Re: [legalcitem] GitHub etc.(long post...sorry)

From
Frank Bennett <>
Date
2014-11-20T12:46:06+00:00
ID
Thread
Re: [legalcitem] GitHub etc.(long post...sorry)
On Thursday, November 20, 2014, monica.palmirani <> wrote:
LegalDocML and LegalRuleML (but also the other OASIS TCs) are using the OASIS tools for cooperating and for contributing in the TCs.

From my knowledge it is fundamental to use those tools for achieving the correct standardisation process, for transparency approach, for managing the IPR issues properly and also for creating persistent URIs ofthe material that will be mentioned later in the standardization process. Otherwise we can have some problems in official steps.

https://www.oasis-open.org/resources/tools

Chet could help in these cases. Any time that I had some doubts about contributions, tools, IPR issues I asked to Chet.

In any case we are using (in LegalDocML and LegalRuleML) the following tools:

- Wiki - https://wiki.oasis-open.org/ (public)

- JIRA  - for managing the activities/task/ticket/bugs (not public only for the OASIS members)

https://issues.oasis-open.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa

- SVN repo - for including all the schema, documents, etc.

https://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/browse/wsvn/?sc=1

(public)

- KAVI - for the official documents approved by the TC. It is important to archive the official documents because we need links in KAVI for each official documents involved in the standardization process (minutes, working document, CSD). See this document for the naming convention of the files:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/specGuidelines/ndr/namingDirectives.html#tracks

Each document archived in KAVI is public:

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=legalruleml

Each email in the mailing list and the attachment are public:

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/legaldocml/

For the public accessibility to the resources/contributions see:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/specGuidelines/ndr/namingDirectives.html#accessibleURIs

My 2 cents,

Monica

The problem (at least in the case of the courts SC) is one of manpower. The technical SC decided that controlled lists were preferable to dumb strings, for values with a finite scope. There are a lot of courts, and there are a lot of reporters, and there are many more intersections of the two. To build out the two lists and the relations between them is beyond the capacity of the committee membership, but there is a community that can help. Since both the community and OASIS have the same aim, I don't see any harm in activating the former, to produce material that can be vetted and adopted by the latter.

Certainly OASIS groups have adopted external work in the past; the only novelty here is perhaps that the external product was conceived after the group formed.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes - I'll try to talk to Chet sometime soon, to iron out any wrinkles.

Frank

 

Il 19/11/2014 23:09, Frank Bennett ha scritto:

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 6:40 AM, John Quentin Heywood

<> wrote:

Hi Folks,

Couple of things:

1. The GitHub repository was discussed in the main TC meeting this morning,

as was other off-site tools such as GoogleDocs. Ken pointed us to the OASIS

Technical Committee (TC) Process document at

https://www.oasis-open.org/policies-guidelines/tc-process

particularly Section 2.8 on TC Visability, which says:

The official copies of all resources of the TC and its associated

Subcommittees, including web pages, documents, email lists and any other

records of discussions, must be located only on facilities designated by

OASIS. TCs and SCs may not conduct official business or technical

discussions, store documents, or host web pages on servers or systems not

designated by OASIS. All web pages, documents, ballot results and email

archives of all TCs and SCs shall be publicly visible.

Both GitHub and GoogleDocs would seem to be in conflict with this, although

as it was pointed out in the call, at least GitHub is an open standard,

which can't be said about GoogleDocs. Many folks on the call were less than

happy with the OASIS Wiki, which would seem to be the only official

collaboration tool available. It was suggested that getting the work done

was important, so perhaps we could use private tools such as GitHub as long

as we put the official documents on the SC's public document repository,

which would be here:

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=legalcitem-courts

and conduct our technical discussions on this listserv. This seems

reasonable to me.

Now Frank has been doing some wonderful work on GitHub, merging the reporter

data from CourtListener and the CSL project with what we have been doing and

making it truly usable for us and other projects (like the Free Law

Project). He thinks we should open the repository up so that others can

collaborate. I agree, and I think this would dovetail nicely with the OASIS

rules. If the work being done on the GitHub repository is no longer

officially OASIS work, we don't have to worry about their rules. The GitHub

repository becomes a tool for the whole free law community, that we in the

OASIS SC can use as a resource for our work. We could rename it to something

like the "Court Citation Project" or even something less lame than that. How

do folks feel about this?

For some examples of what Frank has done, look at:

http://jqheywood.github.io/CourtsSC/index.html

and

http://jqheywood.github.io/CourtsSC/states.html

Terrific!

One question: Should I then remove the reference to OASIS from the

header of the online docs?

     http://jqheywood.github.io/CourtsSC/index.html

That seems stingy, by it would indeed reduce the potential for people

to take the work-in-progress as some sort of draft standard.

If I read correctly, then, the repo itself can be made public? That

would be great - there are already people out there ready to

contribute to the effort.

Some notes about infrastructure changes in the works chez CourtsSC ...

For the CourtsSC docs, the next step will be to generate them directly

from a filesystem data hierarchy of the content (which exists as of

yesterday), with links on each court and reporter to their discrete

source files in the GitHub filesystem. I think GitHub now

automatically performs a fork and pull request when people without

write permissions to an edit, so that will give us easy-access editing

by outside contributors, and an editorial workflow for maintaining

control over the end product.

For extension and reorganization of the source files through the

GitHub online UI, I'll add an explanation of how that works to a

README displayed on every source page. So that will be covered as

well.

Finally, we'll need to work on validation and output. For that, we

should have a discussion about what the constraints should be (beyond

producing parseable source and valid XML). Then I can start mucking

around with code.

With validation in place, we'll be ready to tie the whole thing into TravisCI.

     https://travis-ci.org/

Once on-the-fly validation is working, we'll be ready for scalable

crowd-sourcing.

I guess a final item will be the output. The current rendered view is

handy for examining and working with the source structures, but

machines will want something else. We should be able to generate it

automatically, once we know what it is.

Frank

2. In response to the discussion in our last SC meeting, and never being

afraid to play the fool (or, if you ask my kids, BE the fool, but I

digress), I asked the assembled TC what exactly a use case was, and what are

we supposed to be producing. Everybody seemed happy that I had asked.

Someone (I'm not sure who) described it thusly: HTML5 is the standard, a web

page demonstrating all the different parts of HTML5 is the use case. John J.

reminded us all that the SCs should not get lost in the weeds of detail, as

he has seen other projects flounder because of it. We should be looking for

the common things in these citations and writing them up. I think we may be

close to ready for this in the US context very soon.

Well, time to go home and make my eldest his birthday dinner (he turned 17

today),

John

--

John Quentin Heywood



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