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Subject: Minutes Draft from the OASIS Legal XML Member Section Electronic Contracts Technical Committee Secretary (File id: @@2551)
Minutes Teleconference of July Twentieth OASIS eContracts Technical Committee Came to Order at 18:07 Eastern Time Present: Rolly Chambers Laurence Leff Dave Marvits Peter Meyer At the beginning of the meeting, we had a discussion of possible liason and collaboration contacts. This included the fact that OASIS Legal XML Member Section Electronic Court Filing is in the process of reactiviting its Court Document subcommittee. Also the Associated General Contractors is starting an effort in XML which includes a $90,000.00 grant to start work on development. Mr. Daniel Greenwood, in saying he could not attend the meeting, suggested that we try to make a decision on a host schema. We discused whether or not the issue is ripe for such a decision. We discussed the goals and ideas when the Structural Markup Subcommittee made their suggestions for basis the narrative markup upon the XHTML 2.0. This discussion included the following issues. We were hoping that XHTML would have more market traction. Now, there is concern that they haven't eliminated certain markup that made the structure more complicated including H1 to H6 Also, there is concern that XHTML is too "loose" a markup, and thus to make it rigorous enough for our purposes, must change container and structural elements. If we do this, it won't be XHTML. Can some of the issues of looseness be addressed with tool development and an authoring environment? We discussed why choosing a host schema is a tough choice and "we can't just pick one and go on with it" The decision impacts everything that proceeds including rendering and authoring tools. Yet, it is difficult envisioning how a result that doesn't exist will fit with a contract mark up. It would help use our time more effectively if we were to eliminate some of the candidates on "fundamendal" grounds so we can address "two or three." There was an informal agreement to eliminate DITA as it was not intended for documents. Dita provides tags for marking up small bits of text in an online education or help environment. We then discussed eliminating Microsoft WordML as a candidate. An evaluator pointed out that one could create a WordML file in edit or notepad and have it load into Microsoft Word. One can include foreign XML in that input. One can do a complete round trip of saving and reloading and have that XML remain intact. Unfortunately, Microsoft Word generates very large output files that are not feasible to edit with a tool like edit or notepad. On the other hand, there are plug-ins for Open Office that will read and write Text-Encoding-Initiative files. Of course, there is concern about the possible proprietary nature of the WordML standard. Of course, we could "bring the entire weight of the Legal XML eContracts Technical Committee" to bear on Microsoft to get them to work with us on this issue. It was pointed out that they are now restructuring their sales force on a vertical industry basis and it was suggested that an appropriate letter might elicit some self-interested cooperation from that company. That lead to a discussion of the importance of having a particular XML format being processed natively or being handled by various transformation schemes as generally one can write an XSLT style sheet or program to convert from one XML format to any other. Of course, the information needed by the target markup must be available in the XML being transformed. There was a discussion of the importance of a "grammatical paragraph." This was defined to mean that a section MAY NOT contain paragraphs and lists as siblings--lists are always within a paragraph. Does this make authoring and moving text easier? Does it make designing robust rendering engines easier? Then we discussed of why we should have a host schema and what we might gain from one. These included: a) We gain access to the tools that others developed for processing and rendering that host schema. b) Using a particular host schema may get us some market traction. c) If we used a host schema, it would save the technical committee the time to develop a new one from scratch. This lead to a discussion of how difficult it would be to create a new schema. It was observed that one could envision quickly constructing a few tags for paragraphs, lists, sections, etc. and have a schema for structural markup. However, one member said there were many details that interact with how one writes rendering and other applications. Then, we discussed simply defining tags for contract-specific stuff such as party lists and signature blocks, and allowing them to be embedded in other host schema. This could done using "profiles" analagous to the approach taken by the Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee. Specifically, they have profiles for communication methods that transmit the court filing XML. For example, they have a web services schema and will be developing a "sneaker net" profile. Then, we discussed acceptance for authoring. Obviously, it easier for "geeks" or members of this technical committee to author an XML document than for a secretary in an attorney's office. However, it is not clear whether choices in the host schema or the structuring of such things as lists and paragraphs will make a difference. Would such changes or decision make it easier for the hypothetical secretary to learn and use the schema. And would an improvement that we could hypothetically make in the tag structure be sufficient to get them to learn and use the XML markup; or, or to use one member's metaphor, is our effort in this direction doomed to failure like the person trying to shovel out the tide? As we realized that it was about 19:10 Eastern Time, we had to decide how we can move forward. We went back to the earlier suggestion, that "we all go off to our corners" and try to eliminate some of the candidate schema. We will meet in two weeks at the same time and day of week. At that meeting, we will also determine which day of the week we will meet during the Fall of 2005. Meeting ended at approximately 19:15 Eastern Time
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