Documentation related to legal-information standards, including standardized abbreviation sets, citation standards, court names, and so on.
[ 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 . ]
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:
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,
Not that things have to or even ought to be done this way, but I wanted to just post some thoughts I have been having about markup and get them out there.
Jurisdiction: Should be presented like this in this order: 1.Country, 2.Jurisdictional Subdivision, 3.Court name, 4.Location.
Presented in this order, with just this order of priority, item 4 to be optional.
If it is done this way, everything will sort out.
Example 1:
<sjm:court>
<sjm:country>
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.
Here's what you'll need to run oai4courts:
The law.gov workshop held by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School on March 22 and 23, 2010, produced some general recommendations regarding legislative metadata. They are best imagined as a series of answers to a question from a revisor of statutes or other governmental publisher of statutes or regulations who is asking, "What should I do?".
These approach reflects decisions and definitions documented here.
Name of the case. It is expected that party names will be embedded in this title in a way that will allow user-space applications to parse them easily, eg. Atlantic Dental Products v. Bruce.
