3.1.1 Abstract Data Model

This section describes a conceptual model of possible data organization that an implementation maintains to participate in this protocol. The described organization is provided to facilitate the explanation of how the protocol behaves. This document does not mandate that implementations adhere to this model as long as their external behavior is consistent with that described in this document.

The protocol server maintains a multiple collections of discovery cases, for example lawsuits for 2005-2010 and lawsuits for 2000-2005.

For each case, the protocol server maintains a list of discovery sources, that are applicable to the scope of the discovery case. For example, if a case were about Contoso vs. Fabrikam, an exemplary discovery source might be the email mailbox for the executives of Contoso. The protocol server also maintains internal state about actions that need to be performed for discovery sources, such as when a given discovery source will be placed on legal hold, as well as the status of whether those actions have been performed.

In addition, the protocol server maintains a list of search queries applicable to the discovery sources of a given case, as well as metadata about when those search queries have been exported, that is downloaded.

The protocol server maintains a set of statistics, such as the number of items and the size of those items, that apply to the entire discovery sources, as well as the size when filtered using the list of applicable search queries.

The protocol server also maintains a directory of valid email mailboxes.