[huml-comment] This month's meething

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Here are the minutes for this month's meeting:

Here are the TC Minutes, which I will link to this post Sunday, 
December 22, 2002 on the TC website.

December 18, 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:

James Landrum
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
Rex Brooks
Rob Nixon


Non-voting participants

Sylvia Candelaria de Ram

Minutes taken by TC Secretary Rex Brooks

Meeting convened12:05 p.m. Eastern Time

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

We did not have a quorum.

The first item of business was a review of the 30-day Public Comment 
Period for the Committee Specification The Human Markup Language 
Primary Base XML Schema Specification and the one change which was 
decided by vote of the TC during this process.

We decided to delete the attribute race from the attributeGroup 
physicalDescriptors. We did not have a motion to specifically change 
the other components which have been questioned in relation to the 
Semiosis Section of Specification, Semiosis, Signal and Symbol.

There was no dissent from the proposal put forward by Rex Brooks to 
simply make the change voted and set further work on the Primary Base 
Schema aside until after several other concerns have been decided. 
Specifically, these issues are:

* the modification of the Requirements Document to include a process 
or method by which new components may be added to the Primary Base 
Schema or existing components may be deleted;

* the inclusion or deletion of Semiosis, Signal and Symbol in the 
Semiosis Section;

* the inclusion of any new components which work on the Secondary 
Base Schema through the process of developing the three independent 
implementations of the PBS that are required for submission to OASIS 
for approval as a standard.

We discussed at some length the possible replacement of race as a 
component apart from physicalDescriptors, as a social construct which 
reflects current usages and leaves open a better, more accurate 
descriptions of this common human grouping and its use as an 
important component of identity. Many of the shortcomings of the term 
race were mentioned, including the difficulty arising from 
individuals with mixed "racial" heritages.

 From this discussion, James Landrum's proposal of Ethnicity appeared 
to have the most applicability. James mentioned the Arch-L mailing 
list as a resource for exploring the concepts behind replacing race 
with ethnicity within the academic archeology community.

Sylvia made the point that this area is fraught with multiple, 
overlapping cultural contexts which directly affect comunications.

Ranjeeth suggested that American Culture is often best viewed, if 
possible, from the internal viewpoint of the individual outward for 
purposes of comparing the experience of racial/ethnic identities.

Rob noted that the relative influence of ethnicity within a VR-AI 
context could be viewed as overlapping waveforms in terms of 
analyzing communication interactions. It is noted that the work of 
Rob and Sylvia and James all lend quantifying, chartable or 
graphable, aspects to an accounting of or for ethnicity which 
deserves to be pursued further.

We decided to put this issue on the agenda for January.

The second item on the agenda was to decide on Tentative Milestone 
dates for ongoing work.

We have targeted the date for sample implementations for March 31, 
2003, which parallels the date for work to be completed for the 
papers James and Sylvia may be making to the CIDOC Conference March 
26-27, 2003.

We have targeted the date for completing work on the revision of the 
Requirements Document for Feb. 28, 2003.

We have targeted the date for completing work on the PBS and to 
submit it to OASIS for April 31, 2003.

We had a discussion about the fact that the papers have not yet been 
accepted or declined for presentation, and James asked if the chat 
application implementation would be done in Java, which could 
leverage or work with the the Digital Archive Network for 
Anthropology. Rex replied that he was planning on implementing the 
X3D (VRML97-compliant)/HumanML-enhanced chat in both Java and Python, 
due to the fact that the webhost for the sample implementation uses 
Python as the webserver scripting language. Rex also said that he 
would be using an open-source Java chat application as a model, which 
facilitates the process considerably, since Java is the preferred 
language for the X3D Scena-Authoring-Interface. An effort will be 
made for thisto work with DANA. DANA, is a Java3D application, which 
will require a bit more work for the purpose of interoperability, but 
it remains doable.

Rob said that he and James are proceeding with the sample 
implementation which makes use of the motion-capture work done for 
the "Native Dancer" Diabetes-Awareness Project at North Dakota State 
University which James is conducting.

One of the advantages of this approach is that it will make numerous 
multimedia and image server databases available for numerous kinds of 
interactivity.

The third item on the agenda was discussion, which will be continued 
in January, of developing or adopting a standard format for the 
Mission, Values and Goals Statements of the Subcommittees.

Rex mentioned that it seems likely that our subcommittees will want 
to keep in mind the longer term goal of creating APIs for these 
application areas.

We also briefly touched on the the fourth item on the agenda, which 
was to focus our outreach in a way that can attract individual new 
members capable of acting as liaisons with various other TCs, working 
groups and standards organizations. In this context, Ranjeeth gave us 
a brief description of the early work in organizing and establishing 
the new e-Gov TC to which he will be our liaison, as Rex is for Web 
Services.

One of the overarching themes of this effort was summarized from a 
description of the purpose for DANA, is that we are seeking to use 
HumanML-enhanced language translation in the broader scope of Human 
undertakings by focusing on cultural usages and cultural expressions. 
This is clearly within the scope of communications. This concept ties 
together the need, as exemplified in DANA, for having common 
resources, such as accurately scanned 3D models of artifacts which 
can then be examined by anyone who installs the DANA client, and as 
our chat application seeks to make standard representation of 
emotional facial expressions possible.

We then adjourned.





-- 
Rex Brooks
Starbourne Communications Design
1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA 94702 *510-849-2309
http://www.starbourne.com * rexb@starbourne.com