[legalxml-courtfiling] Interoperability SOW

On January 16, 2003, you wrote to the TC responding to Shane Durham as follows:

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"sorry for the delay in answering your request.

"As you are aware, many of the previously defined Statements of Work were halted in the Las Vegas meeting.
One most notable would be the Court Policy document.
Both you and I voiced our opinions against the Court Policy in earlier messages, and neither of us could see how such a document would describe enough information to make it possible for an EFSP application to interoperate with other vendors EFMs.

"Also in the Las Vegas meeting, a proposed document defining layers of
interoperability was presented.
And as the committee reviewed the document we could see that there were many aspects of the proposed interoperability document that were too restrictive in nature.
As I recall we did not get past the first level of interoperability.
From this discussion many voiced the opinion that Court Filing 1.1 did not have adequate information to make interoperability possible.

"From this evolved a recognition that defining business models and creating DTDs still does not provide adequate information too assist courts studying the standards to feel confident that they have captured all the aspects of the standard such that interoperability will happen.
I am confident that my EFM will work not work with your EFSP, do you agree?
I was of the impression that you had to extend the CF 1.1 elements within your product to make your system function, we did also.

"Under the SOW I distributed the main task that was assigned to me was to describe how interoperability 'might' take place with Court Filing 1.1.
As I recall, one person voiced their opinion that it was not possible.
I have taken the liberty of extending the original request to include a living document to be used and modified as we develop Court Filing Blue in an effort to help steer the definitions into a direction that will educate courts seeking to adopt the standard to understand the complexities of interoperability based on specific Business models that will be define under the Dwight's committee.

"Does this help?  If so, I will include this information in the expansion of the document."

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Are these ideas and concepts that you wrote in January still intended to be included in the SOW?

Does the effort require the subcommittee to attempt to normalize through common definitions of such matters as "EFM", which today are used loosely to describe functionality, but lacking the kind of precision needed for interoperability?

Also, some of your earlier papers covered the topic of security, but it is not now specifically referenced in the SOW.
Is there an intention still to include security?
For example, if two or more EFSP's are talking to an EFM, and (taking your proprietary implementation as I understand it), law firms are also having their CMS' automatically updated in the filing process, then the interconnections between the law firms, EFSP's and EFM theoretically could allow an intruder to capture the system at its weakest point and steal data or cause damage along the line.
This security model could be extremely dangerous to the law firms, who have certain duties to their clients to protect data, and could prove to be a liability to the participating EFSP's (the duties and liabilities of the participating courts are less clear).
Is this intended to be included as part of the work of the subcommittee under the SOW, as it is generally drawn?
Should there be mention of security specifically as a consideration of interoperability in the SOW?

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