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FW: White Paper "Tagging Legal XHTML Information" Published

From: Patrick Gannon
To: [email protected]
Date: Fri, 06 May 2005 17:31:00 -0000

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legalxml-sc message

Subject: FW: White Paper "Tagging Legal XHTML Information" Published

From: "Patrick Gannon" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 13:30:47 -0400

John G.,

FYI.

I'm sure you folks are aware of this outside effort and what Mr. McClure is saying about the OASIS LegalXMl e-Contracts TC effort.

" What is the motivation for starting Legal XHTML?

As a member of the eContracts Technical Committee within Legal XML, a chapter of OASIS, I learned first-hand the problems when a standard for legal instruments is developed by a volunteer group of attorneys and software engineers. The most pressing issue, of course, was the amount of time each volunteer was able to devote to the activity. This one problem meant that our progress proceeded somewhat glacially and, for those software engineers who want to field intelligent applications during their own lifetime, rather unacceptably. The evidence is that, after five years of discussion, the group unfortunately has yet to issue a technical publication. Further, the technical direction of this group is consciously uncoordinated with widely-used standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium that are the centerpiece of their architecture for the 21st century, that is, XHTML 2.0 and Resource Description Framework.

This experience indicated that a different approach is required: a seasoned technical analyst knowledgeable in standards development should create a complete specification that is then proposed to stakeholders for their evaluation.

A related question is whether there is another organization that has the substance and interest to create a standard for legal instruments. The answer, unfortunately, is no. Certainly a private company can create a proprietary technology for tagging legal documents, and then charge royalties of its users. However, if the goal is to increase the "commonwealth" by publishing a standard that is licensed as royalty-free open-source material, there is no other organization anywhere at this time who can accomplish this goal or the technical goals that Legal XHTML has in mind. "

Patrick Gannon

From: John McClure [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, May 06, 2005 12:12 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: White Paper "Tagging Legal XHTML Information" Published

Robin,

Please consider the following announcement for the Cover Pages.

Thank you,

John McClure
360-379-3838

White Paper "Tagging Legal XHTML Information" Published. This paper explores the relationship between information schemas (“vocabularies”) and a user process described as “information tagging”. This process is often necessary in the legal and services industries where information locked in an XHTML format is to be semantically tagged. The ‘semantic menus’ are generated from an OWL schema of the information models that have been drafted by LegalXHTML.org for legal instruments, contacts, roles, events, properties, objects, and topics, and so for this reason, expert functional users must validate the structure and contents of the information schema. This paper is published by a new organization focused on the integration of XHTML 2.0, the Resource Description Language, and the Dublin Core technologies. Its functional scope is the set of documents that are signed (making them by definition, instruments) and which may have numbered clauses, paragraphs or tables. Supporting schemas, resources, stylesheets, and other information are being published. [Full Context]