemberton, who
seems to be the lead editor for the latest "RDF Core Specification", so we can
feel assured that there's coordination of standards occurring at the highest
levels of the W3C.

My betting is that the draft will (1) define a global optional attribute for all
its elements, called @property and (2) provide instruction in the use of @rdf:ID
and @rdf:about attributes on XHTML elements. The @property attribute apparently
contains the name of a 'property' defined in an RDF Schema for a contract. The
@rdf:ID attribute identifies the XHTML element that an RDF description is
"about". The @rdf:about attribute identifies some resource that the properties
contained within, are "for" i.e., "about".

This helps to resolve a question I've posed -- which, among multiple <h>
elements in an XHTML file, is the title of the contract? I've recommended that
the @class attribute be used to identify that, if at all within the file, but in
any event the title should be in a Dublin Core description of the contract
linked-to from the XHTML elements. Now, my expectation is that the new @property
attribute is better and more appropriate than the @class attribute, and it
eliminates overloading the @class attribute with a semantic function. Having a
@property attribute means that <instrument>, <div>, <span>, <area> and <section>
elements can all be given meaningful names by an author which can be mined by
XPATH expressions.

However it turns out, it's certainly clear that -- as a standards body -- we
must need to develop an RDF Schema for a contract, and it must be an integral
part of our technical specification, that is, published with any "structural
model."

I would be happy to organize a Subcommittee to develop this schema, with a
three-month timeframe for its final report. Any others wishing to participate in
this activity?
Thanks,
John

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Dr. Laurence Leff [mailto:D-Leff@wiu.edu]
>Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2004 7:30 PM
>To: legalxml-econtracts@lists.oasis-open.org
>Subject: [legalxml-econtracts] Agenda for upcoming meeting from the
>OASIS Legal XML Member Section Electronic Contracts Technical Committee
>Secretary (File id: @@2408)
>
>
>                            Agenda for Conference Call
>            Electronic Contracts Technical Committee of the
>                   OASIS Legal XML Member Section
>
>                             July 13th 2004
>                              18:00 Eastern
>                Dial 512 225 3050  - Use 84759# for Pin Code (*)
>
>18:00:00 Tue Jul 13 2004 in America/New_York converts to
>22:00:00 Tue Jul 13 2004 in GMT
>
>
>Welcome and Roll Call
>
>1.  Review our requirements document with the goal of reaching closure
>    and/or determining what changes must be made so that we could vote on it.
>
>2)  Determine how and when to achieve a votable submission on structural
>    markup.
>
>New Business
>
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