[huml] LMNL toolkit for HumanML

[Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga <rkthunga@interposting.com>]

Hi Len, Gavin and HumanMarkup group:

I attended my first XML-SIG/NY chapter meeting earlier this week.  Gavin
Nicol was a speaker, and introduced LMNL (re: http://www.lmnl.org).  Of
course, Gavin told me that he and you Len go way back, and I remember Len at
one time you spoke highly of him in relation to your previous
collaborations.

Gavin introduced to us an alternate markup language specification called
LMNL (lmnl.org).  I found that it was that it was different from XML in that
it allowed flexibility in marking up text without trying to force a
'tree-hierarchy' structure.  This was done by allowing overlapping ranges,
and multiple layers, of markup (vs. the top-down, nested parent-child XML
syntax).

I don't know who of any of you remember the initial examples I had posted on
HumanML based on spaghetti XML hacks when I first announced the effort--they
are currently offline, but I'll get them back up as soon.

To recap, I attempted to tease apart different human information (what were
promises, threats, goals, emotionally laden words, etc) from a series of
communiques of US politicians.  I had of course envisioned using XML (i.e.
HumanML) to be able to tease apart these different layers implicit within
communication.  After hearing Gavin's presentation, however, I realized that
the difficulty I was having in getting myself to develop solid working
examples came from the limitations of XML being so hierarchical.  

I really think that by allowing for multiple overlapping layers and ranges,
we can seemlessly account for multiple interpretations and perspectives,
embedded within the document.  Gavin mentioned that he would be interested
in perhaps helping develop an LMNL toolkit for HumanML, and he could present
it to us in some form (Gavin:  I'll let you take it from here ;))  

I will have my use-case description and slides ready later today for the
CIDOC conference--trying to get these ready as quickly as I can (FYI: Sylvia
and James), which will describe more precisely how this could work.  Please
stay tuned.

-----
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga



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