Diff:Oct 2007 & Mar 2008

This is a tentative release of a major evolution, with a specific improvement, namely the support for judgments. Other minor modifications have been included. Existing documents that are not judgments should be unaffected by this release.

Most of the modifications accept and organize the proposal from Monica Palmirani in a document called “Common Open Standard for Judgments”.

Modifications unrelated to the judgment we find:

• A new element for debate documents called DeclarationofVote
• A new element this is added in all FRBR levels to report the URI of the specific component where the metadata block is found
• The name for the Attachment element in the analysis element is now HasAttachment in order to avoid confusions. 

Modifications related to the judgment as specified in Palmirani’s document are:

• A new document type “judgement” is introduced, that has its own schema composed of meta, header, judgmentBody, conclusions and attachment.
• Within the section header a number of additional inline-level purpose-specific elements have been added, namely: judgmentType, judgmentTitle, judgmentNumber, courtType, neutralCitation, party, judge, and judgmentDate.
• The judgmentBody has a repeatable choice of sections named introduction, background, motivation, and decision.
• An additional metadata element, workflow, and its repeatable child action have been added.

Some modifications diverge from Palmirani’s proposal, as follows:

• No elements such as coram, judges and judgmentDates have been specified, as they are containers, disallowed in the patterned structure of inline elements. The corresponding singular elements are used directly in the flow of the text.
• The element body has been substituted with judgmentBody, as body has been used already to refer to the content of hierarchical structures such as acts and bills.
• The href attributes in part, judge and action, meant to refer to the ontological section references, have been omitted as the proper attribute refersTo now exist for all elements in the schema, and therefore no need for such attribute was needed. The as attribute, on the other hand, has been kept as proposed.

Open issues are as follows:

• We have adopted the spelling “judgment” instead of “judgement” as proposed by Palmirani, but we are worried about the last sentence in the following fragment from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_%28law%29: “However, the spelling judgement (with e added) largely replaced judgment in the United Kingdom in a non-legal context […] In the context of the law and theology, however, judgment is preferred. In the U.S. judgment strongly prevails. As with many such spelling differences, both forms are equally acceptable in Canada and Australia, although judgment is more common in Canada and judgement in Australia.[1] In New Zealand the form judgment is the preferred spelling in dictionaries, newspapers and legislation, although the variant judgement can also be found in all three categories. In South Africa, judgement is the more common form."
• We are not convinced of the need for a workflow element, and would have preferred to have it harmonized and included in the lifecycle element.

Click here to see the differences between the releases.