legalxml-courtfiling — archive

[John Messing]

Gary: If I am the JohnM referred to in your posting, I think you ascribe to me greater powers of observation and comprehension than I frankly think I can claim or deserve. My own preference is to leave the family of 1.1 standards that are frozen, in progress, or near completion alone for the moment and to bring that work to completion. Even if there is only one major implementation that can presently take advantage of them, we owe it as a practical as well as a moral imperative to the developers and courts that have listened to us in the past to give them what they need to work with now and in the future, as a complete family of standards. Otherwise our credibility will suffer and no one may listen to us in the future and rightly so. At the same time, we have begun to envision a new generation of xml or rdf standards for embodiment in the 2.0 family of standards. I think with regard to the 2.0 family of standards, what we have done in 1.1 is instructive but not binding upon us. With 2.0, it may be possible to treat the rapidly evolving justice grouping of dictionary definitions as extensions to ebxml or other mature technologies, and to incorporate their camel naming conventions, even if they change from week to week or month to month, until there is final agreement upon them. In this regard, I think that an object model for the subjects of court filings is superior because as objects they can logically have properties, which may make the relationships between them clearer and easier to express in mark-up language, depending of course on how this is accomplished in practice. The timing may not be perfect because of the apparent need to respond to the justice dictionary groups quickly. I think we should tell them that we intend to study the proposals in the context of our next generation of standards, and to begin that work parallel with completing work on 1.1. I guess this is technically an amendment to your proposal.