Subject: [urn] Request for new URN namespace review: LEX

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2017 13:13:10 +0100

Hi,
as responsible AD for draft-spinosa-urn-lex, I would like to request
Expert Review for a new URN Namespace.
The registration template was extracted from draft-spinosa-urn-lex-11:

      Namespace Identifier:  

         "lex" requested according to [RFC8141].

      Version:

         1.0

      Date:

         2017-05-25

      Registrant:  

         Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG)
         Italian National Research Council (CNR) 
         Via de' Barucci, 20 
         50127 Florence 
         Italy 
         e-mail: [email-masked]
         phone: +39 055 43995

         contact: Enrico Francesconi
         e-mail: [email-masked]

      Purpose:

         The purpose of the "lex" namespace is to assign an unequivocal
         identifier, in standard format, to documents that are sources
         of law.

         In the last few years a number of institutional initiatives
         have arisen in the field of legal document management. They
         were aimed at introducing standards for sources of law
         description and identification using XML and URI techniques,
         respectively (for more details see Section 1.3) LEX identifier
         is conceived to be general enough, so to provide guidance at
         the core of the standard and sufficient flexibility to cover a
         wide variety of needs for identifying all the legal documents
         of different nature, namely legislative, case-law and
         administrative acts. Moreover, it can be effectively used
         within a federative environment where different publishers
         (public and private) can provide their own items of an act
         (that is there is more than one manifestation of the same act).

         The LEX identifier is conceived to be: globally unique,
         transparent, bidirectional, persistent, location-independent,
         and language-neutral. It is organized into parts. The first
         part uses a predetermined standard to specify the country (or
         more generally the jurisdiction) of origin for the legal
         document being identified; the remainder is intended for local
         use in identifying documents issued in that country or
         jurisdiction. This second part depends only on sources of law
         identification system operating in that nation. For more
         details on the nature of the LEX characteristics and the
         general internal organization, see Section 1.4.

         The LEX name is linked to the document through specific meta-
         information, internally (with a tag) or externally (with a
         attribute) (for details on this see Section 1.5)

         LEX names will be used on a large scale in references either in
         (X)HTML document or, more generally, in XML documents format
         compliant with the relative DTD/XMLSchema (see Section 1.6 for
         more information).

      Syntax:

         The identifier has a hierarchical structure as follows: 

                             "urn:lex:" NSS

         where <NSS> is the Namespace Specific String composed as
         follows:

                   NSS = jurisdiction ":" local-name

         where:

         <jurisdiction> is the part providing the identification of the
         jurisdiction, generally corresponding to the country, where the
         source of law is issued. It is also possible to represent
         international organizations (either states or public
         administrations or private entities);

         <local-name> is the uniform name of the source of law in the
         country or jurisdiction where it is issued; its internal
         structure is common to the already adopted schemas. It is able
         to represent all the aspects of an intellectual production, as
         it is a legal document, from its initial idea, through its
         evolution during the time, to its realisation by different
         means (paper, digital, etc.).

         LEX specifications gives information on the internal structure
         of both <jurisdiction> and <local-name>, including
         specifications about case sensitivity, the use of national
         characters and diacritics, as well as spaces, connectives,
         punctuation marks, abbreviations, acronyms, date formats and
         ordinal numbers. For more details on the internal structure and
         syntax of the LEX identifier, see Section 3, 4 and 5.

         Recently the r- and q- components have been introduced by
         [RFC8141]. They provide new and interesting perspectives when
         using URNs in a complex sector as sources of law, characterized
         by different versions, languages, publishers, and so on. In
         particular, by using the r-component at the resolver level, and
         therefore at the whole NSS level, you can select from the same
         work only expressions written in a given language, or
         manifestations published by a particular institutional site,
         etc. Using the q-component at the act metadata level, you can
         select versions that are valid at a particular date, or
         modified by a specific act, etc.

      Assignment:

         The Jurisdictional Registrar (or those it delegates) of each
         adhering country or organization is responsible of the
         definition or acceptance of the uniform name's primary elements
         (issuing authority and type of legal measure).

         Any country or jurisdiction, aiming to adopt this schema,
         identifies a Jurisdictional Registrar, an organization which
         shares and defines the structure of the optional part of the
         name, according to the organization of the state or
         institution. The process of assigning the <local-name> will be
         managed by each specific country or jurisdiction under the
         related <jurisdiction> element (details on this can be found in
         Section 7.2).

         Identifiers in the "lex" namespace are defined through a
         <jurisdiction> element assigned to the sources of law of a
         specific country or organization, and a <local-name> assigned
         by the issuing authority. The goal of the LEX schema is to
         maintain uniqueness and persistence of all resources identified
         by the assigned URNs. The elements values for the LEX
         identifier within a jurisdiction are defined by the
         Jurisdictional Registrar, this ensures that the constructed
         URNs are unique (see Section 7.3 for details on uniqueness).

         The persistence of identifiers depends on the durability of the
         institutions that assign and administer them (see Section 7.3
         for details on persitence)

      Security and Privacy:

         This document introduces no additional security considerations
         beyond those associated with the use and resolution of URNs in
         general.

      Interoperability:

         As open standard naming convention to identify sources of law
         at international level, LEX is meant to guarantee
         interoperability among legal information systems across
         national boundaries.

         The characteristics of the LEX naming convention facilitate
         legal document management as well as provide a mechanism of
         stable cross-collections and cross-country references, thus
         allowing the distribution of the legal information towards a
         federated architecture.

      Resolution:

         The resolution service associates a LEX identifier with a
         specific document address on the net. The related system will
         have a distributed architecture based on two fundamental
         components: a chain of information in DNS (Domain Name System)
         and a series of resolution services from URNs to URLs, each
         competent within a specific domain of the namespace (see
         Section 8.1 for more details).

         To cope with possible incomplete or inaccurate uniform names,
         the implementation of a catalogue, based on a relational-
         database, able to associate a URN to related URLs, is
         suggested, as it will lead to a higher flexibility in the
         resolution process. A resolver can provide names normalization,
         completion of inaccurate or incomplete names, and finally their
         resolution in network locations (see Section 8.2 and 8.3 for
         characteristics and behaviour of a catalogue for resolution).

      Documentation:

         None

      Additional Information:

         See [FRAN] and [SPIN].

      Revision Information:

         None

---

From: "Hakala, Juha E" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2017 07:57:35 +0000

Hello, 

I have a few comments. 

Mandate

Based on the I-D, it is not clear to me what mandate ITTIG-CNR has. URN:LEX would complement existing systems; for instance in Finland laws are identified with cool URIs. For instance, English translation of Child welfare act can be found from http://finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/2007/en20070417.pdf. In the short term there might not be much interest to implement urn:lex in the Finlex system.

However, I do believe that establishing a urn namespace to sources of law can be useful in the long term. 

Administration 

ITTIG-CNR will be responsible of maintaining the uniqueness of the <jurisdiction> element. In the level of country codes this will be easy. But there may be a large number of sub-divisions within each country, and also organization-based sub-divisions. If urn:lex becomes popular, it may be a substantial task to maintain <jurisdiction> and to support organizations in making their urn:lex identifiers actionable. 

Has ITTIG-CNR estimated the amount of work required in the short term / long term?   

Semantics and syntax 

The template does not provide sufficient information about the semantics and syntax of NSS, but luckily draft-spinosa-urn-lex-11 is very detailed in that respect. 

Most URN namespaces (and traditional identifiers) have relatively simple semantics. Identifiers may be totally "dumb" (it is impossible to see from the NSS what the URN identifies) and even if the identifier has some semantic like ISBN, things are kept simple (for those in the know, ISBN reveals the country and the publisher). Other persistent identifier system are even more extreme when it comes to semantics: identifiers in ARK, Handle and DOI are usually dumb, and recommend strongly that all semantics should be avoided. 

URNs from proposed urn:lex namespace may contain a lot of information about the identified resource. For instance, I-D contains an example URN like this: 

urn:lex:eu:tibunal.justicia:sentencia:2009-06-11;33-08@original:es$text-html:juradmin.eu;jurifast:todo:anonimo 

It may be difficult, both for humans and applications, to make sense of this. 

ITTIG might consider making NSS simpler, and including at least some of the information which is now embedded in NSS (such as date and file format) into metadata records that would accompany URN:LEX identifiers. Having a lot of semantics in the NSS may overload the resolvers with tasks which should be done by passing a request to an appropriate target system. It is also more challenging to develop assignment rules for a very semantic identifier system, and to be able to use such system correctly.    

As regards syntax, I am concerned about un-encoded use of @ to indicate an expression of a work: 

local-name = work ["@" expression] ["$" manifestation]

Resolution

ITTIG-CNR intends to maintain a centralized resolution service for urn:lex. That is necessary for organization-based sub-domains. But for country-code based subdomains such as urn:lex:fi, resolvers may be established in the national level (just as in country code based sub-domains of urn:nbn). Generally, if it is not necessary to establish a global resolver service for a namespace, it is better to decentralize, since otherwise there will be a single point of failure. 

It would of course be possible to harvest URN - URL mapping tables from national lex resolvers into the central resolver maintained by ITTIG-CNR. 

All the best,   

 Juha

> -----Original Message-----
> From: urn [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Alexey Melnikov
> Sent: 20. syyskuuta 2017 15:13
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: [urn] Request for new URN namespace review: LEX
> 
> Hi,
> as responsible AD for draft-spinosa-urn-lex, I would like to request Expert
> Review for a new URN Namespace.
> _______________________________________________
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