Dear Dale,
thanks for your remarks. As they are very sensitive in the on-going
discussion, we send you and the other reviewers some considerations about them,
in order to clarify our approach in the URN:LEX proposal.
URN:LEX has been conceived to cope with two main objectives:
- sources of law identification
- facilitate sources of law accessibility from references usually present in
different types of documents (other sources of law (legislation, case law or
administrative acts) was well as newspapers, legal doctrine, etc.)
In this respect the URN:LEX proposal distinguishes two aspects:
1) sources of law URNs creation and attribution
a) always complete and unequivocal;
b) generated through a complex set of metadata, which nevertheless is
able to guarantee uniqueness of document identification (among versions,
languages, formats, within a federated system characterized by different
issuing authorities and publishers)
c) assigned by an issuing authority or publisher
2) sources of law references
They can be present in any document, even non legal.
Legal references are often incomplete or inaccurate, therefore the URN derived
from a reference will be incomplete as well, either generated by a human or by
a software tool (a parser).
Since the aim of the approach is to facilitate document retrieval, an
intelligent resolver can use the derived, even incomplete, URN to retrieve the
best matching documents. Then, the user will be able to choose, among the
results, the document matching his requirements.
This mechanism exploits the possibility to detect metadata within a textual
reference expressed in natural language and create an even incomplete URN,
rather than forcing a user to search for the exact URN within an remote
database.
In the legal domain the access to the last version of a law is typically
required. Since the information expressed in references correspond usually to
metadata at the FRBR Work level, the URN that can be derived is not complete
(it lacks information at Expression and Manifestation levels; ex: Regulation
(EU) No 1308/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 December
2013).
Moreover, a part from references expressing amending actions which are
typically static (they make reference to a specific version of a target act or
partition at the moment of their modification), legal references are typically
dynamic (they make reference to the version of the target act or partition
“in-force” today). Therefore, describing a reference by a complete URN is wrong
even from a conceptual point of view.
An effective URN resolver has to be able to provide all the URNs at Work level
matching the incomplete one derived from the reference.
Then, the user can choose the desired URN and the resolver can provide the
different versions associated to that Work (in case highlighting the “in-force”
version). Then, chosen a version, the resolver can provide all the possible
manifestations among which the user can choose the required document.
Such resolver behavior is actually made easy by the hierarchical structure of
URN:LEX (work, expression and manifestation levels clearly separated by @ and $
characters).
In the URN-LEX proposal we followed such principles, with the aim to
distinguish between these two aspects (sources of law naming and sources of law
referencing). Obviously we are available to modify the URN:LEX draft so that
these principles can be more clear.
We are also analyzing the other remarks of the reviewers; shortly we will send
you some proposals to solve the issues raised.
Thanks!
Best regards
Pierluigi and Enrico
---------------------------------------------------------
Enrico Francesconi
ITTIG - CNR
Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques
Italian National Research Council
Via de' Barucci 20
50127 Florence
Italy
Tel: +39-055-4399-665
Fax: +39-055-4399-605
email: [email protected]
---------------------------------------------------------
> On 18 set 2017, at 08:11, Dale R. Worley <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Let me speak in favor of draft-spinosa-urn-lex.
>
> My understanding of the intention of the draft is essentially the
> creation of a universal system for bibliographic citations of legal
> works, using the syntax of URNs to express the citations. This
> understanding colors how I think about the namespace proposal.
>
> The intention seems to be that every document is assigned one or more
> URNs by a governing jurisdiction, or by a publisher of a version of the
> document. Note a point that I did not understand until recently, that
> the uniqueness rule for URNs permits multiple URNs to refer to one same
> resource. As the authors note, one use of this is providing references
> to a document which are based on multiple natural languages.
>
> The resolution process for assigned URNs is a typical indirection
> system, where the URN is looked up in a database. However, the system
> supports a usage that is much more like other library or bibliographic
> systems -- the user can compose the information that he knows about the
> document into an "approximate" URN which can be searched for in a
> database using a "closest match" rule, which both converts the queried
> URN into an assigned URN and provides information about the document
> itself. In this usage, the user-composed URNs are fundamentally
> equivalent to queries.
>
> The current draft does not clearly separate the information about the
> query/resolution process. It would be helpful if the resolution
> information were in a separate section, as the registration template
> format in RFC 8141 recommends. It would also be helpful if there was a
> clear distinction between the parts of the resolution process that are
> well-defined and fixed, and (IIRC) some information which has not been
> firmly fixed.
>
> However, the messy part is the user-created "query" URNs. To get these
> within the formal rules for URN namespaces, we need to recognize them as
> a special subclass whose definition does not come from assignment to a
> document by an authority, but rather from the namespace definition
> itself, in a clause somewhat like:
>
> A URN that is not assigned to a document is defined to represent a
> query into the universe of URNs that have been assigned to
> documents, whose resolution is current set of assigned URNs that
> most closely match the URN.
>
> Clearly, there are some rough edges to that. But the meaning of a URN
> is time-invariant as a query, despite that the results of the query
> depend on the time. And when a URN is assigned to a document, the URN
> is equivalently a query that returns just that one document (since it is
> a perfect match to itself as an assigned URN).
>
> Some of this reasoning is a stretch, but (a) I've written URN definitions
> that aren't perfectly compatible with RFC 8141, and (b) this pattern of
> definition and usage seems to be ideal for handling bibliographic
> references.
>
> So I think the overall concept is good and useful, though the
> presentation needs to be cleaned up in the ways that we've been
> discussing.
>
> Dale
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