[humanmarkup] Website updated, Assorted Notes

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Hi Everyone,

This is my usual Secretarial/Webmaster note to let you know that the 
minutes have been posted and the website updated.

One of the things we discussed in our monthly meeting which I did not 
capture in my notes was the nature of our discussions being in and of 
itself a discussion about metaphors using metaphors to explain 
metaphors. By that we meant that HumanMarkup elements are themselves, 
as units of an XML Vocabulary, metaphorical abstractions as language 
terms referring to concepts which are in turn metaphors for what they 
represent, all of which are metaphors to make digital machine 
language understandable by us humans.

This note is as much for our listeners as it is for the people who 
attended the meeting and may notice that I missed this observation. 
It is very important for us to keep these distinctions in mind as we 
move forward in our goal of creating an XML Vocabulary with which 
applications can be made in pursuit of the charter we set out when 
this process was begun.

We all tend to start taking such understandings for granted, and what 
the introduction of a new member does, is to remind us of these very 
important concepts. And it keeps us on track toward the goal of 
improving the accuracy of human communications in human and machine 
readable language and programming constructs. So Philip, thanks for 
just being new. It is amazing to discover just how little of our own 
personal understanding is not resident in the minds of others. When 
working in these tightly focused groups we tend to lose track of that 
as we get caught up in the particulars of the work itself. This has 
been brought home to the WSIA and WSRP TCs recently when the chair 
attended a conference in France last week and found that he had to 
back up to square one in explaining what web services actually are as 
opposed to what the three or four individuals out of an audience of, 
I assume, high double digits if not hundreds, even knew of the 
popular misconceptions about web services (itself a misnomer) are.

Lastly, my apologies for not getting to the third element of the 
Phase 0 Base Schema yet. The fact is that I am not sure yet where I 
stand on the issue of whether the term itself, bodyLocation is better 
than bodySite, which is marginally more compatible with H-Anim, 
Humanoid Animation sub spec of VRML97/X3D. If I still haven't made up 
my mind by tomorrow morning, I will just include my indecision in my 
initial post for the thread. As it is, we still haven't heard from 
all who have said that they would post thoughts on artifact in 
particular and various related thoughts about HumanMarkup and this 
process in general.

Ciao,
Rex
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