Minutes Draft from the OASIS Legal XML Member Section Electronic Contracts Technical Committee Secretary (File id: @@2618)

["Dr. Laurence Leff" <D-Leff@wiu.edu>]

                              Minutes
                        Meeting of November Tenth 2005
The OASIS legal XML member Section e-Contracts Technical Commmittee

Present: Rolly Chambers, Dan Greenwood, Peter Meyer, Laurence Leff, Dave Marvit

Our meeting was primarily based upon "Development steps for TC Specification
Revised" which you can find annotated at at
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/legalxml-econtracts/email/archives/200511/msg00000.html

Meeting Started at 18:03 Eastern Time

In 1.1.2, we decided that we are focussing on providing an XML as a
backend to such products as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft.xml.      And
our standard should be convertable to either of these as needed, while
remaining independent of both of these standards and how the market may
view or use them in the future.  We are also independent of changes to
these standards and note both of them are considerably more complicated
than OpenML.  One of the members reported on a related discussion with the CIO
of one of top three law firms in Australia.

We also noted the issues in users of OpenOffice products of Microsoft Word
in using styles consistently so as to facilitate this transformation.

Our committee decided to keep our specification within contracts, although
we may have pointers to web sites to address other issues and we may mention
our belief that firms would prefer to  use the same standard for other purposes
such as correspondence or litigation documents.

We decided to use Relax as the schema in our specification, 
at least for initial drafts although we hope to include a version in
XML Schema in the specification.  We may possibly include one in DTD.

Mr. Meyer will ensure that we can validate the Schema and Relax NG and
that any example documents validate with any specification included
in the specification.

Mr. Dan Greenwood volunteered to match  the above-mentioned
document against the minutes to show the resolution of each point.

We set an action item to address the issue of URI's versus URL's,
URN's and name space identifiers.

There was a discussion of including vocabularies and how our specification
relates to UBL.  The fact that the BNML specification incorporates
the Dublin core was mentioned favorably.  We discussed the XML markup
for Party and Addresses.  We regret that there are several standards
that use different ways of marking up such ubiquitious information
as people and addresses.  UBL has markup for this purpose; vCard
does as well.
(We briefly discussed whether vCard was an XML standard or was just
an ASCII format.)  We hope to revisit this issue and find a good source
for this markup that has "general use"  and noted the comments of
a CO that it would be desirable to "coattail" on the "big kid on the block."

We also discussed customization of the schema (1.6), noting that the Elkera
specification provided for customization as in contrast to just being
a specific schema for contracts.   We decided that our specification
should have a working example and  base implementation recognizing that many 
users would wish to customize it for their own purposes.

There was a brief discussion of how would complete the specification
quickly and whether we could complete it by the end of the calendar year.

The TC decided that the next meetings would be November 22nd and December
Eigth.  These would be at our regular time of 18:00.  (Note November 22nd
is not a Thursday to accomodate the United States Thanksgiving holiday.)

Meeting adjourned at 19:04 Eastern.