[huml] This month's TC meeting minutes

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Please excuse me if you get this twice, or more but, still, for some 
reason, even when I fixed the typos in the address, it still did not 
appear to go through even right after I sent it yet again. I am 
endeavoring to get the webpage updated before I get swept up in a 
week of meetings.

Here are the minutes for this month's meeting:

Here are the TC Minutes for this month.

January 22, 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


Non-voting participants

Sylvia Candelaria de Ram

Minutes taken by TC Secretary Rex Brooks

Meeting convened12:05 p.m. Eastern Time

Previous meeting minutes accepted.

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

We did not have a quorum.

As usual, some of these items were actually discussed in a different 
sequence from the posted agenda, but it is handier to summarize these 
discussions by using the posted agenda.

Old Business:

The first item of business was a review of the Requirements Document 
revision, on which Rex is continuing to work.

He reported that he was undecided about recommending a specfic 
procedure that requires some amount of demonstrated work, such as a 
sample implementation or well-described use-case, in order to add an 
element. Requiring a sample implementation seems too rigorous, but 
the procedure needs to be made non-trivial.

However, until a recommendation on that is pulled together, Rex said 
he would initiate and manintain an Issues List such as we used to 
formalize discussions and decisions on the Primary Base Schema to 
focus on the revision of the Requirements Document as we proceed. In 
particular, such an Issues List addresses concerns for deleting 
elements as well as making editorial changes. Members are encouraged 
to submit issues once this has been set up. We established a new due 
date for the Revision of April 30, 2003.

The second item on the agenda was a brief discussion of a new, 
unified format for Mission Statements in Subcommittees.

It was generally accepted that, based on surveys of other 
subcommittees and standards groups, that these statements should 
include three components:

Mission Statement: concrete and fairly short summarizing the charter 
of the subcommittee.

Values Statement: summation of the intended values and benefits the 
subcommittee is promoting.

Goals and Objectives Statement: fairly specific enumeration of long 
term aims to be met by deliverables with milestone target dates for 
producing these deliverables,

The third item on the agenda was a discussion of the reports on work 
of the subcommittees.

Sylvia asked why the Human Physical Characteristics Description 
Markup Language needed to be so long and involved. It was explained 
as a way to distinguish the scope of the language from Biometrics and 
Medical vocabularies while maintaining its usability in both Identity 
Enhancement uses and in VR-AI uses.

Ranjeeth gave a brief chronicle of the discussions by Karl and the 
e-Gov TC which proceeded the decision to rename the Diplomatic 
Communications Subcommittee. It is now the Conflict Resolution 
Subcommittee, which is a somewhat broader scope, but which allows the 
vocabulary to be made available for Diplomatic uses without confusion 
about which TC "owns" the domain.

VR-AI is maintained as is.

The fourth item on the agenda was a discussion of reports on informal 
liaisons with other TCs.

Ranjeeth reported that e-Gov was focusing on services, best 
practicies and sublanguages subcommittee. Sylvia requested a 
clarification of the focus of this TC in terms of whether it was 
concentrating on interpersonal, intrapersonal, intergroup or 
intrapersonal aspects of communication. Ranjeeth said that all of 
them as well as combinatins were being included. It was noted that 
the Semiotic Processor could used to delineate these.

James noted that his expertise could be helpful in the area of 
language interpretation and translation with particular emphasis on 
cultural influences. Various examples of how cultures have different 
gestural lexicons for similar movements, such as nodding v. head 
shaking for indicating agreement or disagreement. Another case with 
great complexities is India, where written communications in 
government are in English, despite the fact that there are 14 
different official languages and 35 distinct regional languages in 
use. The point of these examples is that we need, where possible, to 
draw upon members of cultures to build descriptions of those cultures.

Rex reported that next week is the final face-to-face meetings that 
will culminate in the release of the Web Services for Remote Portlets 
specification v1.0. This effort will have taken a bit longer than a 
year, will have seen the appropriate WSIA-specific issues included in 
the limited, but very concrete scope of the specfication, which has 
both narrowed down its specificity to what amounts to a Protocol and 
API while greatly expanding the sheer bulk of the document and the 
detail with which it addresses the myriad processes and procedures 
that have been codified.

Over the course of this year, the actual name of what web services 
are for this specification has evolved to become Portlet, a specific 
collection of data and/or presentation information for that data. The 
point was made that this evolution exhibits how a process over time 
can go in unexpected directions.

Rex also reported that the Web 3D Consortium is entering the final 
phase of reviews before submitting the next version of the ISO 
standard previously named VRML, which is a componentized 
specification presented in XML format, and named X3D.

The fifth item on the agenda was a report on the preparations for 
presenting the brief description of HumanML in a paper at the CIDOC 
conference in March.

It was noted that the paper had been accepted for presentation. It 
was with relief that we learned that James Landrum will be able to 
make the presentation.

We noted that this paper is significant because it is the first 
actual scholarly paper presented on HumanML. Sylvia and James will do 
the majority of the work and represent us at the conference in 
Washington D.C.

Rex volunteered to help prepare the paper with a powerpoint slideshow 
to accompany the paper. This will make use of the material on the 
Humanmarkup.org, Inc. website, and some iconic diagrams of how 
HumanML can work.

The paper will be comprised of an introduction, a very brief history 
of the HumanMarkup project to date, and an explanation of the purpose 
and scope of HumanML.

We can also use the facial expression animation from Rex's website 
and the full body animation from Rob which depicts a figure slipping 
on a smooth surface and quickly recovering her balance. These two 
animations demonstrate the two aspects of physical expression HumanML 
will provide a standard language to interpret and produce in VR.

It was noted that Sylvia has a concurrent Python conference in D.C. 
and, depending on the scheduling will participate as she can.

The sixth item on the agenda was to have those involved report on the 
progress toward sample implementations.

James said that the Native Dancer Project was being broken down into 
modular sections, at which point it could be determined where HumanML 
PBS would fit. It was deemed most likely that HumanML PBS could be 
useful in the game in creating the gestural movements of dance and 
facial expressions where those gestures and expressions could be 
tokenized to represent specific emotions, associated messages and 
moods.

Rex reported that he has finished his initial learning phase with 
Python for creating the Chat Application in Java, C++ and Python, has 
established that the Java and C++ classes produced from the PBS by 
XMLSPY are quite useable, and that the actual work of organizing and 
coding will begin when the WSIA meetings next week are finished. He 
said that for the first versions, he would not use Java3D, but down 
the road would try to include the DANA interface and Java3D.

Sylvia has done some preliminary work on the Semiotic Processor, 
establishing that it will work, but has not had the time to work more 
on it due to extensive traveling over the Holidays. She configuring a 
Linux installation on her computer which will allow us to test on all 
major platforms and will renew her efforts soon. A rough version may 
be ready by CIDOC, but preparing for CIDOC and her own work with 
Python have priority.

New Business:

Rex has indicated that he will work on a brief history of the 
HumanMarkup Project.

Sylvia asked if we could enlist aid from Manos specifically in his 
material on how to translate HumanML PBS into RDF as well his 
experiences with Topic Maps TCs and UI TC. It will looked into.

For next month's agenda we will attempt to have Mission Statements 
for our Subcommittees.

We also have to report our membership to OASIS for inclusion in the 
updated structure being built by Kavi.com. Rex said he would work on 
that.

We finished at the top of the hour and adjourned.
-- 
Rex Brooks
Starbourne Communications Design
1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA 94702 *510-849-2309
http://www.starbourne.com * rexb@starbourne.com