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[Monica Palmirani]

Dear all, I would like to submit my personal view on the composition of globally numbered ids. In our experiences in legal drafting (both with a special editor and manually) we often noticed a clear stratification of mark-up activities across offices. It is not unusual to find an office in charge only of the structure, another on the normative references and another on the modifications/amendments. So the mark-up is done over time in different steps, with different granularity, with different completeness, by different people. Examples: the normative references of a bill during the discussion are not marked up immediately, but the officers mark-up only the mandatory ones (e.g. Constitution, justifications normative citations, etc.) and later the other normative references, depending on the fluctuation or stability of the relevant text. Another example: one could start to mark up the normative references and only later add the modifications, so <mod> mod elements would came later even if the <ref>s they contain are already inserted. This diluted and flexible process is one of the benefit of Akoma Ntoso. For instance, the Senate of Italy at the moment is using Akoma Ntoso only for the structure, but in the future they can improve the markup with a new manifestation just adding the references and more details. At the moment, our discussion about ids requires that the number associated to globally numbered elements is created in the order of appearance of the element within the document, so that every insertion, deletion, or move requires to update every id of the document to accommodate this. In order to better cope with the aforementioned scenarios I propose to leave the author of the markup more flexibility in choosing the number of the ids for globally numbered elements, and to allow to number them following either the sequential order of the position of the element in the document, or the order in which the elements have been marked up. In this way if a new <ref> is added inside the first article, and the last marked-up ref was <ref eId="ref_98">, I will simply use eId="ref_99" regardless of the position of it in the text. This also makes sure that these new attributions do not affect the metadata block and all the idRef contained in the document, and maintains consistency with the previous manifestations of the same expression. My 2 cents from legal drafting scenario. Yours, Monica -- =================================== Associate professor of Legal Informatics School of Law Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna C.I.R.S.F.I.D. http://www.cirsfid.unibo.it/ Palazzo Dal Monte Gaudenzi - Via Galliera, 3 I - 40121 BOLOGNA (ITALY) Tel +39 051 277217 Fax +39 051 260782 E-mailmonica.palmirani@unibo.it ====================================