Sept. 17, 200 TC Meeting Minutes

Here are the minutes for this month's meeting:

September 17, 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
Sylvia Candelaria deRam
James Landrum
Rob Nixon
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
Russell Ruggiero

Roger Alexander (Prospective) Will be a voting member by next month's meeting

Minutes taken by TC Secretary Rex Brooks

Meeting convened 12:05 p.m. Eastern Time.

Previous meeting minutes accepted.

This meeting was held on the normally scheduled third Wednesday of the Month.

We had a quorum, but there was no TC business to conduct.

As usual, some of these items were actually discussed in a somewhat different sequence from this summary.

Due to the simultaneous meetings of the WSRP TC's week-long face-to-face meeting/event, the secretary/co-chair was not prepared with a set agenda for this month's meeting, so we adopted a roundtable format of having those present report on their on-going HumanML-related activities with the specific topic of working toward initiating work in subcommittees as an overall theme.

Rob said that the work proceeds on preparing to get started with the Cognition in Environments Subcommittee with talks between he and Sylvia. They estimate that they will be ready to proceed by next month of shortly thereafter.

Sylvia noted that the Conflict Resolution Subcommittee name carries a negative connotation after having been changed from Diplomacy due to a request from the E-Government TC in which Ranjeeth participates as a liaison with us. It was also agreed that it would be wise to change it from his contacts in the State Department, but, as Sylvia mentioned, focusing on Conflict assumes a negative situation from its inception. This, she said, could be alleviated by a more positive name.

Rex advised that his suggestion of the Conflict Resolution name was based on existing names that are understood fairly well, and that this name puts the subcommittee work squarely in the field of mediation and that if we choose another name it should come from the legal arena which promises to be the most receptive to inclusion of HumanML in the near term as an aid and whose terminology is aimed at an existing problem of an overworked judicial system.

As the secretary recalls there was some discussion about a name which could create a connotation of "bridging cultural perspectives," creating cross-cultural dialogues, and James suggested modeling it after the IST (Information Society Technologies) and INRIA (THE FRENCH NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN COMPUTER SCIENCE AND CONTROL) which is something of a European equivalent of NSF that fosters communications on the web around 4-year Framework Programmes and favors solutions such as creating a large scale European Broadband Network and using UML as a primary programming vehicle. James suggested we might want to recruit from this organization to give our effort a more international basis.

Ranjeeth noted that, regardless of naming considerations, this subcommittee is still very important and that we need to find a good candidate to chair the subcommittee. It was left at that point, with the issue open and it is suggested that we seek a better name.

Sylvia went on the mention her work with Rob and Roger on how to communicate their proprietary work in ways that preserve their IPR while providing a more complete explanation of the base terminology that they will be contributing to a HumanML Secondary Base Language for the CogEnv application area. She mentioned something about doing this via interlinking documents that can span domains, and it is hoped that she will write something to elucidate this further to make up for the secretary's somewhat compromised note-taking skills during this meeting--being overextended while enduring a common cold in somewhat uncommon conditions.

Sylvia also mentioned some related developments which she has turned up that deal with cultural heritage and in particular a Python Project called Gamera, Gamera: A Python-based Toolkit for Structured Document Recognition that can be found here:

http://dkc.mse.jhu.edu/gamera/
http://dkc.mse.jhu.edu/levy2/papers/python-2002-gamera/python-2002-paper/gamera.html

This work is capable of converting music recognition to object definitions.

James said that his work is somewhat in limbo pending funding outcomes, and said that he and his team is reviewing, reworking and will be resubmitting the Native Dancer Project based on feedback from NIH. He said that they have recruited and Endroinologist and a Psychologist, Kevin McCall for the Project. Their resubmission will be made Nov. 1, 20023. James also recounted that they have suubmitted an application for an internal grant to North Dakota State university for Motion Capture Facilities to be housed at the Archeology Technologies Laboratory which should be decided by Nov. 1, 2003. We all wis him and his team best of luck.

James went on to detail his current travel plans in relation to his particpation in the CIDOC CRM work, saying that he will be in Swinden Oct 6-9, which means that he will be out of the country from Oct 2 to 12-15, but that he expected to return in time for our next TC meeting.

Roger related that he has been doing quite a bit of traveling recently and that he was recommending that we look into Scholonto (a combination of Scholar and Ontology) which is part of "Knownspace" a free datamanagement AI tool that appears to be in line with Gamera and Protege:

http://www.knownspace.org (IE Explorer recommended since Netscape only displays the doctype html)

In case you are unfamiliar with Protege:

http://protege.stanford.edu/

Russell reported that the article he co-authored with Rex, "Are We Ready for the Next Web?" which explains the relationship of HumanML to the development of Web Services in the context of near term future web developments has been accepted for publication by Thomson Media in October. He reported that he will also be attending a meeting of the federal xml authoring working group Sept. 24 where he palns to meet Owen Ambur and get a feel for how we can introduce our work to OMB as well as GSA and the Veterans Administration.

Russell also mentioned a new recruit, Tony Pisi, a former CIO of Merrill Lynch who will be working with us fairly soon and should help us get more positive feedback in the press.

Russell is enthusiastic about our ability to begin getting more traction in the corporate world for our work.

Rex reported that our Demonstration Project featuring the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for Emergency Management in collaboration with Oracle is still going forward though we are not going to participate in the Sept 25-26 Demonstration at the Global Homeland Security Conference. This project is a proof of concept, WSRP/JSR168-conformant/compliant, Web Services-based, New York Academy of Medicine Public Healthcare Preparedness Portal that will be enhanced by HumanML. It will be using the Resources Guide Ranjeeth has built for NYAM hosted by the Oracle PortalStandards Project. Also, our Collaborative Operations Group (COG) remains registered with the Disaster Managment Interoperability-Services Group of FEMA/USMC.

Just before we adjourned Sylvia added a recommendation of some powerful XML processing tools under development in Python under the project name of XMLFilter. Details would be welcome.

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