The domain language
Because the platform is built domain-first, the words the courts use are the words the code uses, so these are the terms to search for when you are looking for where something happens.
These are the terms most likely to come up in your first week. It is a starting point, not a complete glossary.
A case, and the people and offences in it
A prosecution case is what a prosecuting authority sends to the court. It is the container everything else hangs from.
A defendant is a person or organisation the case is brought against. A case can have more than one, and their circumstances can differ.
An offence is what is alleged, and offence definitions are held centrally as reference data rather than per case. A charge is the case-level concept that carries an offence — so the definition is shared and its use is not.
Hearings, and what comes out of them
A hearing is an occasion on which the court considers a case. Cases are listed into hearings, which is its own discipline — matching cases to courtrooms, dates and the people required.
Results are what the court decided, recorded against a charge or a defendant. They drive a great deal of what happens next, including which documents are produced. They are structured rather than free text, which is what makes them actionable.
Result definitions are the catalogue of outcomes a court can record, with the prompts each one asks for. They are reference data, maintained centrally, and they change over time — which means a question about results usually has a date in it.
Notices, orders and warrants
NOWs — notices, orders and warrants — are the documents a court produces after a hearing, and what a person outside the court actually receives. The range is wide:
- Notice of Grant of Bail
- Notice of Financial Penalty
- Notice of Disqualification from Driving
- Notice of New Date of Hearing
- Notice of Football Banning Order
- Notice of Compensation
A single hearing can generate several, addressed to different recipients, and which ones are produced follows from the results recorded — the document is generated from the decision rather than typed up afterwards.
Reference data
A good deal of the platform’s behaviour is not in code but in reference data — the offence definitions, result definitions, prompts, court and prosecutor details.
Two things follow. Behaviour can change without a release, because the data changed. And a question of the form “why did it do that” is often answered by the reference data in force at the time, rather than by the code as it stands now.
Why the vocabulary is worth the effort
Domain-first design means these words are load-bearing. If you search for the business term, you will usually find the code; if you search for a technical synonym you have invented, you often will not. When a term seems to be used in two different ways, that is worth pursuing rather than smoothing over — it usually marks a real boundary between two parts of the business.