[humanmarkup] Oct 16 Meeting Minutes.

Oct 16, 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:
Len Bullard
Kurt Cagle
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 had a quorum.

The first item on the agenda was a report on the current state of preparation of the first draft of the Primary Base Schema. Rex Brooks reported that we had, at that point, nearly finished the item-by-item review of the strawman schema from Phase O written by Len Bullard last year. This included the new elements and attributeGroup that we had developed over the course of these discussions since April when we began the process. This included a review of the relevant OASIS Policy cited here:
"
Section 2. Standards Process
   (a) Approval of a Committee Specification

       Upon completion of a specification the TC may approve the work as a Committee Specification. The approval of aCommittee Specification shall require at least 2/3 of the total membership of a TC voting to approve and no more than 1/4 voting to disapprove.

   The name of a Committee Specification may not include any trademarks or service marks not owned by OASIS.

       Before the TC can submit its Committee Specification to OASIS membership for review and approval as an OASIS Standard, the TC must conduct a public review of the work. The decision by the TC to submit the work for review requires a majority vote. The review should be publicized on applicable OASIS mail lists and other public mail lists. Review must take place for a minimum of 30 days, during which time no changes may be made to the document. Comments must be collected via the TC's public comment list. The TC must record the comments received as well as the resolution of those comments. The TC may conduct any number of additional review cycles (i.e. collecting comments, making edits to the specification, sending out a revised version for review again, etc.) before deciding that the review is complete. After the conclusion of the review and final changes to the document, the TC must re-approve the work as a Committee Specification before submitting it to OASIS.
"

Kurt Cagle made a motion, which passed without dissent, that the HumanMarkup Technical Committee conduct our vote on the first draft of the Primary Base Schema on the TC E-mail list and to complete the voting by Oct. 31, provided the first draft was completed with sufficient time for a review.

Rex Brooks, who is compiling and editing this draft said that it would take about a week, which would leave just enough time for a review and vote.

The second item on the agenda was a discussion of the need for the committee to provide a mechanism for amending the various specifications which we anticipate will be produced. Rex Brooks suggested that the appropriate vehicle for this mechanism was the Requirements Document which will need to be updated for ongoing concerns regardless.

It was decided to collect opinions and suggestions for this issue and revisit it at a later time.

The third item on the agenda was a clarification by Len Bullard of what he meant by a need for us to develop an "adjunct process" to accompany our specification work. Len said that what he meant was something along the lines of an outline or overview of how the specification would handle inputs and what kind of outputs it would provide. This was distinguished from the ongoing "semiotic processor" experiment which we also discussed a bit later.

The fourth item on the agenda was to have been a discussion of what Manos Batsis was doing for the proposed RDF Schemata Project to provide resources for various measurement standards to make use of these in applications of HumanML. However, because Rex Brooks was unable to have a chat with Manos on Yahoo IM as has previously been employed for such purposes, this item was deferred to a later time.

The fifth item on the agenda was a brief discussion of how the "Semiotic Processor" experiment was progressing. Len reported that he was still conducting further research, and Sylvia noted that she remained ready to proceed once it was a little more clear how such a processor would work with the elements from the Primary Base Schema.

It is expected that once the Primary Base Schema specification is defined and in the 30-day public comment period, the Semiotic Processor experiment would proceed. Rex Brooks expressed a hope that it could be one of the three separate implementations of any specification that is required by OASIS for final standard approval.

The sixth item on the agenda was a brief discussion of how the subcommittees might proceed, especially using the RDF Schema for including appropriate measurment systems, and with some development, through that process, for a method or methods for supplying reliable values for subjective measurements such as intensities of emotions. This was discussed in relation to the need for developing numerous code lists of element and attribute enumerations, extensions, restrictions, and application-area specific foundational vocabularies in the Secondary Base Schema which will follow our work on the Primary Base Schema.

This item also included some discussion of the need for implementations as well, and a suggestion was made by Rex Brooks that a planned motion-capture collaboration between James Landrum of North Dakota State University and Rob Nixon of Quantum Digital Arts to record Pow Wow dancing as part of a program to raise awareness of diabetes as a manageable health problem among Native Americans could be used as a sample implementation, although it was not discussed in any detail as to how that might be achieved.

The seventh and last item on the agenda was a discussion on the topic of the three separate implementations required by OASIS for adoption of a candidate specification as an approved standard. Rex Brooks asked that all committee members give this some thought and informed the group that he would be pursuing an X3D application to provide more human-like animated emoticons in a chat window that users could indicate emotional reactions and various kinds of facial gestures or expressions. Although that implementation along with the motion capture and Semiotic Processor would provide three implementations, it was made clear that there was no guarantee that these would reach fruition, so more candidate implementations are needed.

The process for conducting the review of the last few remaining items from the Primary Base Schema, and moving on to proofread and comment on the first draft of the specification was reviewed again, and then the meeting was adjourned.

humanmarkup message