[huml] This month's meething

December 18, 2002

Teleconference meeting of the OASIS HumanMarkup Technical Committee.

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Roll Call:
Voting Members:

James Landrum
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
Rex Brooks
Rob Nixon

Non-voting participants

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 first item of business was a review of the 30-day Public Comment Period for the Committee Specification The Human Markup Language Primary Base XML Schema Specification and the one change which was decided by vote of the TC during this process.

We decided to delete the attribute race from the attributeGroup physicalDescriptors. We did not have a motion to specifically change the other components which have been questioned in relation to the Semiosis Section of Specification, Semiosis, Signal and Symbol.

There was no dissent from the proposal put forward by Rex Brooks to simply make the change voted and set further work on the Primary Base Schema aside until after several other concerns have been decided. Specifically, these issues are:

* the modification of the Requirements Document to include a process or method by which new components may be added to the Primary Base Schema or existing components may be deleted;

* the inclusion or deletion of Semiosis, Signal and Symbol in the Semiosis Section;

* the inclusion of any new components which work on the Secondary Base Schema through the process of developing the three independent implementations of the PBS that are required for submission to OASIS for approval as a standard.

We discussed at some length the possible replacement of race as a component apart from physicalDescriptors, as a social construct which reflects current usages and leaves open a better, more accurate descriptions of this common human grouping and its use as an important component of identity. Many of the shortcomings of the term race were mentioned, including the difficulty arising from individuals with mixed "racial" heritages.

From this discussion, James Landrum's proposal of Ethnicity appeared to have the most applicability. James mentioned the Arch-L mailing list as a resource for exploring the concepts behind replacing race with ethnicity within the academic archeology community.

Sylvia made the point that this area is fraught with multiple, overlapping cultural contexts which directly affect comunications.

Ranjeeth suggested that American Culture is often best viewed, if possible, from the internal viewpoint of the individual outward for purposes of comparing the experience of racial/ethnic identities.

Rob noted that the relative influence of ethnicity within a VR-AI context could be viewed as overlapping waveforms in terms of analyzing communication interactions. It is noted that the work of Rob and Sylvia and James all lend quantifying, chartable or graphable, aspects to an accounting of or for ethnicity which deserves to be pursued further.

We decided to put this issue on the agenda for January.

The second item on the agenda was to decide on Tentative Milestone dates for ongoing work.

We have targeted the date for sample implementations for March 31, 2003, which parallels the date for work to be completed for the papers James and Sylvia may be making to the CIDOC Conference March 26-27, 2003.

We have targeted the date for completing work on the revision of the Requirements Document for Feb. 28, 2003.

We have targeted the date for completing work on the PBS and to submit it to OASIS for April 31, 2003.

We had a discussion about the fact that the papers have not yet been accepted or declined for presentation, and James asked if the chat application implementation would be done in Java, which could leverage or work with the the Digital Archive Network for Anthropology. Rex replied that he was planning on implementing the X3D (VRML97-compliant)/HumanML-enhanced chat in both Java and Python, due to the fact that the webhost for the sample implementation uses Python as the webserver scripting language. Rex also said that he would be using an open-source Java chat application as a model, which facilitates the process considerably, since Java is the preferred language for the X3D Scena-Authoring-Interface. An effort will be made for thisto work with DANA. DANA, is a Java3D application, which will require a bit more work for the purpose of interoperability, but it remains doable.

Rob said that he and James are proceeding with the sample implementation which makes use of the motion-capture work done for the "Native Dancer" Diabetes-Awareness Project at North Dakota State University which James is conducting.

One of the advantages of this approach is that it will make numerous multimedia and image server databases available for numerous kinds of interactivity.

The third item on the agenda was discussion, which will be continued in January, of developing or adopting a standard format for the Mission, Values and Goals Statements of the Subcommittees.

Rex mentioned that it seems likely that our subcommittees will want to keep in mind the longer term goal of creating APIs for these application areas.

We also briefly touched on the the fourth item on the agenda, which was to focus our outreach in a way that can attract individual new members capable of acting as liaisons with various other TCs, working groups and standards organizations. In this context, Ranjeeth gave us a brief description of the early work in organizing and establishing the new e-Gov TC to which he will be our liaison, as Rex is for Web Services.

One of the overarching themes of this effort was summarized from a description of the purpose for DANA, is that we are seeking to use HumanML-enhanced language translation in the broader scope of Human undertakings by focusing on cultural usages and cultural expressions. This is clearly within the scope of communications. This concept ties together the need, as exemplified in DANA, for having common resources, such as accurately scanned 3D models of artifacts which can then be examined by anyone who installs the DANA client, and as our chat application seeks to make standard representation of emotional facial expressions possible.

We then adjourned.

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