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Subject: [humanmarkup] August Meeting Minutes
- From: Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>
- To: humanmarkup-comment%lists@oasis-open.org, humanmarkup@lists.oasis-open.org
- Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 08:12:06 -0700
Title: August Meeting Minutes
Oops!
Wrong date on previous post. Sorry
Following is the minutes for our monthly meeting this past
week.
Here are the TC Minutes, which I will link
to this post Sunday, August 25, 2002 on the TC website.
August 21, 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
Invited Experts:
Sylvia Candelaria deRam
Len Bullard
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 another bare quorum.
Again, much of the meeting was absorbed with exploring the concept of
a semiotic engine which is becoming somewhat more clear as we explore
it.
However, our first agenda item was Ranjeeth's question of how we are
going to proceed with the examination of the Primary Base Schema
elements and then extract those definitions from the email threads
under which we have been discussing them.
Rex explained that the methodology is to work through the list
alphabetically as previously arranged, keeping a list of new elements
to consider once we have proceeded through the list. At that time we
will go through those new elements to see if we think they should be
included in the first draft of the Primary Base Schema, and what their
definitions should be. Then we will go through the list a final time,
voting on the codification for each element in turn, certifying it and
then submitting to OASIS-wide inspection and vote for the first
specification of the Human Markup Language.
That explanation seemed to suffice in capturing the process as it is
being practiced.
Then, due to schedule constraints, Len asked to have the semiotic
experiment report and discussin moved up to immediate consideration,
which we did.
Len explained that he has been working with Sylvia off line,
cherry-picking the industry for necessary or important concepts,
definitions, and terminology to add or to be used as instances with
which we need to be consonant, consistent and/or compatible.
Specifically, Len said that he was using the Gudwin model of
perception, intelligence and knowledge which is based on Piercian
Semiotics. The url for the definition explication of this model is:
http://www.dca.fee.unicamp.br/~gudwin/compsemio/
One of the aspects of this exploration has been, in Len's observation,
is that it looks like this examination of the atomic units of
communication in semiotic terms appears to put our discussion of the
elements of the Base Schema into a fairly clear order as code sets of
sign systems.
Ranjeeth asked about a particular concern of his, as to where the
subset of HumanML on which he is working, Diplomatic Communications,
specifically the phenomenological decomposition of Speech Act Theory,
and by corollargy, Writing Acts, could be clarified with the semiotic
engine.
To this Len said that the parties to a Diplomatic Negotiation would be
representing their respective sign systems. In essence, what this
exchange revealed is that, in attempting to discern either party's
(semiote's) relative truthfulness with regard to their intention in
any negotiation would require that a processor using the semiotic
engine would have to compare the assertions of each party against the
stored/shared sign system. This writer is not entirely sure this is a
correct rendering of this exchange, but my best recollection is that
intention itself can only be taken at the face value of a party's
(semiote's) expression, emitting, of signs compared against the sign
system employed.
This is at best an approximation of what was said based on my
notes.
Rob then asked a specific question, related to the
intention/truthfulness discussion about the particular language usage
involved with culture-specific slang in which, for instance, an
individual (semiote) could say "X (object/person) is bad"
meaning that x is actually very good (approval) at one moment and then
the same individual could say that "Y is bad" meaning that y
is actually bad (disapproval). How, then does the semiotic processor
determine the relative truthfulness of any use of the word bad by this
individual semiote?
Len's answer was that the sign system itself, the culture or cultural
subgroup to which the individual belongs, with some other
indicators/context would be the rule, saying that such determinations
would have to be defined by the rules pertaining to a sign system.
This led to a brief discussion of the fact that signals for signs can
be emitted both consciously and unconsciously. Sylvia asked if anyone
had done or heard of any work using chromographic representations
(color fields) of emotional states.
To this Rob said he had and would discuss it offline, and Rex said
that Ranjeeth had received an exchange of emails with a woman last
year who represented a small company that produced such chromographs
based on emotional states revealed by questionnaires, but Ranjeeth did
not recall the exact person.
However, regardless, it is quite natural that such a chromographic
representation aligned with the fairly well-understood associations of
colors to emotional states is both possible and could be included in
our work at some point as a way to indicate more context in
communications.
At this point Len needed to leave, and we proceeded on to Rob's report
on the current state of the VR-AI effort, which seemed like a logical
seque based on the fact that we had just discussed Diplomatic
Communications in context of the semiotic engine report. Rob said that
his work was at about the same point as it had been last month, in the
sense that he was still working away on the task of developing a
tokenized and iconizable set of emotional states represented in
physical postures and bodily gestures. He was aked to get in touch
with the field in preparation for introducing the concept of the
semiotic processor, which experiments have shown, will be codable
sooner rather than later, perhaps even ahead of the Primary Base
Schema, having fewer terms and functions.
Rex related that he would be preparing a sample implementation of the
Human Physical Characteristics Description Markup Language using
generic male and female human models for our work once the Primary
Base Schema in its first draft has been completed. Sudhakar was not
present, and Rex also indicated that he would have the time to work on
the HPCDML at that time.
That mostly finished the agenda we had set forth, so we opened the
floor to freeform discussion.
One item of interest was a question that Rob asked. How do we map
apparent non-sequiters, oxymorons and outright contradictions or
paradoxes such as the statement: "Nothing is Impossible?"
This statement simultaneously conveys two messages: that anything is
possible, which contradicts common sense; and that a total void, which
is actually quite nearly impossible to conceive since it would
disallow even the conception of itself occuring in any consciousness,
is actually, literally impossible, which is an oxymoron on its face
value because the concept of nothing is itself a concept in the mind
which therefore exists.
We decided we couldn't answer the question yet because our terminology
isn't sufficiently advanced and we haven't arrived at a point where we
can set rules for how HumanML or the semiotic engine should process
oxymorons, except Rex's suggestion that the processor should either
return a null set answer or throw an exception error.
And at that point, we adjourned.
--
Rex Brooks
Starbourne Communications Design
1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA 94702 *510-849-2309
http://www.starbourne.com * rexb@starbourne.com
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