multinational

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

Strategy

All metadata standards are compromises between completeness and accuracy of representation (on one hand) and ease of formulation and implementation on the other. Gathering support for any particular standard or set of standards requires momentum that can easily be lost in debate over minutiae. There is a built-in tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good, when what is need are functional standards that are designed not to stand in the way of their own refinement at some later time.

[this is mostly a placeholder for now -- unedited notes follow]

Here's what we have in mind:

oai_lii:law.cornell.edu:us/federal/scotus/00-201-ZO-html

This example is the identifier for the majority opinion in NY Times v. Tasini. It breaks into
scheme:namespace-identifier:local-identifier

-- the scheme oai_lii should be the same for all identifiers, everywhere, and will eventually
be associated with a series of standards documents and formal xml schemas.

You will also want to look at the conceptual overview of Level 1 data.

Here's a schema diagram. It won't print well, sadly. There's a PDF version that might be more readable: OAI-lite.pdf

What's here

[NB: this is a guided tour of an experimental service. It bounces around a lot, so if it's not working for you, try again. Frustration at repeated, unsuccessful attempts can be vented at the author, tom-dot-bruce[somewhere in the vicinity of]cornell-dot-edu]

This "guided tour" will walk you through the prototype OAI repository server at the Legal Information Institute. It includes a little bit of explanatory text, but

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.

For our purposes here:

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

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:

Implementation scenarios: where does the metadata come from?

OAI-PMH repository implementations consist of request- and error-handling scripts that draw on a relational database (RDBMS) for the metadata they deliver. In practice, this is because implementations that relied on real-time extraction of metadata from documents in a file tree would be unacceptably slow. So for practical purposes the question becomes one of how the metadata finds its way into the RDBMS, and that in turn depends on the nature of the documents themselves,