[humanmarkup-comment] Re: Self-Schemas

[Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga <rkthunga@humanmarkup.org>]

Hi Owen,

Thanks for the message.  Yes, schema was a term I was using all throughout
my education as well to describe our own internal frameworks...Actually,
based on my own personal education in psychology, HumanMarkup was always
totally common sense for me, and there was never any leap be for me between
mental self-schemas and XML schemas...(the difficulty for me personally has
been how to play my part in helping organize the effort early on...I'm not a
business management major ;-)).

One of the design requirements for HumanMarkup is to ensure that we not are
restrictive.  It goes against most design principles, which call for a
restricted  scope.  However, we are trying to represent human
characteristics, without compromising some of the important facets that go
along with describing human characteristics.  This calls for uncommon set of
requirements.

In current day explicit representations of human self-schemas, a person is
classified as having 1 cultural identity, 1 personality, or 1 religion.  I
believe it was Len who implied something like this that can use the simple
systems of identification, such as this, to actually *hide* behind them.  An
example I can think of:

"I am an Orthodox Christian.  It is against my belief to commit adultery.
Thus, I am not guilty."

Such simple description of human self-schemas explicitly do not properly
describe humanity, and simply propogate the old systems of human
classification, which have failed miserably in dealing with existing human
communications issues.  The reason is we actually have *multiple differently
constraining* self-schema in our brain.   We were discussing a few months
ago how we could possibly use RDDL to make explicit the various constaints
amongst and between the different schemas of what describes us.

In other words...

XML Schema module = a mental self-schemas

RDDL Schema Algebra = interrelation between mental self-schemas

(as I conceptualize it)

It is easy to simply list out human characteristics.  It is more difficult,
but much more important to explicitly capture human contradiction. human
learning, human memory processes, and human schemas as they *actually* exist
in our minds.  We've discussed a lot of ways we could potentially do this in
our discussion thus far, using XML based technologies.  It is certainly very
much possible to do so.


Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga

----- Original Message -----
From: <Owen_Ambur@fws.gov>
To: <rkthunga@humanmarkup.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 11:52 AM
Subject: Self-Schemas


> Ranjeeth, I am nearing the finish of "The Seven Sins of Memory," by Daniel
> Schacter, and came across the following on page 168:
>
> "Psychologists refer to the compilations of past experiences ... as
> 'self-schemas'.  Built up over years and decades, self-schemas contain
> evaluative knowledge of our own characteristics... Emotionally healthy
> people tend to endorse more positive than negative words, whereas
depressed
> individuals endorse more negative than positive words.  Depression is
> associated with a highly negative self-schema ..."
>
> While depression does not necessarily equate to terrorism or other forms
of
> antisocial behavior, it is interesting that the term "schema" is already
in
> the psychologists' lexicon.  It will be good when the elements that are
> implicit in the conceptualization of self-schemas are made explicit in an
> XML schema.
>
> Ultimately, it will be good when our self-schemas are more transparent
> (explicit) and readily available for evaluation by those with whom we may
> wish to associate.
>
> I look forward to seeing the contributions that HumanML can make toward
> that end.
>
> Owen Ambur, Co-Chair
> XML Working Group
> http://xml.gov/
>
>