Slight Revision to HM.HPCDML Mission and Charter

Mission Statement, Values Statement and Objectives Statement

February 28, 2003

Mission Statement:

Develop, design and provide specifications for Human Physical Characteristics Description Markup Language.

HPCDML will be designed to provide standardized description of physical characteristics of humans, with specific responsibility to harmonize and interoperate with widely accepted Public- Health, Medical, Biometric, Human-Modeling and Public Safety standards.

HPCDML is a superset of HumanML and through markup language concepts will provide a communication medium for end users and software community to exchange information of greater depth and complexity than verbally-based symbolic language in isolation from non-verbal contextual information. This extended communication requires an accurate depiction of human physical behaviors.

The primary objective is to provide a common medium specification for software to communicate physical characteristics. The goal here is enhance, unify, and provide a uniform common language for exchange of physical characteristics of humans, both external and internal, which help us identify individuals and interpret their physical communications uniquely. HPCDML will be specifically designed to be interoperable with and as nearly as possible identical to existing, recognized standards for the description, identification and empirical documentation of the human body.

Scope: HPCDML shares the uniquely identified goals of HumanML and as a superset of HumanML, these goals are almost identical with exception of the fact that HPCDML has as its primary focus Physical Human Characteristics both external and internal, most especially those often missed or overlooked by the existing, recognized standard information systems, with which harmony and interoperability is required, for the description of human physical characteristics adopted by:

> world wide web identity authentication and security domains;

> general and specialized medical domains;

> public safety and emergency management domains;

> governmental and legal domains; and

> law enforcement domains.

The scope of HPCDML will include:

> resource references for the ontology and taxonomy of human, ancestral human, (e.g. Homo erectus) and hominid, (e.g. Australopithecines) physical characteristics;

> relevant, open, public specifications cited above, and possibly the standardization of Application Programming Interfaces to implement them.

Values Statement:

To implement this mission, the HPCDML Subcommittee will pursue the accuracy, preservation and privacy of individual human information in a time-defined fashion. This means that providing for the delivery and use of an individual's most current and immediately applicable information will be the guiding principle for any collection, recording, and providing of such information. This will require complete respect for the wishes of the individual for control of and responsibility for the release of such information from any repository using the HPCDML specifications.

Further, the values of improving human communication and the timely delivery of such information with particular emphasis upon securing and improving human health and welfare at all appropriate levels guide this mission and will be respected.

Objectives Statement:

We will endeavor to deliver a Requirements Document for this subcommittee by July 31, 2003.

huml message