Title: RE: [legalxml-courtfiling] Document and Resources I think the list you have provided is fairly comprehensive in describing titles used in the various categories. Having a list of nouns used to designate officials and other actors (dare I say it?) in the law, safety, and justice system and providing that to GTRI is a helpful, important step. Of course, the various titles are not precisely and exhaustively defined by the leading definition. Ultimately, to be useful in the Data Dictionary, terms all require defining. (At the Integrated Justice Technical Committee meeting, the GTRI consultants were very clear about their needing definitions supplied to them by subject matter experts.) While some terms are synonyms or not easily distinguished from one another because they reflect differences in local conventions (e.g., judge, circuit judge, district judge ), the rest should be amenable to a more or less precise definition. Further, some of the distinctions (e.g., between fact witness [plaintiff] and expert witness [defendant] ) may not apply generally (i.e., many courts might call these expert witnesses or just witnesses ). Would it be productive to put out a call for candidate definitions for these terms? I say candidate definitions, because they would have to be reviewed, reconciled, and so forth, to get to the precise and exhaustive definitions (or as close to that as possible) each of them should have. Also, synonymous terms need to be identified under a common definition. An alternative to asking everyone to help by a certain deadline might be to recruit a definitions work group, but such a group might best do the reconciling, etc., rather than having to come up with the candidate definitions on their own. I think casting a wide net to ask for candidate definitions could help us move forward in a very useful way. Those are my 2-cents. Regards, Roger Roger Winters Electronic Court Records Manager King County Department of Judicial Administration 516 Third Avenue, E-609 MS: KCC-JA-0609 Seattle, Washington 98104 V: (206) 296-7838 F: (206) 296-0906
