[humanmarkup] This month's Meeting Minutes

Here are the TC Minutes, which I will link to this post Sunday, April 21, 2002 and some other updates to the TC website.

April 10, 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
Manos Batsis by Proxy
Joseph Norris
Sudhakar Gorti
Kurt Cagle

Non-members:
Len Bullard
Sylvia Candlearia de Ram

Minutes taken by TC Secretary Rex Brooks

Meeting convened12:10 p.m. Eastern Time

This meeting was held a week earlier than usual due to the overlap of the face to face meetings of the OASIS Web Services for Interactive Applications, to which Rex was committed, with our normally scheduled third Wednesday of the Month TC meetings. Also Ranjeeth had invitations to meetings of the Universal Accessibility Workshops of the GSA and the XML.GOV during that week, so it was decided to move our meeting up by a week to accommodate this situation. It was later decided that we would return to our normal schedule after this exception rather and making the second Wednesday of the month our new schedule.

This meeting took up the tasks that follow adoption of our first formal Working Draft of the key document, HM.Requirements.

Our first item of discussion was to clarify that the HM.requirements document is now in a six month period commonly used by standards bodies to allow time for as many public discussions as are needed to fully explore the issues contained in the requirements document. This period is formally called the "Request For Comments" period. It will occur in parallel with the effort to produce the first specification of the Human Markup Language.

In a recorded conversation earlier in the day, Manos Batsis updated Rex Brooks on the progress of the RDF Activity of the W3C and informed us of the first meeting of the International Semantic Web Conference June 9-11 at the Grand Hotel in Baia Caia in Sardinia, Italy.

We next discussed the next steps in the process of writing the first draft of the Base Primary Human Markup Language XML Schema. This effort is being headed by Len Bullard in his role of Invited Expert, and we decided to follow the procedure Len suggested.

The process we will use in writing this specification is that of starting with the basis of the HumanML Schema known as the Toolkit which Len produced during Phase 0.

Then we will proceed by using the public comments mailing list to discuss scenarios suggested by members for various secondary schemata such as those of the subcommittees, and specific applications anticipated in these enabling secondary schemata. What this means is that we will start from asking the question, based on these suggested scenarios, "Do the secondary schemata have what they need? Then, if not, we will discuss what is needed."

We spent a bit of time discussing this process by using the Diplomatic Communications scenario(s) being used by Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga, for which he noted that such communications constructs can less complicated or more complicated in relation to one of the main terminology issues in this scenario, that of "Threat."

Len pointed out that the Element "Threat" in the secondary schema can inherit attributes from the top level, Base Primary schema, but this inheritance is not necessary if the secondary schema wishes to use a more limited or expanded set of attributes. However, if that is the case, the secondary schema will have to specify what it's "Threat" element specifically signifies so as to distinguish it from a top level "Threat," if there is one, and it will also need a prefix referring to the secondary schema's namespace, or it will need to specify what the secondary schema needs in the top level "Threat" element.

Rex expressed the thought that we may need to make explicit how inheritance operates in the standalone version of the secondary schema if the secondary picks and chooses attributes to inherit.

Kurt expressed the thought that we may need to specify tests for ranking levels of a "Threat" element to validate a specific usage of the "Threat" element. This is thought to allow for a "diagnosis" of the "Threat."

This discussion developed the basic methodology we will use in proceeding along this line.

Rex suggested that we should bring specific scenarios back to the next meeting, but Len challenged this motion on the basis that using email was better, more interactive, and allowed for a more complete public discussion. The motion was withdrawn in favor of using the email list for testing the toolkit actively.

In new business, we decided to retire the HumanML_Write/Report subcommittee because Joe felt that his skill set was not sufficient to the task. It should be mentioned that this does not mean that the effort, which still holds promise, is in any sense precluded from being reintroduced.

Discussion using the Diplomatic Communications as a basis led us to a debate about the feasibility and desireability of forming a Diplomatic Communications subcommittee chaired by Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga. Ranjeet did not favor this, but was willing to proceed on the basis that having such a subcommittee officially would bring our effort more credibility when we point out the applicabiity of HumanML and form the basis for attracting more participation from groups concerned in this area. The motion to form the subcommittee passed.

A subsequent discussion ensued at the suggestion of Sylvia Candelaria deRam that we consider the need for a filter/process language or for us to include such in HumanMarkup. This was discussed at some length with the result that we decided to take up this discussion of this in email. We specifically want to understand and provide for a filtering mechansim to identify core cultural data models. The need is apparent for inclusion of a top level of elements in the Base Primary schema that represent cultural characteristics.

It was in this discussion that we decided to make a policy statement which will be reflected in the TC website that we want to conduct as much of our work as possible on the public comments mailing lists.

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