First Town Hall Meeting

Mark your calendars!

The SOLI community will be holding its first town hall meeting on September 6th, 2024. This event will provide an opportunity for members to discuss the future of the standard, share insights, and contribute to shaping SOLI’s priorities and roadmap.

The inaugural town hall meeting will be held virtually and open to the public:

While we encourage all interested parties to attend and participate in this important event, the meeting will be recorded and made available for those who are unable to join live.

We’ll update this topic with a link to the recording and transcript when they are available.

Please feel free to share agenda topics in advance on this thread.

I doubt I’ll be able to attend the meeting, so I’ll add my $0.02 here.

I think that LMSS is hamstrung by the fact that it is part taxonomy, part data schema, expressed in an ontology language. So it doesn’t work as an ontology, which is what it appears to be, and as both a data structure and as a taxonomy is it awkward to utilize. I propose that SOLI should, as one of its operating principles, adhere as strictly as possible to the standards it uses. Both out of a desire to simplify adoption, and the moral principle that if we want to encourage compliance with open standards we should probably demonstrate it.

I think there’s a lot of potential in open standards for legal data, and I acknowledge SOLI has a number of much bigger problems to solve, such as deciding who it serves, how, and why. The technological aspects are secondary. But in the course of solving those problems I think adherence to open standards as a guiding principle will help SOLI avoid repeating mistakes that have interfered with the success of previous iterations.

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Thanks, @Jason_Morris! This is probably the most important technical topic we need to address, so I’m glad that you’re already thinking about it :slight_smile:

As I’m sure you can guess, the two technical constraints that we’ve faced are:

  1. Legacy compatibility with older standard versions

Because some organizations have already adopted, we need to think about the impact of changes to “the” standard on their use cases.

  1. UI for collaborative modeling

Because we want to collaborate with a range of contributors, we need a collaborative modeling UI that supports “real” ontological modeling.

Ideas

We’ve discussed a number of ideas that would partially or wholly address the issues, including:

  • moving to a more modular distributions (e.g., splitting the taxonomic aspects into SKOS resources)
  • maintaining a legacy standard in parallel with a new standard following best practices like you suggest
  • providing more open source resources or free APIs to address common frictions caused by the current design

We’d love to hear your ideas or feedback on these ideas.

Even if you can’t make the town hall, we’d love to set up a session to hear from you too.

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I think it is actually mutually exclusive to maintain backward compatibility, and adhere to standards, if the backward versions are not standards compliant. So I’d prioritize being compliant, avoiding backward incompatibility going forward, and attempt to minimize the cost of migration. If there is sufficient reason to support the existing standard, maybe there is a reason to do that, but maybe it’s more properly SALI’s job.

Modularity makes a lot of sense, as does SKOS for the taxonomic elements, potentially. But I would need to dig into LMSS and other resources further to have an opinion on whether the right place to start is carving part of LMSS out, or of there are more fundamental pieces missing.

I am reminded that the government of Canada last year released it’s first enterprise-wide data standard, and it was for provincial and territorial abbreviations. Thirteen lines of code, give or take. Almost absurd in how small it is. But also exactly the right place to start.

I would actually discount the value of a collaborative editing UI. The point of something like this is that it should get used once it exists. If it’s not used, how easy it was to edit doesn’t matter.

I would focus very hard on what people are or could be using it for, and the standards that will support those uses. Then, you will know what technologies will support those standards, and you can decide how easy it can be made to collaborate using those standards. But if making it easier to use makes it harder to edit, it should be harder to edit.

I am a fan of ontologies (and to a lesser extent, taxonomies), and I think they may have a role to play as a source of truth for standards, but I don’t think that OWL or SKOS files should be the only or primary “product.” As a general rule a CSV file is more useful. To the extent that being more useful is inconsistent with backward compatibility, I would prioritize usefulness, too.

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I am not familiar with the acronym LMSS. Lake Minnetonka Sailing School?

Seriously, an ontology or taxonomy without rules is severely limited, in my opinion. Let me put on the table an alternative, at the other end of the scale of logical expressiveness:

Thorne

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Yes, @ltmccarty and @Jason_Morris, some means of expressing actual relations and constraints will be happening. As you both note, the details are where we want to get agreement (though that agreement could be to support multiple approaches!).

For example, we (@Damien_Riehl) discussed building our own meta-framework for collecting, storing, and translating the various “stuffs” that have lived in the OWL files.

Since much of SOLI is about collecting information from other sources of truth (e.g., court systems, popular acts, etc.), automating the collection is already a natural next step.

And once we automate more of the collection and maintenance, we will end up with a meta-representation of many sources anyway.

In that sense, the “S” in SOLI can really be plural Standards, and the underlying software can generate CSV, SKOS, OWL, or even LISP if we feel like it :smiley:

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I was interested in the meeting and as promised, I spoke with Adrian and I wanted to share this open source:

This is the first time I actually heard anyone speak of the project, but I am super excited to go through it and help!
I specialize in building AI, so this will also be an interesting endeavor for me working with Terah Dent.
Thanks for doing this!
Jesse

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