WORKING DRAFT
5-19-04
LegalXML Integrated Justice Technical Committee
April 29, 2004 Meeting Minutes
A.LegalXML update - Steering Committee report (J. Cabral)
The committee has been very productive over the past few months and there appears to be a lot of interest, participation, and opportunity for growth.
1.Attendees
JohnAerts
Gregory Arnold
Donald Bergeron
JimCabral
Tom Clarke
StanDefilippi
Art English
RobinGibson
JohnGreacen
Jason Harrop
Rex McElrath
John Messing
Ellen Perry
CatherinePlummer
DallasPowell
David Roberts
JohnRuegg
TonyRutkowski
Christopher Smith
Roger Winters
2.Committee Membership
Structural changes to the committee that are a departure from the legacy Board structure have been made.
Representatives have been added from every LegalXML Technical Committee. Membership includes:
Technical Committee / NameE-Contracts / Dave Marvit
E-Filing / Roger Winters
E-Notary / John Messing
Integrated Justice / Jim Cabral
Legislative / To be selected
Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) / Debi Miller-Moore
at large / Robin Gibson
at large / John Greacen
at large / Dallas Powell
In order to ensure sufficient funding for LegalXML from OASIS, members must be selected from the LegalXML member section and not just an individual LegalXML TC.
3.Funding Report
There is money available to fund LegalXML activities (currently approximately $54,000). The committee is soliciting ideas, such as:
»Creating a test bed for verifying compliance/conformance with LegalXML standards
»Allocating resources for message architectures that could be utilized by all of the LegalXML TC’s.
»Hiring a technical reporter to help write the Court Filing Blue specifications.
»Conference call services (All LegalXML TCs share the same number)
»Other web based meeting resources, such as WebX, etc.
The process to submit and approve expenses was distributed at the April 29 LegalXML member section meeting held in conjunction with the OASIS conference.
4.Strategic Planning
The steering committee has begun strategic planning discussions, including:
New mission statement, vision statement, and goals have been adopted. They have been posted on the LegalXml Member Section site at
Need to consider ideas and roles for cross-OASIS coordination.
»Technical Advisory Board (TAB) elections are coming up; this is the main functional body for OASIS for these issues.
»Karl Best has been regularly attending the steering committee meetings; will plan to invite Jamie (?) to attend on an ongoing basis.
»OASIS is aware of the importance and need for more cross visibility between TC’s. For example, the April symposium in New Orleans was intended to jump start more communication between groups and improve the technical context; reflecting a rejuvenation of the TAB.
»There may be opportunities to cross pollinate with other related TC’s, such as participating with the eGov technical committees.
5.International coordination.
There was extensive discussion about ongoing international efforts and ideas about how to expand the focus of LegalXML to the international community.
Dave Roberts has been spreading the word regarding more international coordination and participation in GLOBAL’s activities. For example, Great Britain is working on an XML based CJIS project.
»These standards have not been made publicly available, although there appears to be a movement to release them to a wider audience.
»The Police Information Technology Organization (PITO) corporate data model can be found at
»Here's a general reference to the Criminal Justice Information Technology (CJIT) business modeling and exchange work on-going in the UK:
and
»Dave Roberts is planning to speak with his contacts in UK and EU to identify specific people we can reach out to and invite to participate in our TC and other activities.
Other international efforts include:
»Ongoing work in Western Australia and Belgium.
»A new Convention on CyberCrime treaty has been signed (see Current participants include 32 European countries, US, Canada, Japan, South Africa, with additional signatories to come
»International Law Enforcement Telecommunications Seminary (ILETS) – G8+ level organization to drive international cooperation for information sharing.
»European Justice Network, currently used to facilitate contact information between prosecutors and courts, such as to facilitate extradition
Some ideas to enable and support international participation include:
»Relaxing attendance requirements for out of time zone members and thinking about how to manage multi-continent conference calls.
»Making a concerted effort to reach out for international participation.
»Scheduling face to face meetings at least annually.
»The group agreed that it was important to continue with a consolidated approach instead of separating into regional subcommittees in order to support and promote good communication.
Multi-lingual issues were also discussed, including
»Possible impacts on day to day TC business
»The importance of supporting the development of multi lingual XML specifications, such as adding additional character sets, considering translation requirements, and developing a process for multi-lingual context metadata and registry.
6.Meeting Schedule
The steering committee will continue to hold monthly conference calls.
Minutes will be posted to the OASIS site; their location will be publicized as it has been difficult to find them in the past.
B.GJXDM 3.0 update
Robin Gibson, Catherine Plummer, and Ellen Perry presented a report on The Development of the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM). A link to this presentation will be posted on the LegalXML web site shortly. This presentation sparked a number of questions and comments:
What’s the status of, and what entity should be responsible for, the development and maintenance of GJXDM Registry and Repository?
»The XSTF tried to find a suitable repository tool, but couldn’t find an affordable one with the required functionality. It’s currently looking at using other government registries as OJP isn’t prepared to take this effort on and GLOBAL’s charter specifically excludes funding for operational work
»xmlRegistry.nist.gov:8080 is a possible resource; this is the old version of Yellow Dragon (before it was sold to Adobe).
»Questions about whether government or industry should be responsible for managing these issues on a long term basis
-One scenario is that government should write the standard, and then industry would step in to develop the tools and repositories necessary to implement the standards.
-Another scenario is to identify sufficient resources to ensure that the appropriate public sector agency can support the registry.
There is a need to develop a core set of transactions and data requirements. Robin Gibson reported that the courts are especially interested in:
-Adult Protection Order
-Sentencing document
-Traffic citation
Feedback message for the XSTF.
»Public access to the (Access) data model that is beneath the GJXDM.
»If development resources are limited, it may be more useful to build a shared repository rather than more tools.
C.IJIS Technical Committee UpdateS
Matthew D'Alessandro(Motorola) is the IJTC representative to IJIS; he wasn’t able to attend the April 2004 meeting; will ask him to give an update report at an upcoming call.
IJIS GJXDM Performance Testing Committee update (Ellen Perry)
»The testing effort is seeking to objectively quantify performance metrics for end to end transactions (construction, transmission, consumption, transformation) using the GJXDM.
»Use Case Scenarios include:
-AMBER Alert
-LA Arrest/Incident Report
-Inmate Record
-RAP Sheet
-Reduced Tag Size (AMBER Alert)
»Testing hierarchy includes:
-Schema size (full, partial, bare minimum)with constant data content
-Data content (large, typical, small) with constant schema size
»Membership. Please note that while any of the participants listed below are available for informal discussion, the IJIS institute is the official point of contact for this project.
-Paul Wormeli, IJIS Institute ()
-Jim Threatte, chair (SAIC, )
-Paul Embley (Practitioner Resource Group, )
-Ken Gill (OJP, )
-Ellen Perry (MTG, )
-Joseph Mierwa (VisionAir, )
-John Wandelt (GTRI, )
-Tim Wilson (TriTech Software, )
D.Lessons learned Using the GJXDM 3.0 operational release
The OXCI Project (Washington AOC - Tom Clarke) reported that the data dictionary content has been useful and that he has issues and concerns with the data model
»Full schema/derivation by restriction broke the existing object oriented programming tools.
»Work around solution was to use the sub schema approach.
ARJIS (in San Diego) is using the content but may not be following all of the sub schema rules.
LA County (John Aerts/John Ruegg)
»Anticipates mapping 15 business case instances to the GJXDM.
-One example is sentence orders for DNA; will extract from their system, convert to PDF, and map to the GJXDM.
»Have implemented a test e-filing system using the GJXDM. Greatest performance impact is in the network transmission time; lessons learned are:
-Compression before transmission is a good idea
-Schema caching is important
-SAX parser was more efficient than the DOM parser
-Schema size doesn’t appear to significantly impact performance; appears that dictionary size could grow over time without significantly impacting performance
-Also highlights that real time transactions will have fewer performance issues than a nightly batch upload process.
E.message exchange architectural profiles
The TCs could make an important contribution by developing standard transaction profiles, as a separate step from the development of content specific exchanges such as reference documents and e-filing.
There is an opportunity for these standards to expand across and beyond the justice domain.
Several different kinds of models could be used to manage this process, such as:
»The consolidated member section could put up a map of the to-do items that provides a framework to organize the work, and individual technical committees would then select and build a particular process.
»A “bottom-up” approach could be used, where each TC develops specific profiles required to meet the needs of their particular transactions.
Further discussions regarding a consolidated architectural approach will be added to the LegalXML Steering Committee agenda.
F.integrated justice TC governance and meeting schedule
1.Appointment of new leadership
The group thanked Dave Roberts for his ongoing efforts leading the committee. Dave has stepped down from primary leadership due to his travel schedule and other work commitments.
The following individuals volunteered for the following positions:
»Private Sector co-chair: Ellen Perry, MTG
»Public Sector co-chair: John Ruegg, LA County
»Secretary/Web master: Catherine Plummer
This information will be posted in the minutes and on the website for comments by any members who were not able to attend the face to face meeting, with final approval to occur at the next IJTC conference call.
2.Monthly conference calls
The group tentatively agreed to meet on the third Tuesday of every month at 10am Pacific Time.
The goal is to hold the first meeting on May 18, 2004.
3.Quarterly Face to Face Meetings
In addition to the monthly conference calls, the group agreed to hold quarterly face to face meetings, preferably in conjunction with other industry meetings. Ideas for the next two meetings are:
SEARCH is considering holding a reference document workshop in early summer, probably late June in Sacramento, California.
»Recommend two days (or at least 1.5 days) for the meeting.
»Catherine has a list of potential participants, who have submitted use case scenarios (hopefully 25-50 people)
»IJTC face to face would occur at the end of the workshop.
One idea for the fall face to face meeting is to hold it in conjunction with the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) in November 2004 in Los Angeles.
G.NEXT STEPS - goals and activities for the coming year
The primary effort of the TC will be focused on developing GJXDM reference documents (schemas and instances) for the highest priority exchanges. Preliminary steps reviewed by the group were:
1.Gather resources and identify high priority exchanges
Catherine Plummer volunteered to forward a list of organizations and states that are currently using the GJXDM to the TC chairs for follow up.
It will be important to foster as much coordination between groups and associates as possible, to help prevent unnecessary duplication of effort and leverage previously completed work when possible.
Were there any relevant developments at the May LEIM meeting held in Sacramento?
The original charter statement describes plans for the following subcommittees:
»Arrest/Incident Report
»Arrest Warrant
»Charging Document
»Sentencing Order/Disposition
»Protection Order Registry
The original reference document list discussed at the September 2003 meeting included:
»Arrest Warrant
»Criminal Complaint
»Judgment & Sentence Order
Other ideas brought forward at the April 2004 meeting were:
»Traffic Citation
»Arrest Disposition Report
»Adult Protection Order
2.Prepare a development strategy and approach
Compatibility of data elements
Modular approach, either within a reference document or across a number of documents.
Determine whether different versions of the same reference document should be created.
Identify the validation and approval process, including coordination with OJP and GLOBAL