Hi All,
I like Fabio's general guide on subcommittees. I envision
subcommittees form because we need to divide the work in order to
complete it expeditiously. Our first round of subcommittee work
should be DRAFT. Then all subcommittees can compare their work and
the whole Committee can adopt the best ideas from the bunch. Then,
subcommittees can re-convene to revise first round DRAFTS based on
the best ideas agreed upon by the Committee.
Moreover, I think each subcommittee should include techies and
non-techies (end users). If we want to self-identify in advance of
the next meeting for (a) techie/non-techie and (b) preferred
subcommittee/document type, I can prepare a list so that we can
dole out responsibility appropriately and quickly at the next
meeting.
Melanie Knapp
George Mason University Law Library
Arlington, VA
On 2/18/2014 5:57 PM, Chet Ensign
wrote:
Hi Fabio,
I really like the way you have thought this through. Here
is some initial feedback...
On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 4:59 PM,
Fabio Vitali <>
wrote:
Personal proposal for the definition of a few relevant
terms to this TC:
* citation: an explicit, human-readable mention of a legal
text as found in another text, providing sufficient detail
for an averagely competent person to identify with
precision the relevant text.
* reference: a machine-readable representation of a
citation, containing at least the same quantity of
information (but possibly more) as the plain text citation
for the purpose of identifying the relevant text.
* identifier: a string univocally associated to a document
that identifies it. Using an identifier in a reference is
a simple way to make it work, but it is not the only way:
there will be references that do not contain an
identifier, and require more work to find the relevant
text.
First, I like the idea of developing a glossary of
terms from the start. These kinds of definitions will
ensure that we are talking about the same things when we
get into discussions. I can go with your definitions
above. A couple of notes ... "an averagely competent
person to identify with precision the relevant text" - I
think that is the ideal - but it doesn't always work out
that way in practice & in fact is perhaps one of the
motivations for this TC.
And as to identifier - is it always the case that the
identifier is one-to-one with a document? Or would it be
more accurate to say that an identifier is a string
uniquely associated with some resource - that could be a
document but could also be a component of a document I
just wonder if defining identifier this way narrows its
meaning too much.
Next are some standard Web terms that are relevant for
this TC, I believe:
* A locator is an identifier of a physical resource (e.g.,
a file on a hard disk somewhere on the net) that is
actionable (that is, it can be immediately used for
dereferencing).
* Resolution: the act of determining a usable, active
locator of a physical resource given a reference to a
document of which said physical resource is a reasonable
representation.
* Dereferencing: the act of delivering a copy of a
physical resource given its locator.
I'm good with these as well - and these do in fact
present an operational description of what we are
endeavoring to make possible for legal citation systems.
Accessing a document given a reference, therefore, has two
well-distinguished steps: the reference is first resolved,
obtaining a locator, and this locator is subsequently
dereferenced, obtaining a representation of a physical
copy of the document that is actually stored and available
somewhere on the web.
Please note that I have abstained from using web-specific
acronyms such as HTTP, URI, URL, and URN, because these
concepts exist independently from their web
implementation, but web standards and best practices are
completely consistent with the above terminology.
Next, some basic issues that set apart legal citations
from plain hypertext links on the web, in my point of
view. Most of the following reasonings derive from my
experience with legislation, and I am curious to see how
they fare with respect to court documents.
The most important thing that sets legal documents apart
is that a citation is almost never to a physical file
stored somewhere on the net. Most often it is to an
abstract conceptualization of a document, that can
correspond to a number of different physical files.
Do you mean - I think this is what you mean - that
legal citations are not entered as links but rather as
descriptive bibliographical data that people or machines
can process into a locator?
A
few examples:
* there could be many different physical copies of the
same "document", some authoritative (e.g. from the web
site of the office emanating it), some not so much (e.g.,
a union, a political party, a local administration giving
access to their own personal stash of documents even when
they are not the official publishers of these documents),
some plain, some richer in metadata (e.g., a commented
version provided by private publisher).
Certainly true for court documents in the US - part of
the reason that briefs often give parallel citations. The
same case will exist in several reporters and so an author
cites them all.
* there could be many variants of the same document
differentiated by content (e.g., a full copy vs. an
excerpt, maybe of a very long, multi-topical text, of the
bits that are relevant to the activities of an office), by
language (all European legislation exists in 27 different
languages, and the citation to an European act that an
Austrian friend sends me as taken from the German version,
when I use it I see the right place of the Italian
version), by temporal validity (a reference to a 1999 act
subsequently modified in 2007, 2010 and 2013, if examined
in 2014 for a civil suit about events in 2011, will bring
me neither to the 1999 version, nor to the 2013 version,
but to the 2010 version of the act).
I think this is less of an issue for court documents in
the US. What you'd have, I think, would be the instances
of the court opinion in official reporters, the
pre-official reporter copies that were published, things
like that. But in general, I think if you are citing to a
court document, you are citing to a complete document that
doesn't morph over time, at least not its content.
(Ideally speaking anyway.)
* there could be citations to documents that are not
accessible, available or even existing yet: e.g. a
citation of a court document that will be released in a
separate moment from the publication of a sentence, a
citation of a document for which I have no security
clearance, a citation of a regulation that will be written
after the enactment of the legislation it is mentioned in,
a citation of an act that it is foreseen it will modify
existence, validity or jurisdiction of this one.
Leaving out our new "secret" courts - brrrr - I don't
think this is so much the case in US court documents.
These cases imply, in my view, that references will always
be to abstract documents, or conceptualization of
documents, rather than physical files somewhere on a hard
disk,
That's a pretty fair statement across the board. Even
if there is only one physical instance of a document being
cited, the citation itself as you say is the human text
which is to the abstract document.
and
that the most appropriate physical representations of
these references will be identified at navigation time by
the end user, not at the time of the creation of the
reference by the author.
Basically,
this means that reference resolution is a NECESSARY STEP,
and not an occasional aspect, of navigating legal
citations.
I don't know that this necessarily follows. There may
be very good reasons why in some applications a
implementer might put physical locators into their
citation markup. Let's just say I'm a legal editor at
BigLegalPub and I am using editorial tools intended to
enhance our content for customer products - our special
citator for example. The tools developers might very well
choose to use hard locators in the content for reasons of
efficiency or other proprietary interests. Point is, I
think it is too soon to say that is a universal truth.
Please
note that I have abstained from using librarian-specific
conceptualizations such as FRBR, because these issues
exist independently from their proposed solutions, but it
is worth noticing that the Akoma Ntoso naming convention,
the CEN Metalex standard, the urn:lex protocol, and the
ELI proposed standard all rely, explicitly or implicitly,
on the concepts of FRBR.
Finally, before getting to the actual list of
subcommittees, I would like to propose a first guiding
principle for the activities of this working group: NO
ARBITRARY STRINGS!
There are two basic approaches at determining identifiers
for documents: arbitrary strings or feature lists. The
first relies on creating sufficiently long opaque strings
and associate them to documents by fiat, so that, say,
"ax45wtp987w1" becomes the identifier of "Act n. 12 of
2013 of the Republic of Hungary"; the other is based on
seeking a list of relevant characteristics of the
documents, that, appropriately codified according to a
given syntax, are used to identify the document, so that,
say, type=act & number=12 & year=2013 &
country=hu are the features of "Act n. 12 of 2013 of the
Republic of Hungary" that are necessary to identify it.
Despite arbitrary strings are easier to build tools for, I
strongly urge AGAINST using them for this TC: arbitrary
strings are fragile (one wrong character and you've
misrepresented the reference), rely on a central
marshaling station that is the only storage of the mapping
between strings and documents, shunt any guesswork on
similarly named documents, etc. Arbitrary strings are
evil.
Well, you make a good point but again I think it would
be premature to make this decision at this stage. I used
arbitrary strings in some of our applications way back
when - more way back than I care to remember in fact - and
they worked out ok.
If, as I hope, we go with feature lists, then an important
task of this TC is to determine what are the features of
proposed and enacted legislation, of sentences and related
court documents, of parliamentary reports and related
documents, etc. Features should be divided in
a) identifying vs. accessory (those features that are
necessary to identify the document, e.g. the number of an
act or the year, vs. those features that are frequently
accompanying the reference, but not strictly necessary,
e.g., the month and day of an act, if the number is
present and is reset at the beginning of the year)
c) required vs. desired (e.g. if I request act 12/2013 in
HTML, I will not accept act 13/2013 in HTML, but I am
willing to accept act 12/2013 in PDF).
d) describing the cited document vs. the citation itself
(e.g., the number of the act is describing the cited
document, specifying that a reference is modificatory or
groundwork for the judgment are justifying the citation
itself, and not describing the cited document). Thus
motivation, provenance, type, purpose, scope are all
features of the citation and not of the cited document.
---
Thus said, this is my proposal of subcommittees for this
TC:
a) court documents: the purpose of this SC is to deliver,
in a multinational, multi-language and
multi-jurisdictional fashion, the features that
characterize legal citations to court documents including
judgments, memoirs from the parts, trial documents, and
commentaries. These features should be clearly
characterized in terms of identifying vs. accessory,
required vs. desired, and describing the cited document
vs. describing the citation.
b) legislation: the purpose of this SC is to deliver, in a
multinational, multi-language and multi-jurisdictional
fashion, the features that characterize citations to
proposed and enacted legislation and regulations at all
levels, including local regulations and international
treaties. These features should be clearly characterized
in terms of identifying vs. accessory, required vs.
desired, and describing the cited document vs. describing
the citation.
c) parliamentary documents: the purpose of this SC is to
deliver, in a multinational, multi-language and
multi-jurisdictional fashion, the features that
characterize citations of parliamentary documents
including hansards, orders of the day, reports, etc. These
features should be clearly characterized in terms of
identifying vs. accessory, required vs. desired, and
describing the cited document vs. describing the citation.
d) contracts: the purpose of this SC is to deliver, in a
multinational, multi-language and multi-jurisdictional
fashion, the features that characterize citations of
contracts. These features should be clearly characterized
in terms of identifying vs. accessory, required vs.
desired, and describing the cited document vs. describing
the citation.
e) technical SC: the purpose of this SC is to deliver one
or more syntactical approaches to express the features of
the above-mentioned citation types, so as to provide an
easily implementable navigation system using standard
browsing tool, as well as to determine behavior, response
types and error handling of tools connected to the use of
legal references, mainly how to characterize successful
and unsuccessful resolution and dereferencing of legal
references.
This is a good list - I think we need to consider as a
group the stages of how we progress and our approach as a
first topic of conversation. My only concern about a
breakdown like this is that we might well have conflicting
terminology or feature descriptions, gray areas and
overlaps (which I think we've already seen raised) - in
other words, I would suggest we hold off starting
sub-committees until we have put some more structure on to
how we'll move forward.
Those are my thoughts...
In case you are still awake after all this, let me know
your opinions.
Ciao
Fabio Vitali
--
Fabio Vitali Tiger got to hunt,
bird got to fly,
Dept. of Computer Science Man got to sit and wonder
"Why, why, why?'
Univ. of Bologna ITALY Tiger got to sleep,
bird got to land,
phone: +39 051 2094872 Man got to tell
himself he understand.
e-mail:
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), "Cat's cradle"
http://vitali.web.cs.unibo.it/
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