Monthly TC Meeting Minutes for 10-15-03

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Hi Everyone,

Here are the minutes for this month's meeting:

October 15, 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
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
Russell Ruggiero
Joseph Norris
Len Bullard

Propsective Member:
Chandrashekar Tamirisa

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.

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

We began considering old business with subcommittee reports.

Rex reported that he had begun work on an outreach letter for HPCDML 
SC, but was holding off on completing it until James returns from 
England to provide feedback in suggestions, comments and critiques as 
well as additional contactees. He also said that he was ready to 
resubmit his Facial Musculoskeletal to the Humanoid Animation Group 
of the Web 3D Consortium. Len noted that it appeared to him, as a 
member of the Web 3D Consortium Board of Directors that interest in 
actively expanding the activities and promotion of support for 
VRML/X3D was increasing. Rex thought that this would be a good 
coincidence, and would bode well for both H-Anim and HumanML/HPCDML. 
Rex also mentioned that Sandy Ressler was working on a table for 
mapping equivalent terminology from CAESAR to H-Anim and is willing 
to work with the HPCDML SC on extending this table of equivalent 
terminology to include HPCDML, or for HPCDML to include the table as 
part of its work.

Rob Nixon was invited to attend and reported that he has had to allow 
his OASIS membership to lapse temporarily but was willing to work 
with Sylvia, who has stepped up to take on the role of leading the 
work to finish originating work on the Charter and Mission Statement 
for the prospective Cognition in Environments Subcommittee.

Sylvia reported that she had been reviewing email on the subcommittee 
topics, and had decided to use as a model the Conceptual Resource 
Model of the ICOM/CIDOC. She noted that she had joined the CIDOC CRM 
SIG during the presentation she and James made this March, and that 
she thought the broad overview technique with comprehensive attention 
to providing for the framework was a good place to start.

Because Chandra was not in attendance, we did not spend much time 
discussing the transition from Ranjeeth's vision of a Diplomacy SC 
that was required by both the State Department and the e-Gov TC, 
which he joined to remain in position for liaison work in the future, 
to be changed. Recalling that at the last TC meeting it was suggested 
that Conflict Resolution was too negative a name and that something 
along the lines of "Bridging Perspectives" had been suggested, there 
was some discussion along these lines. Rex voiced the opinion that 
whatever name is chosen needs to have immediate and unmistakable 
recognition, based on a body of existing work, to avoid confusion. 
This actually resulted in a brief moment of confusion as to which 
subcommittee he was referring with his comment due to his 
transposition of Cognition for Diplomacy while speaking. The 
confusion was cleared up by correcting the error, and we noted that 
this issue was still moot with the new chair volunteer present to 
join the discussion.

We then moved on the listen to Russell report on the conferences and 
meetings he attended in Washington, D.C. Monday and Tuesday, 
September 29, 30, 2003.

Monday, he attended the XML Authoring and Editing Conference by 
invitation of  Owen Ambur co-chair of the federal XML.GOV Working 
Group Monday morning and reported that his brief report on the 
HumanML effort was well received. He was able to renew the HumanML 
effort's close connection to Mr. Ambur. He was subsequent invited to 
following conference's including the XML.GOV meeting the morning of 
our TC Meeting, Oct. 15, 2003. We have also been invited to 
participate in several other ongoing, related governmental, xml-based 
interoperability programs and projects.

After the Authoring Conference, Russell went to an appointment with 
Ms. Illa Brown, former Chief of Communications for the Department of 
Homeland Security, (DHS), now with Oracle Corporation where she has 
served as head of the effort to work with the DHS where he discussed 
our collaboration/liaison with Humanmarkup.org, Inc.'s New York 
Academy of Medicine Portal Project, and other areas of possible 
overlap.We adjourned at about 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. He reported 
that his appointment went well.

Tuesday, he attended the EA Collaboration Workshop Sponsored by the 
Emerging Technology Subcommittee, Architecture and Infrastructure 
Committee and the National Coordination Office for Information 
Technology Research & Development by invitation from

Susan B. Turnbull, Senior Program Advisor, GSA
Office of Intergovernmental Solutions, Office of Citizen Services and
Communications
Emerging Technology Subcommittee, Architecture and Infrastructure
Committee, CIOC
202-501-6214
susan.turnbull@gsa.gov

                        Agenda  - September 30, 2003
                    Collaboration Expedition Workshop #28
        National Science Foundation Board Room, 12TH floor, Room 1235


Purpose: To explore the Potential and Realities of Intergovernmental
Communities of Practice as Innovation Catalysts in an "Intangibles" Economy
The President's Management Agenda requires all federal agencies to
transform the roles and relationships among people, processes, and
technology in order to become a citizen-centered government. The Federal
Enterprise Architecture provides a blueprint for organizing lines of
business around shared mission purpose.

It was at this workshop that Russell met Mr. Chandrashekar Tamirisa, 
Division of Research and Statistics
Board of Governors, Federal Reserve Board, who has joined our TC and 
volunteered to take the chair of the former Diplomacy/Conflict 
Resolution/Perspective Bridging SC, and has a project for 
consideration which has the working title, "Global Development 
Perspectives." The secretary chose to include this statement here in 
order to show how it fits into the framework of governmental contacts 
and activities with which we have become associated, and with which 
we hope to continue to work on positive projects to move forward 
toward mutual goals and objectives.

In conjunction with this workshop, Russell attended the meeting of 
the XML Web Services Working Group headed by Brand Niemann, which is 
another effort by the Federal Government for which it is perhaps a 
good idea to examine the organizational working charter of this 
COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE:

http://www.web-services.gov/#link4

The URL above contains the complete information including reference 
links for the excerpt which follows for the purpose of including an 
understanding of this important practical organizational concept 
which is being used currently with the federal government, and with 
which we are now aligned in many ways, due to the co-membership of 
Ranjeeth in e-Gov TC and Rex in Emergency Management TC.

"Government Semantic XML Web Services Community of Practice (SWS-CoP)

in cooperation with the Government XML Working Group, the Universal 
Access Collaboration Workshops, Emerging Components, Government 
Enterprise Architecture Framework (GEAF) Components Registry and 
Repository, and other Communities of Practice (CoP).

Web Server (courtesy of USGS Geology Division CIO's Office): 
http://web-services.gov, GSA ListServ (courtesy of GSA CIO's Office): 
http://listserv.gsa.gov/archives/cioc-web-services.html, and 
Collaboration Place (courtesy of GSA's CIO's Office of 
Government-wide Policy): http://ioa-qpnet-co.gsa.gov/WebServices

...

The purpose of this CoP is to support the Emerging Technology 
Subcommittee of the CIOC/AIC in its work with the other two 
subcommittees (Enterprise Architecture Governance and Components) and 
the e-Gov Initiatives in their use of Semantic XML Web Services to 
demonstrate increased accessibility and interoperability ..."

Russell mentioned that he perceived Brand Niemann of the xml 
web-services wg along with the Owen Ambur of the xml.gov wg as being 
more focused on tangible demonstrations such as web sites and 
documents of record than with verbal descriptions, hence it is 
advisable, he thinks for us to provide such materials in our future 
efforts to maintain and build upon our contacts with these 
individuals and their respective working groups.

Russell also discussed at some length the xml.gov meeting he had 
attended via Web Ex teleconference the morning of our meeting, where, 
in the context of Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 
(GPRA) discussions the following presentations of XML Authoring Tools 
were given

9:10	Basic XSD for GPRA Strategic Plans, using DOE's as an Example 
for Conversion to XML
		Bert Sheingate, HyperVision (via WebEx)
		Assisted by Jon Barrett, Hummingbird, a HyperVision partner

9:50	XMetaL Customization for Creating/Editing/Viewing ET Stage 1 
Instance Documents
		Jay Di Silvestri, Corel (via WebEx)

Russel said that these showed the relationships between documents and 
the schemata to which they belonged, or from which they were produced 
and also mentioned that it was reported that Windows 2003 products 
like Word will now be using XML as native, rather than as referenced 
instructions/rules. This demonstrates the commitment of the major 
business computing platform to a thorough-going implementation of XML.

Russell closed his report by saying that we have been invited to 
attend the first
Quarterly Emerging Components Conference:
Fostering a Component Technology Maketplace for eGovernment with SBIR/STR,
at the White House Conference Center,
October 20th (see attached for  details, register at 
http://www.componenttechnology.org/Emerging/OtherParty/, and see
http://web-services.gov,
Announcements, September 16th, and Past Meetings and Presentations, 
September 30th).

And, we also have been invited, as we are every month, to the next EA 
Collaboration Workshop Oct. 28, 2003.

Russell also mentioned that he has been in touch with Thomson Media 
and that they have indicated that they will be publishing the 
article, "Are We Ready for the Next Web," by he and Rex soon, and 
that he has contacted another writer who may be interested in 
learning more about us. As this writer is an Anthropologist as well 
as the author of an article titled, "Culture Clashes" in CIO 
Magazine, such a person stands to be a great addition to our team if 
she is sufficiently intrigued by our work.

Len mentioned an article he had posted to our list, and drew our 
attention to the author, Richard Cooper, as someone with an abiding 
interest in Ontologies and said that he would be referring Mr. Cooper 
to Rex in connection with our work both in Ontologies/Taxonomies and 
in Semiosis via Sowa's work in ontologies.

These latter discussions occurred in the context of our ongoing 
outreach efforts, which are showing some results now, though several 
comments from this later discussion have been inserted out of 
sequence for their pertinance to other discussions.

We adjourned at 12:55 p.m. Eastern Time.


-- 
Rex Brooks
GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA, 94702 USA, Earth
W3Address: http://www.starbourne.com
Email: rexb@starbourne.com
Tel: 510-849-2309
Fax: By Request