August TC Meeting minutes

Here are the minutes for this month's meeting:

August 27, 2003

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:

Rex Brooks
Rob Nixon
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
Len Bullard
Russell Ruggiero

Roger Alexander (Prospective)

Minutes taken by TC Secretary Rex Brooks

Meeting convened 12:05 p.m. Eastern Time.

Previous meeting minutes accepted.

This meeting was held on the fourth Wednesday of the Month.

We did not have a quorum, but there was no TC business to conduct.

As usual, some of these items were actually discussed in a somewhat different sequence from this summary.

We welcomed our new propsective member, Roger Alexander and asked him to relate a bit of information about himself and his interests. Roger is a veteran of the corporate IT world who has now moved on to academia as an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Colorado State University. He was referred to our work by Dr. Sylvia Candelaria de Ram, and he chief interest in connection with HumanML is in the field of cognitive science.

Old Business:

Ranjeeth announced that Rex had accepted his invitation to become permanent co-chair of the HumanMarkup TC, and that he is still looking for a good candidate to take on the work of chair for the Conflict Resolution Subcommittee.

Rex asked Len to expound a bit on his recent email concerning the computer 3D training program employed by the University of Michigan in its football program. Len reposted his message to the list with the comment that the following urls illustrate the use of football play diagrams as a variety of sign, signal and symbol system:

"...Some interesting stuff I just came accross from:

http://www-vrl.engin.umich.edu/

(Virtual Reality Laboratory (VRL), Univ.Michigan)

* Detroit Midfield Terminal:

http://www-vrl.engin.umich.edu/NewMidfield/index.html

has VRML models

* Virtual Football Trainer: (for american football)

http://www-vrl.engin.umich.edu/project/football/index.html

has VRML models and some videos too

interesting is the skeleton stuff for the animations, see "Creation of Three-Dimensional Play Animation" paragraph in that text and also follow the link it has to:

http://www-vrl.engin.umich.edu/project/football/skeleton.html"

Len noted that while this system uses a "CAVE," [(Cave Automatic Virtual Environment--schematic image attached) an advanced system for immersive virtual reality. A CAVE provides its users with the convincing illusion of being fully immersed in a three-dimensional world that is computer-generated and presented to the viewer in realistic full scale as well as in stereo], the CAVE system is not itself crucial to the formulation of a set of training materials. Len further noted that some of us might care to follow up on a training system application, for use in developing our secondary vocabularies and demonstrating the usefullness of HumanML as a front-end for immersive 3D training systems.

Len pointed out that such an application also provides an illustration for the symboling grounding problem which needs us to pull down practical applications from a higher level sign (semiotic) system for creating an "immersive" training environment, and that such an example of HumanML usefullness is probably of more practical use than that of suggesting HumanML observers in Iraq to study and document the cultural practices of that society and its current turmoil.

Rex then announced that he is working with the main participant from Oracle in the WSRP TC to develop a demonstration of the Emergency Management TC's Common Alerting Protocol 1.0 (CAP) within a WSRP/JSR168-conformant and -compliant "Proof of Concept" Portal at the Global Homeland Security Conference in Washington, D.C. Sept. 24-26. This "Portal" will demonstrate the principles of interoperability at work in OASIS standards efforts, and will be a prototype for a Public Healthcare Preparedness Portal that can grow from the Public Heathcare Preparedness Resource Guide Ranjeeth has produced for the New York Academy of Medicine.

Rex said that he will also prepare a powerpoint presentation to explain this project and that Russell Ruggiero will be on hand to run the demonstration which is part of a booth at the Conference which has been provided for the Emergency Management TC by the federal Disaster Management Interoperability Services group. This poerpoint presentation will highlight the role that HumanML in general and HPCDML in particular, can play in this kind of application of Web Services to deliver crucial information during critical times.

Len suggested that such applications would be good candidates for producing training scenarios where training simulations can be built to teach decision-making skills in the roles required for such incidents, and that, if constructed well, these training applications can be self-adapting to change conditions in realistic ways so that long term development of leadership and decision-making skills can be developed.

Rob explained that he and Sylvia are working toward the goal of having the mission and charter for the Congition in Environments Subcommittee ready by next month, with the IPR issues ironed out.

A bit of discussion was conducted concerning security issues brought up by the recent Blaster MS worm and the Sobig.F virus in disruptions and Len drew attention to some issues which revolve around the contentitious topic of indemnification for open source software. This is critical moving into the future because "risk" management and insuring against risks inherent in all software is an issue which open source enthusiasts tend to misunderstand as they attempt to portray their wares as desirable in the corporate world. This is particularly important in relation to the role of HumanML applications in Public Safety, such as will be discussed in the presentation to the Global Homeland Security Conference.

This also applies to the IPR considerations Rob and Sylvia are wrestling with for the CongEnv SC. Beyond copyright for derived applications which will be using CogEnv standards, there is also a need to understand and avoid perpetuating the current "culture of irresponsibility" as Len termed it, in the corporate software development world.

We discussed how this also applies to our more general efforts as well as CogEnv, where our new member Roger's interests are involved with the cognitive side of software, especially in the arena of self-aware software that also "learns" its users. It was also noted that simply using "GPL" or "LGPL" becomes somewhat intractable when software becomes capable of modifying itself according to the human preferences and habits of individual users.

(Note, I have drawn conclusions that seem somewhat obvious from my notes, but which we did not necessarily connect at the time in the course of this last-of-the-summer-season, free flowing discussion. Next month we get back down to specific agendas for moving our work forward again.)

huml message