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Subject: [humanmarkup] August Meeting Minutes


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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