Applying intertextual semantics to Cyberjustice

Abstract

We report on a project consisting in the application of the Intertextual Semantics modeling method (IS; Marcoux 2006, Marcoux & Rizkallah 2007a, Marcoux & Rizkallah 2009) to a particular type of legal document: the “Agreement as to the conduct of the proceedings,” used in the Province de Québec (Canada). This was done as a sub-project of the Towards Cyberjustice project in the Faculty of Law at Université de Montréal. One of the project objectives was to verify whether the availability of a semantic model of a document type (more precisely, a IS model) would impact on (and hopefully help) the development of an application for the collaborative authoring of such documents. We first explain how the project lead to many extensions to the then existing rudimentary IS platform (Marcoux 2009), and describe the most important of them. We then present a few unforeseen difficulties that arose in the process of modeling, and the lessons learned. Although no definite answer was obtained as to whether IS can directly help in the development of applications, the project showed it can at least help indirectly, by forcing fundamental questions to be asked early on in the process. In our case, applying IS modeling revealed that nobody really knew from the outset what the target community was, nor what their actual needs were. This is a good illustration of the kind of effect IS can have on application development projects: making sure fundamental questions do not go unasked too long.

Intertextual semantics: A semantics for information design

“…As a kind of trade‐off, IS allows partially geometrized text in intended interpretations, namely written text with line and paragraph breaks, as well as indentation (Marcoux, 2006; Marcoux & Rizkallah, 2007a, 2007b). Considering more richly geometrized text is on the research agenda.…”

“…There have been few applications of IS (Marcoux & Rizkallah, 2007a, 2007b, 2008), but in all cases, the main benefit has been the impact on the modeling process of having to think about intended interpretations right at modeling time. Having to write an IS specification together with a model, for example, can reveal ambiguities and useless distinctions in the model as well as defects in its structure, or uncover “hidden” or avoidable dependence of the sense‐making process on distant information not already known by the target community of users (e.g., a table of codes).…”

“…The general IS approach can help clarify the implicit inherent semantics of certain constructs in data models because it requires specifying composition rules for generating the intended interpretation of conforming IBOs. For example, XML attributes were analyzed from this angle in Marcoux and Rizkallah (2007a). We believe IS also could provide intuitive understanding of certain design constraints associated with data models; for example, some of the normal forms for relational databases (Date, 2004).…”

“…IS and literate modeling can help choose appropriate names for the various “parts” of a model (e.g., database field names or XML element names). A judicious choice of part names can have an impact on the perennity of conforming IBOs, which may then remain understandable, even if isolated from their original creation context (Marcoux & Rizkallah, 2007a).…”

“…Instead, artificial formal languages are developed and used to represent, hopefully in an unambiguous and precise way, the information or knowledge to be managed. Intertextual semantics (IS; Marcoux, 2006; Marcoux & Rizkallah, 2007a, 2007b, 2008) adopts an almost exactly opposite point of view: Natural language is the very foundation around which information management tools and systems should be developed, and the usefulness of artificial formalisms used in the process lies exclusively in our ability to derive natural language from them. Thus, the artifacts used to manage information and knowledge are considered meaningful and useful not in themselves but only in as much as they can be interpreted, or “read out” in natural language by users.…”