standards

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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:

As metadata standards for case law evolve, it will be necessary to identify certain entities, such as courts, in an unambiguous way.  The simplest way to achive this is by adopting a standardized vocabulary.

URIs on the Semantic Web

The RDF / Semantic Web community has developed the concept of the URI as an identifier for non-document entities such as people and organizations.  See, for example, Cool URIs for the Semantic Web.

Background

Metalex/CEN is a European standard for metadata interchange that describes itself thus:

Akoma Ntoso (http://www.akomantoso.org) describes itself thus:

Standards promulgated by the Open Archives Initiative are the basis for much of what is in OAI4Courts.  Some of the basic standards documents are listed here: