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This is especially important because we envisage stakeholders to come from very different domains - technical, business, legal, etc. - each of which has different needs. Minimizing the effort being spent in this WG will require us spending some time to identify these needs, and finding ways to reconcile them into a minimum number of artefacts to be produced and maintained.

Mental Models and Terminology

The most basic purpose for having mental models and terminology (definitions) is for them to help someone that interprets a term (interpreter) that is uttered by someone else (speaker), to correctly hallucinate its intended meaning. In casual, human conversations, 'interpretation errors' (mis-hallucinations) may be detected and corrected if relevant. In automated contexts, terms (messages) are just interpreted as they are programmed, so any miscommunication occurs at the human level, and may go undetected and lead to buggy software (or costly repairs).

We want to build on a specific practice we find in (Dutch) legal settings. In many court cases, discussions are about whether or not someone or something qualifies as (an instance of) a term, e.g. 'guardian'. The outcome of this discussion is relevant, because the law assigns consequences (duties, rights, ...) to those that do, or do not qualify. Often, the first article in a law document specifies the terminology that is used by that law, and hence should also be applied in cases where that law applies. And the point is that lawyers, knowing that such definitions must be used to decide whether or not something qualifies as in instance of a term, have made it a habit of defining a term in terms of criteria that judges and lawyers can apply, precisely for the (basic) purpose of ensuring that they all mean the same thing in a specific context. We have noted that it sometimes happens that a single criterion has different names (terms) in different laws. Lawyers can work with that by keeping strict tabs on the scope and context from which a term stems, and in which it is used.

Emphasizing that the MM&T WG is NOT for legal users only, we still remain inspired by the 'Legal Dictionary', which not only provides a definition of various terms, but also a brief description (for TL;DR readers), backgrounds, various use-cases that exemplify the relevance of (the distinctions made by) the terms, and more. This may well serve as a prototype of (one of) the result(s) this WG would be working towards, that would be capable to reconcile the different needs that different stakeholder-audiences could have in a single MM&T WG product, and that could evolve as ToIP evolves.

Governance

<insert proposed governance policies and procedures>

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