Minutes for TC Meeting 12-17-03

Here are the minutes for this month's meeting:

December 17, 2003

Teleconference meeting of the OASIS HumanMarkup Technical Committee.

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USA Toll Number: +1-773-756-0201

Roll Call:
Voting Members:

Rex Brooks
Sylvia Candelaria deRam
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
Len Bullard
James Landrum III
Roger Alexander

Minutes taken by TC Secretary Rex Brooks

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

Previous meeting minutes unavailable.

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 event and subcommittee reports.

Rex reported that the presentation made on behalf of the collaboration which included the OASIS HumanMarkup TC to the 30th Enterprise Architecture Collaboration Expedition Workshop hosted by Susan Turnbull. Senior Program Advisor, Office of Intergovernmental Solutions, Office of Citizen Services and Communications, US General Services Administration went quite well based on the audience reaction and one outcome in which our collaboration has been asked to return to give an updated version of this presentation as part of a more general demonstration of web services interoperability involving OASIS to the FOSE Conference/Convention in Washington D.C. March 23-25, 2004. This Exposition, formerly known as the Federal Office Supply Exposition, is the major trade show event which focuses on IT in the federal government.

Len Bullard focused on the fact this may be useful in relation to his work in Public Safety database work, noting that the Justice Department Data Dictionary mentioned as a possible resource that may be including elements of our work in this collaboration, needs some evaluation from the viewpoint of industry usability. Those reponsible for the Justice Department Data Dictionary will be considering the inclusion of some of the work we presented through a liaison contact who attended the presentation and who is a member of the Emergency Management TC and the intergovernmental community. Specifically, this will be based on the concept of coordinating elements needed for a common operational display showing geospatial elements and emergency response elements as shown in our presentation. This will be of some importance to the intergovernmental communities of practice and interest.

The slideshow presentation is available at

http://ua-exp.gov/QuickPlace/ua-exp/Main.nsf/h_12CDF5C6107594FD85256DEF0073C0BA/B6211857396EBE3485256DF6007B83A8/?OpenDocument

The paper which accompanied the presentation is available at

http://ua-exp.gov/QuickPlace/ua-exp/Main.nsf/h_12CDF5C6107594FD85256DEF0073C0BA/E2D6A4734FFFA14585256DF80053D03F/?OpenDocument

Part of this presentation included a description of the HPCDML SC work, as well as descriptions of the pending Subcommittees being prepared for inauguration. The collaboration with James Landrum's work with the Acheology Technologies Laboratory at North Dakota State University and the Digital Archive Network for Anthropology and World Heritage is highlighted in the presentation. This part of the presentation was used specifically to highlight the fact that our TC is actively seeking such collaborations and liaisons and that our paradigm is one of inclusion to make use of all well-accepted existing standards in the domains of knowledge and communication we address.

James reported that the Joint NDSU-ATL/Tanzanian Department of Antiquities (DoA) and Herbert Kairuki Memorial University (HKMU) project to create an International Digital Library, the Biological Anthropology Collection (BAC) component for the Digital Archive Network for Anthropology (DANA-WH) was rejected. While this is regretable, James indicated that such NSF proposal decisions do not allow for rebuttal or appeal. James indicated that the one reviewer whose comments were apparently given primacy for the decision stated incorrectly that:

"...
* The researchers should consult people with expertise in Digital Libraries (we have expertise in this area, e.g., the DANA-WH; clearly stated in the proposal)
* they do not include discussion of the roles of metadata, structured vocabularies, thesauri, etc.
..."

This is included specifically in our minutes not only because it was mentioned in the course of James' report on his work in connection to the HPCDML SC, but also because we will now have it in our archived records, as well as in the above cited locations for the presentation given at NSF Headquarters: NSF, Stafford II, Room 555, Ballston, VA, where it is archived as well as being available at the URLs cited above. The specific reasons for the rejection of this grant proposal are very pointedly disproven in both the slides and paper. In fact, James specifically defined the concept of a "crosswalk" for the paper, as it applies to the HPCDML's purpose of providing a universal referral service to the appropriate metadata, structured vocabulares, data dictionaries and thesauri within its scope. Portions of the process that went into the preparation of the paper are contained in our email archives.

This provides for a well-supported rebuttal with materials timestamped previous to the release and receipt of the reviews of the proposal. It also demonstrates the utility of the open, public process maintained by OASIS.

James said that he is still awaiting word on his other grant proposals.

Rob Nixon was invited to attend and reported that he has had a favorable response to his recent presentations of material related to concepts likely to be included as part of the secondary base vocabulary for the Congition in Environments SC.

Sylvia reported that she continued work to adapt the principles embodied in the Conceptual Resource Model of the ICOM/CIDOC for use in CongEnv and as the basis for an example of how a Semiotic Processor could be assembled. She said she is exploring a new Python UML tool that may be well-suited for this project. Sylvia stated that she is continuing to work on integrating her work on Linux with her work on CogEnv and that she thinks she may be working on a Data Dictionary for CogEnv/Semiosis to be written in Python.

In a related comment, James noted that he would be continuing his work on the CIDOC CRM over the holidays. James indicated that this process, combined with his explorations of the Protege toolkit provided by Stanford Medical Informatics group as an example of RDF-like functionality are likely to produce conclusions that will be useful for HPCDML as well. His latest activities have included obtaining a license for the Terminologia Anatomica, a seminal work for the anatomical aspects of our work in HPCDML, as well as also obtaining a license for the Foundational Model for Anatomy from the University of Washington, which we will be using in HPCDML as well.

James also suggested, and we decided to schedule a chat on YahooIM to discuss grants, particularly in relation to the new government-wide portal for grant research, http://grants.gov This chat will be held January 7 in the late afternoon, Eastern time. The specific time has yet to be established since this coincides with another scheduled chat and it remains to be decided if this will be a combined session. James suggested biological databases, informatics and visualizations as grant topic areas to be considered further. Rex indicated that he will solicit the participation of a new possible recruit, Christopher Lakey of the Wasington D.C. PR firm, Image Matters, LLC, who has recently made a presentation to a previous Collaboration Expedition Workshop, specifically targetting the SBIR/STTR grant programs which are now being widened out to cover all governmental agencies as part of the Federal Enterprise Architecture program.

Because Chandra Tamirisa was not in attendance, we did not discuss the pending Mediation SC.

Roger Alexander noted that as final exams ended for him in this semester, he would have more time to consider how best he can contribute to our efforts. We heartily encouraged him in this.

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