RE: [humanmarkup-comment] TC Meeting

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Hi Rex:

Unfortunately, your email went to my work account the 
day after I left for a long holiday.  I am now back at 
work.

The problem I have at this time is that the draft schema 
has never been commented on seriously.  I have seen references 
to Kurt writing papers for a conference on the HumanML design, 
but nothing of what that was or how it would affect a schema 
based design.  Without some sort of feedback on that approach, 
I don't quite know how to go forward.   Schema design requires 
a very precise notion of domain boundaries.  Look at any relational 
DB design and most of the Codd rules are applicable.  Of course, 
that reflects a viewpoint overly influenced by relational design, 
but XML is better suited to that in many cases, so it is a 
rational viewpoint.  

The XML datatypes from the XML Schema specification are the 
basic datatypes.   After that, the design of the schema itself 
depends on how the application developers want to work with 
the core set.  We may want to step back and ask ourselves 
again what is to be in that set.  Human identification systems 
are part of almost any database whose transactions require 
a user description (name, address, phone number, email) etc. 
These are not controversial and will be found in most business 
languages (eg, are they in UBL?) so a namespace clash is 
inevitable here.  Unless we pull the goals of the Schema 
into a set we can be reasonably assured is scoped to a limited 
set of applications, we are going to have more clashes of 
that sort.  Physical characteristics were orignally included 
in the draft because I forsaw an overlap between the h-anim 
like applications for real-time 3D and the information one 
finds in public safety databases.  Otherwise, I used the 
categories from our communications research.

So, what happened while I was at home raking leaves?

Happy New Year to all!

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@starbourne.com]

Hi Len,

Is there any chance you could attend tomorrow's TC teleconference? 
One of the items on the agenda is going to be the question of 
formally asking for a gathering of requirements from our applications 
area for elements, attributes and datatypes that we need to consider 
for interoperability and useability.

These are not design questions at this stage, just gathering 
information, which we need to do if we want our language to be 
useful. This became important in the context of considering 
interoperability which just happened to coincide with the OASIS 
Interoperability Conference in Orlando this last weekend. We are 
waiting to hear what conclusions may been come to in the conference, 
but regardless, we do need to ask our designated audiences--the app 
makers and users of existing codification systems, what we need to 
do, or perhaps most importantly what we need to not do to avoid 
conflicts and confusion of terms and data.

The notion is that we charge you, as our Invited Expert, with 
formulating a plan to proceed with the first basic XML Schema after 
this information has been gathered--hopefully also gathering some 
reliable volunteers along the way.

I'm not optimistic about that latter, based on my own experience, but 
we owe it to ourselves to try, eh?

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Let me know, please if you can't make it, and have issues you want 
represented. Specifically, would it be useful to you for us to try to 
arrange to have you subscribed to the TC list? It seems only logical, 
since you are going to be conducting work, the details of which, 
might very well bore comment's list reader to tears, and would 
certainly give the impression to potential members who drop in as 
newcomers, that we are a bunch of propeller-topped dome heads, or in 
my case, bone heads.