April 23, 2003 HumanMarkup TC Minutes

Here are the minutes for this month's meeting:

Here are the TC Minutes, which I will link to this post Monday, March 31, 2003.

April 23, 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
James Landrum
Rob Nixon
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
Sylvia Candelaria deRam
Len Bullard
James Landrum

Minutes taken by TC Secretary Rex Brooks

Meeting convened12:05 p.m. Eastern Time

Previous meeting minutes accepted.

This meeting was held on the fourth 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 discussionsby agenda or topic.

Old Business:

Ranjeeth reviewed his contacts with the New York Academy of Medicince on behalf of the Fund for the City of New York. He, and therefore to some extent, we (the HumanMarkup TC) will be contributing to a Resource Guide database with the follow-up possibility for expanding into a full public heath portal.

That will include some liaison effort from Rex Brooks to coordinate the cross connections for Emergency management through his participation in that TC. Ranjeeth will be doing likewise to coordinate his work with the E-Gov TC. He reported that he would hear definitive word on whether this project would be moving forward in a way that can accommodate our limited input the following day, Thursday, or the day after that, Friday. (We have since heard that this was decided affirmatively.) He was in transit so he had to leave a bit early.

Rex asked when the E-Gov TC would meet again, and we learned that there is a face to face meeting scheduled for London in May.

Rob and James reported that their mutual projects are currently awaiting word on NSF Grant applications which will be decided in a July-August timeframe.

Rex reported that the OASIS policy for substantiating sample implementations consists of affirmative statements from three member companies that they have or are using a specification satisfactorily.

James and Sylvia reviewed the presentation to the CIDOC Symposium in Washington D.C. March 27, 2003. They reported that our presentation was well-received and that they are encouraged by the response. Sylvia reported that our definition for humanGroup was actually adopted as part of their CRM as a definition for Group, and that our Primary Base Schema fits well with the CRM to add emotional and cultural elements. Both of them joined the CRM SIG, and will continue to pursue this connection. It was also suggested that our supporting work outside OASIS should be aligned with and signed onto this SIG.

James mentioned three names for people with whom we might pursue further contact, Martin Doerr, Matthew Stiff and Tony Gill, and Sylvia concurred. James also said that this work has a fairly strong connection to an NSF grant proposal that the ATL (Archaeology Technologies Laboratory, NDSU), in collaboration with Donald Sanders, President, Institute for the Visualization of History (VIZIN), submitted for development of a Virtual Heritage Library (VHL), which addresses access to and preservation of 3D cultural heritage worlds (e.g., 3D archaeological sites, monuments, and objects). A second NSF grant proposal in preparation is for an International collaboration between ATL and Tanzanian colleagues at the Hubert Kairuki Memorial University (HKMU) and the Department of Antiquities, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. for the creation of a Biological Anthropology Collection (BAC) component for inclusion in the Digital Archive Network for Anthropology and World Heritage (DANA-WH). This new National Science Digital Library (NSDL) initiative will include textual, and multimedia content (2D graphics, 3D models, streaming media) of significance to the domain of biological anthropology and related fields (e.g., paleoanthropology, paleontology). The 3D models of fossil hominids and associated material culture remains (e.g., artifacts) will be generated through the use of portable, non-contact laser digitizers (which record surface features of objects) and Computed Tomography (CT) scanners ( which record both surface and interior matrix features of objects) for use in a variety of studies, including morphometric analyses. Both these projects will involve use and further development of HumanMarkup-enhanced annotations and metrics.

Sylvia and James are continuing work on finishing up the fully annotated combined paper and presentation which they will be submitting to CIDOC for inclusion in the archived Symposium materials.

Len suggested, in the context of further discussion that one of the issues we should be aware of in our outreach efforts is that customer requests for applications and features is currently the major if not only way corporate-funded research is likely to be approved. So, he said, one of our best possibilities is to work through such Academic Institutions as the MIT Media Lab in their efforts to find Research and Development funding for Post Graduate projects. The discussion led us to a conclusion that one line of approach would be to ask for Corporate Sponsors to fund a review of our work in human communication for the purpose of determining its efficacy in influencing behavior and avoiding miscommunications. Rex mentioned that we have a grad student inquiring about our work, so this is something that can be pursued in the near term.

It was also suggested that we look for groups that build codelists for standard applications in order to place our work in that context.

Rex reviewed his work in the Emergency Management TC and the Web Services TCs (WSIA, WSRP), in particular his work with the WSRP-Markup Subcommittee. His conclusions are that many related standards are converging, and the task of coordinating, harmonizing and ensuring interoperability is a major liaison task that he is pursuing, especially in the context of ensuring the applicability of the Human Physical Characteristic Description Markup Language Subcommittee (HPCDML SC). James said that he needed a bit more time to review the charter Rex previously submitted for the HPCDML SC, so it could not be voted upon during the meeting. It was decided we conduct a vote by ballot for the approval of the charter on the OASIS HumanMarkup TC webpage. That vote is scheduled to end on May 1, 2003.

Sylvia reviewed her work on a semiotic processor, saying that she is working with Manos on interval logic modelling of time--intervalic time as an environment variable and asked Rob to look at it. It was also noted that time concepts play a large role in the work of anthropology and archaeology and that this is an on-going interest for Rob and James. It appears that there is a fairly important connection between developing temporal metrics and connecting CRM, the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), with both AI and training/learning (education process) modeling efforts.

Rob explained that this specifically relates to his work on creating temporal reference "frames" in which body mechanics are performed, using this in his work on creating kinesic gestural "vocabularies" with motion capture information. James said that this dovetails with the ATL NSF grant proposals for the Virtual Heritage Library (VHL) and the Biological Anthropology Collection (BAC), as well as the Native Dancer project, in the sense of describing body mechanics, such as that exhibited in the "Native Dancer" project. James also mentioned Dr. Debra Lieberman, a Native Dancer project participant She is an educator who develops interactive health challenge games, and with whom the ATL is working on extending the Native Dancer project to address diabetes among Hispanic peoples. Dr. Lieberman is at The Research Center for Virtual Environments & Behavior at the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research, University of California, Santa Barbara.

The meeting concluded at 1:10 p.m.

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