[humanmarkup-comment] July Meeting Minutes

Here are the TC Minutes, which I will link to this post Sunday, July 21, 2002 on the TC website.

July 17, 2002

Teleconference meeting of the OASIS HumanMarkup Technical Committee.

USA Toll Free Number: 888-576-9014
USA Toll Number: +1-773-756-0201

Roll Call:
Voting Members:

Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
Rex Brooks
Rob Nixon
Joe Norris
Kurt Cagle

Invited Experts:
Sylvia Candelaria deRam
Len Bullar

Minutes taken by TC Secretary Rex Brooks

Meeting convened12:10 p.m. Eastern Time

This meeting was on our normally scheduled third Wednesday of the Month.

We had a bare quorum, so the decision without consent to proceed with the Semiotic Application experiment proposed by Len Bullard has the TC's approval.

Much of the meeting was absorbed with exploring the concept of a semiotic application of sort that will be more determined as we proceed. We also decided to renew our discussion of elements from the Primary Base Schema simultaneously.

Our exploration of the concept of a semiotic application experiment started with Len's explanation of where the impetus for this idea arose. Basically, due to the fact that our discussions of the StrawMan Toolkit from which the Primary Base Schema will evolve had reached a point where we were seriously considering inclusion of concepts fundamental to processing as opposed to strictly defining terms per se.

What this stimulated was the idea that we needed a more fundamentally grounded language--that is to say, a formulation of foundational terms that are clearly at the correct and well-understood level of abstraction with respect to the human communication process. Since we are dealing with the basics of semiotics, that is sign, signal and symbol, we agreed that this needs to be explored.

Len and Sylvia have both contributed major foundational messages to the mailing list which form the basis of discussion, which they and we will pursue to produce this experiment. Among the concepts at work in this pursuit are: the notion of a term for communicating entity or unit, a semiote; the concept of several contexts such as temporal, cultural, sending or transmitting mesages and receiving messages as directional processes that need to be well understood in the sense of how a marked up signal needs to be clearly defined for this experiment, and the particular term Len has proposed such as <!ELEMENT sign (sign*, signifier, signified+, referent) > with its attribute requirements.

This is an oversimplification for the purpose of keeping the minutes within reasonable bounds, and the reader is referred to the humanmarkup-comment mailing list archive to view the specific messages.

Rex Brooks reported on the progress and reamification of the work he is involved in with the Web Services for Interactive Applications TC, with the recommendation that the HumnMarkup TC should discuss his proposal that a statement be made concerning our view of the necessity for a Bill of Rights for Individual Information Control and Security for privacy and for verification purposes for the kinds of information which HumanMarkup is positioned to add as greater depth information to basic identification authentication and certification services.

This is also an oversimplification. It was suggested that this statement be further discussed in the mailing lists.

We also heard a brief report from Rob Nixon on the progress of his work in relation to Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence. He is working on categorizing and tokenizing patterns of motion in gestures as being associated with emotional states and/or as behavior in a semiotics context.

It should be noted that Rob Nixon took on the task of maintaining a simultaneous Instant Messaging session with Kurt Cagle, who contributed his views on these topics, too.

The meeting took the entire hour allotted for it, and adjoured at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time.

This ends the minutes, what follows is the Secretary's own additional comments.

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The discussions were lively and included many ideas and concepts that are not reported in these minutes, and raise the issue of whether or not we should consider recording our teleconferences if that is possible.

One concept that emerged and was mentioned with regard to both the semiotics discussion and the Bill of Rights for Individual Information Control, and that was frame of reference. Mostly this was a catch-all for the contextual information that various modules of the HumanMarkup Language will codify, but it also occurs to this writer that this concept might be a useful one for a similar kind of shorthand for individual's to define for themselves using HumanMarkup terminology and add to their own identification information at will to further refine how web-based services and offers are configured to their personal preferences.

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