Presentation Update

I wanted to catch you all up at once since my recent discussions have been largely private as I refined the presentation concepts. The attached word doc is a fairly comprehensive outline of the presentation. It has gone through several iterations to get to this point, and I have been buried under the task of getting the web services portal demonstration as far along as I could. I will know more about that next week. However, regardless of how it is presented, whether the simple demonstration which I am fairly certain will be done and working, or the more elaborate version which I will describe on the basis of the simpler scenario in any event, I am confident that the concepts will be clear. There are definite, tangible benefits here for Emergency Management scenarios, and there are much wider benefits available in the burgeoning medical supplies and services markets.

In the PresentationUpdate you will find an outline with parenthetical notes to tell you who I hope will contribute their thoughts in the next week on the specific areas indicated. The only one called out for Susan is to check the availability of printed materials handed out in a previous workshop, which I would like to include for reference with the materials we will be providing. Otherwise, the rest is either FYI, or, if named,a request for your thoughts on the specific topic. What follows is the Introductory Section on Human Capital, HumanML and the XML/RDF standards.

Incubating New Kinds of Collaborations through Emerging XML/RDF Technologies in Government, Business Using in HumanML to Release the Potential of Human Capital

Human Capital can be thought of as the value of the knowledge contained in individual human minds and experience. This represents a kind of collective, distilled, filtered knowledge which is largely going untapped to improve human societies and cultures. This kind of value can be projected as the currency of the future in a new conception of what we can achieve by effectively harnessing emerging technology to human needs and human uses. In this way, Human Capital can be used to purchase a better future, but, only if it is used in circulation rather than locked up and stored uselessly in individual minds.

The fledgling practices of Knowledge Management, Fuzzy (Inference) Logic and, to some extent, Topic Mapping are all busily attempting to turn their practices into sciences, but as with all such "soft" sciences, the human psychological, sociological and pholosophical disciplines, the definitions of their terms and the models they build to approximate observational continua lack a firm empirical foundation. We would like to believe that these practices will, eventually, find a firm foundation and become as useful as the so-called "hard" sciences of physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, etc.

What the Human Markup Language can do for these practices to aid their development, as well as HumanML's many other applicable areas, is to provide a framework for standardizing the definition of these terms through a consensus-building framework in OASIS. This will require years simply to establish, but the good news is that a start has been made. We have put a stake in the sand, to use a term from the current vernacular, and a process can be further developed that will yield these standardized, standardizable, definitions for terms within specific contexts or disciplines. The process starts with the formation of an interest group, some of which we have already started, organized around the purpose of developing an XML vocabulary, or Markup Language, (ML) combined with an RDF grammar of defintional resources related to the ML. XML is the Three Letter Acronym, (TLA) for EXtensible Markup Language and RDF is the TLA for Resource Description Framework. Both are initiatives of the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C.

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