[humanmarkup] November Meeting Minutes

Here are the minutes for this month's meeting:

Here are the TC Minutes, which I will link to this post Sunday, September 22, 2002 on the TC website.

November 20, 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:

James Landrum
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
Rex Brooks
Rob Nixon
Monica Martin

Non-voting participants

Len Bullard
Sylvia Candelaria de Ram

Minutes taken by TC Secretary Rex Brooks

Meeting convened12:05 p.m. Eastern Time

This meeting was on our normally scheduled third Wednesday of the Month.

We did not have a quorum.

The posted agenda was:

1. Report(s) on progress of 30-day public comment period.

Rex Brooks reported that we had received a message from Ram Kumar, chair of the OASIS Customer Information Quality Technical Committee asking why we had apparently chosen to include the schemata from the HR-XML Consortium and XNSORG, over their specifications, and that it had been a case of Rex's error of uploading an older version of the schema. It was corrected, and Ram was satisfied because the specifications from the CIQ TC were specifically declared as opposed to being imported.

Rex also pointed out that the other imported namespaces for schemata related to inidividual identity in the elements of name and address were commented out for now because the urns for the respective specifications were not currently arranged in accordance with the manner recommended by the W3C XML Schema Specification.

There has not been further public comment yet, since the specification has only been in the public comment period for a short time.

2. Change short name of TC to huml to coincide with namespace and to shorten the parenthetical identifier in subject lines of emails from [humanmarkup] and [humanmarkup-comment] to [huml] and [huml-comment].

Because we did not have a quorum, this decision has been put to a vote on the TC mailing list.

3. Discussion of Sign, Symbol complexTypes.

Len and Sylvia were asked to briefly outline their positions with regard to these semiotic terms and how the primary base should accommodate them. Rex expressed his opinion that signal might be a better choice for the single base term if we were to choose from amongst sign, signal and symbol.

Len's position that sign is the most basic, and useful term to use was conditionally accepted subject to further discussion on the email lists in order to further clarify the issues.

The fundamental issue is that the body of thought on semiosis has two theoretical models, Peircian and Saussurian. Our primary base schema needs to provide for both without adopting one as a choice which could invalidate our work with respect to the other position. Using the sign concept without qualification allows either model to be elaborated from the base, which is in keeping with the guiding prinicples of simplicity and lack of specificity in our base terms.

There are other issues that develop out of this approach which need to be understood more fully before we make a final decision about whether or not to remove signal and symbol from the primary, and perhaps semiosis as a term also. We need to understand how these concepts can be and should be derived in the secondary base so that they also can serve all models which may be used.

Lastly, with regard to this topic, we noted that a very simple semiotic processor would be an important sample implementation.

8. Formally join the Joint Security Committee.

Monica Martin joined the telecon at this point and we switched to item 8 in order for her to fit this portion of the meeting into her schedule. She is a member of the Joint Security Committee and gave us a brief description of what it is and what it is planning to do, which is to maintain a liaison to other groups who are concerned with security issues, such as HumanMarkup, but not to attempt to drive the specification work. She described the schedule of meetings and made it clear that the person who chooses to handle this liaison work for us would not need to commit a large block of time for this.

Rex mentioned that he would make an extra effort to recruit one or another of our mailing list lurkers to step up and take on this commitment, especially if the individual's area of focus happens to coincide with our concerns in this important area.

Monica mentioned other new TCs which may be candidates for a connection with HumanMarkup including the PKI TC, (Public Key Infrastructure) and the Biometrics TC which is working on the XML Common Biometric Format based the Common Biometric Exchange File Format(NISTIR 6529) using ASN.1.

A last mention was made that this area is one which offers the best way to bring our work to the attention of more parties who might find it beneficial to participate in our work.

Monica was also notified that she is now a voting member of the TC, before she needed to return to her other work.

4. Where else can we announce our public review?

Ranjeeth reported that he had sent an announcement our specification to the Humanities in Computing Mailing List, which is moderated, and so has not yet been included.

A more general request was made for all participants to consider other venues and suggest them. In regard to this request, Len mentined that he had made an announcement to the Knowledge Management list, which is a closed list, and that Edwina Taborsky would be a good candidate to solicit in this regard.

5. Reports on progress, ideas, outreach for sample implementations, and, perhaps, a Reference Implementation. This is not standard OASIS Practice, but if we develop a Semiotic Processor, it could be a reference implementation and we might be able to get NIST to provide conformance testing for us since that do that for a number of technologies.

This was covered in passing in item 3.

Rex said that he will produce a very simple application that can produce the six fairly standard facial expressions/gestures corresponding to the six elementary emotions included in the Primary Base Schema.

Rob gave a brief overview of his work with James Landrum on the "Native Dancer" motion capture project which may evolve into a simple tokenization of kinetic body movements which have the potential to be included in another simple implementation providing a sample demonstration of the representation of kinetic behaviors.

6. Special acknowledgements in Specification for Len and Sylvia. (We are not the only TC that does this.)

There was no dissent on this.

7. Report (if possible) on the implications of new (recently released) working drafts for
(Nov.8) RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised) http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/
(Nov, 13) XPointer Framework http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-framework/

(There's always an exception, but this one led to the others in this group:
(July 10) XPointer xpointer() Scheme http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-xpointer/

(Nov, 13) XPointer element() Scheme http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-element/
(Nov, 13) XPointer xmlns() Scheme http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-xmlns/
(Nov. 15) XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics http://www.w3.org/TR/query-semantics/

(Nov. 14) Web Services Architecture http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-ws-arch-20021114/

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