OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing TC

Following up on the recent interest in developing a JSON version of the ECF 5 specification, here are some resources that will likely be useful to the effort.

• NIEM 4.0 model (2017)
• Non-normative guidance for NIEM JSON (2021)
• ECF 5.01 UML model (2023) which was developed based on NIEM 4.0 with the free BOUML modeling tool and the open source, Java-based niemtools plugout
• ECF 5.01 Committee Specification (CS) 01 (2023, and repo mirror) which is an XML representation based on NIEM 4.0 generated from the ECF 5.01 UML model using niemtools.
• ECF 5.0 JSON (2017) which is a JSON representation of ECF 5.0 based on NIEM 4.0 generated from a an early draft of the ECF 5.0 UML model using niemtools and using an early draft of the non-normative JSON guidance.
• NIEM 6.0 model Project Specification 01 (2023) published in XML Schema Definition (XSD) format
• NIEM Common Model Format (CMF) (2024) which defines an abstract modeling language for defining NIEM exchanges
• NIEM 6.0 Naming and Design Rules (NDR) Project Specification (PS) Draft 01 (2025) defines the rules for modeling NIEM 6.0 exchanges in either CMF or XSD format and implementing NIEM 6.0 exchanges in either XML or JSON format.
• CMFtool (2025) - a tool for converting schemas between NIEM 6.0 CMF, XSD and JSON schema. CMFtool is still in development and is untested with previous versions of NIEM.

I see a few possible paths forward for generating a JSON version of ECF 5.0:

1. If CMFtool works with NIEM 4, use it to convert the ECF 5.01 XSD representation to CMF and then transform from CMF to a JSON representation.
2. Update niemtools to support the latest NIEM 6.0 NDR and either
   1. Generate JSON representations directly from the latest ECF 5.01 UML model.
   2. Generate CMF representation from the ECF 5.01 UML model and CMFtool to transform from CMF to a JSON representation

------------------------------
Jim Cabral
Interim Executive Director
+1 502-640-4970
------------------------------