overview

Elements vs. attributes

How do we choose between 

<element myattrib="foo"/>

and 

Court practice

Some courts publish decisions as a single document that contains all of the opinions (majority, concurrences, dissents) that comprise the decision.  Others issue the opinions in different writings. The challenge is to contrive a model that is equally useful in either situation.

[merely a stub]

Court names and identifiers

Jurisdiction

Geographical

Subject-matter

Relationship with other courts

[[ NB: if you're looking for systems to use in marking up dates in judicial opinions, you might take a look at 

Dates are a surprisingly complicated topic, with many subtleties and variations.  That is because almost any milestone in the process of hearing the case and carrying out its resolution can have a date associated with it, as can any of the documents generated along the way.  Every case will have a date of decision.  Most appellate cases will have an argument or hearing date.  Beyond that the varieties are practically infinite:

General notes

[nb.: if you're here looking for sane approaches to marking up names in judicial opinions, or in general, take a look at the relevant sections of TEI ]

(mostly a stub for now)

Parties

Representatives (lawyers)

Judges

Authors

Terminology

The words "decision", "order", "opinion", and "judgment", and even "case" tend to be used both loosely and interchangeably to mean either the act that delivers a court's ruling in a particular case, or the text of the ruling itself.  To make things even more confusing, a decision (in either sense) may affect (either dispositively or nondispositively) more than one case, and a decision (in the sense of the text that records the court's ruling) may consist of more than one document.

This page is an index of overview documents that describe, non-technically, different classes of element found in Layer 2 of the oai4courts caselaw metadata standard.  They provide descriptions of the different logical entities described by the oai4courts Layer 2 elements, as well as pointers to each.

Note that these are intended for use in caselaw metadata (as opposed to caselaw markup), but some of the thinking involved applies to both.

Element classes

Overview descriptions exist for:

Welcome to OAI4Courts

[ In a hurry? View the proof-of-concept app guided tour, then come back and read here ]

[ Most of this is still under construction -- don't be surprised by blind alleys or puzzling incompleteness ]

[ Want to comment or contribute? See here . ]

Sets and tags

OAI-PMH supports a system for the creation of sub-collections that it calls "sets". oai4courts adds database support for a less-formal system of tags. Sets are named according to a hierarchical system that implies an equally hierarchical partitioning of the database. Tags may be applied in any way you like.

Where does this fit?

Level One is the first metadata schema implemented in OAI4Courts, and corresponds to the mandatory unqualified Dublin Core schema required by OAI-PMH.