[huml] February Minutes

Here are the minutes for this month's meeting:

Here are the TC Minutes, which I will link to this post Wednesday, February 26, 2003 on the TC website.

February 19, 2003

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:

Rex Brooks
Len Bullard
James Landrum
Sylvia Candelaria deRam
Rob Nixon
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga

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 had 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 presentation materials being developed for the the International CIDOC Symposium, March 26, 27, 2003 in Washington, D.C.

James sent an outline to the TC list which indicated the materials on hand and expected, to fulfill the theme of the Symposium, "Sharing the Knowledge," in a way that introduces the Human Markup Language effort, shows its purposes and represents the scope of the endeavor. In addition, he asked for short biographical sketches of the TC members because the TC and its membership will be cited as authors in the scholarly paper which will accompany the slide and animation presentation, which is being given an overall rough time slot of 30 minutes of which ten will be presented by James and ten will be presented by Sylvia with ten reserved for questions.

Of these materials, animations have been provided by Rob for full body animation based on motion capture and extrapolation and Rex for facial animation. Rex has supplied four jpeg images illustrating a hypothetical Social Services Agency Use Case for Child Protective Services. Rob has provided a similar series of images of HumanML-enabled reports relating to personal information in use.

Sylvia is working on the abstract for the presentation paper titled "Human Markup Language (huml): Humanness Content and Sharing across Perspective Shifts." She is including comparison of the CIDOC CRM which has been rendered as an XML Schema and HumanML Primary Base Schema, much of Emmaneul (Manos) Batsis work on HumanML in RDF, a brief historical account of the HumanMarkup effort, its scope and aims all of which will be accompanied by slides. This will be supplied shortly.

Len Bullard was asked to supply the biographical sketch, and it was acknowledged that he and Sylvia have been designated official "Invited Experts" and given one-year OASIS membership status by the OASIS CEO.

Ranjeeth has supplied a sample html form which will become an application, largely for his work as chair of the Conflict Resolution Subcommittee, for showing how information can be supplied, and then interpreted using HumanML. This will provide the textual accompaniment for Rob's images.

There was a discussion of how this can operate as both a sample implementation of the Primary Base Schema and a tool for gathering information about what is needed in this area, and other areas appropriate to this tool and a revived HumanMLWrite/Report App for the purpose of starting work on the Secondary Base Schema.

As it turned out, Sylvia has parsed Ranjeeth's sample text formally to illustrate how an interpretation could be made from such samples, and this might find its way into the CIDOC presentation. Ranjeeth also said that he might use it in his attendance the next day at a State Department presentation and panel discussion in Washington, D.C. the following day.

Len asked if anyone had thought to turn this kind of process for gathering information around, reversing it so as to teach the characteristics of cultures, as opposed to identifying cultural/social implications from text using HumanML. During this digression, Rex said that he would send Len some material he was gathering as part of his participation in the recently formed Emergency Management TC--which Rex said will have significance for HumanML, as well.

The remaining work to be done on CIDOC material was briefly discussed.

The second item on the agenda was the need for Revised, harmonized Mission Statements for the three Subcommittees we will now be pursung more actively. Rex had posted such a revised Mission for the Human Physical Characteristics Description Markup Language Subcommittee and James noted that it was not accurate to describe it as a subset of HumanML, and Rex agreed. It will be changed to read superset since that is what these extensions will actually be, since they will include the HumanML Primary Base Schema Specfication. Both Rob for VR-AI and Ranjeeth for the renamed Conflict Resolution Subcommittees said their Mission Statements would be forthcoming. The basic three part format was agreed, with a Mission Statement which includes at least a paragraph on Scope, a Values Statement for such overall concepts as respect for individual rights to control of their own vital information, and accuracy as guiding principles, and an Objectives Statement with target milestone dates for specific deliverables.

The third item on the agenda was the ongoing work of the subcommittees and the progress toward Requirements revision. Rex said that he had come to the conclusion that attempting to set a method for revising the Primary Base Spec and the Secondary Base spec should not be attempted now, but that working on the Secondary and the subcommittee specialties would provide the information we need to fashion such a method.

Rob said he would look into the Artificial Intelligence Markup Languauge as part of his subcommittee work in response to a suggestion from Len.

Ranjeeth said he would make a report which will also include description of the E-gov TC work in which he is participating, on the Department of State Open Forum Discussion on "e-Diplomacy: Using Technology to Advance the Management and the Conduct of Foreign Relations" being held Thursday, February 20, 2003.

James described, in context of Rob's work with his group at North Dakota State University on the Native Dancer project, how there is a need, which may relate to a number of areas, for a way to develop data from and for qualitative assessments of project effectiveness in the area of behavioral change or modification. In particular, this discussion was concerned with HumanML's ability, which Rex cited in the Social Services Use Case for the CIDOC presentation, to derive data from collections of text documents. The issue is how to develop qualitative data as well as quantitative data. Statistical Analysis Systems and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences were cited as resources that need to be studied and improved upon.

Sylvia and James along with Len were concerned that simply providing a means or methodology for generating numerical data from text collections were inadequate for taking "cultural bias" into account, nor for accommodating decisions and outcomes based on subjective judgments. So it becomes apparent that we need to consider how to build a sound, scientific basis for making qualitative assessments.

Ranjeeth explained that the information he had from the Fund for the City of New York for the possibility of developing a project to produce a cognitive-assist for signing among non- or poor-English-speaking parents would be updated March 17. He also stated that his sources needed help in understanding XML and HumanML in relation to it and how that could aid in their work in this area.

James reported that the Native Dancer project was in hiatus until hearing from NIH, but that he was working with Rob on what they have recorded to date.

In relation to that tokenization and reproduction of systematized human movement systems, suck as Native American Dance, Sylvia noted that there was another fully systematized and well-studied system in Indian culture, called "Mudra" "Bjharatyanatyam." Rob said he would research it.

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