TC Monthly Meeting Minutes 11-19-03

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
James Landrum III

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 did not have a quorum. As a result, we allowed for a more free-flowing discussion or brainstorming session than is our usual practice.

The Secretary apologizes that these minutes are more than a month late. This was due to the amount of preparation that went into the presentation and paper on "HumanML in Collaborations" for the Federal Enterprise Architecture Collaboration Expedition Workshop #30 on December 9, 2003.

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.

James announced that there was a call for papers for the CIDOC CRM SIG Meeting Workshop, to be held in Heraklion, Greece April 24, 2004. He said he would be attending, but did not (at that time) have a topic ready for developing a paper with the TC, as we did last year for the CIDOC Symposium. Sylvia, who was co-author and co-presenter with James at the March 2003 Symposium said she would give it some thought. Specifically, she mentioned that she would use her work on putting together the Cognition in Environments Subcommittee as a basis for a topic on how HumanML could work with CRM, particularly as a goal for that SC.

James also mentioned that he would be working on "Crosswalks" between HPCDML and CRM using XML and RDF, concentrating on the work he is doing to prepare the CIDOC CRM for submission to ISO for approval as an ISO Standard, which is scheduled to coincide with the timeframe for the Workshop (please confirm this, James--Secretary). James indicated that this process usually takes six to nine months which would project the adoption of the CIDOC CRM as an ISO Standard in Q4 2004. Sylvia mentioned that she thought that her work was heading in a direction that would specifically be based on CRM using RDF as the functional structure for defining relationships between concepts and resources for Cognition and Semiosis, and making use of those relationships in a tangible way, such as the creation of a working semiotic processor for cognition and communication.

During CAA2004 (and also at the CIDOC CRM conference at Heraklion) I will be participating in forums and other formal and informal discussions with a variety of cultural heritage professionals regarding XML (and RDF/RDFS as well) and databases and distributed network systems, with some emphasis on organizing a series of sessions (targeting CAA2006, which we hope to host in Fargo) on the role, use, and potential of markup languages in human biological and cultural heritage digitization projects (targeting CAA2006, which we hope to host in Fargo). Among the themes for these sessions will be explanation and description of the need for structured vocabularies (e.g., data dictionaries and thesauri) and crosswalks, etc., as well as emphasis on the critical importance of widespread collaboration and international participation in these areas, with the ultimate goal of creating a set of uniform, international standards, with some emphasis on the creation of conforming, interoperable regional typologies and taxonomies, and also to organize the heritage community with regard for initiatives tha focus on development of multilingual (e.g., translation, transliteration, and semantics) applications and other relevant issues."

"beyond the artifact
digital interpretation of the past"

Russell mentioned that he has not heard from Tony Pizi, but thought that Mr. Pizi might still be interested and that he was working on recruiting Christopher Lakey as a collaborator on software development with specific responsibility for keeping our work within a mainstream architecture.

Sylvia asked if it would be a good idea to contact Manos about the upcoming work on RDF and Rex concurred, saying that he would do that. (Note: this remains to be done as of 12-21-03.) This was also noted as something that might have a tie in to the CIDOC CRM Workshop, which is being held in Heraklion, Greece and is centered on the theme of "Practice of Knowledge Sharing" which is a topic particularly well-suited to the use of RDF. It could be that we can use this event as an opportunity to recruit for a more international membership for our TC work. The tie-in with the 2004 Olympics to be held in Athens and the history of what we call Western culture having its intellectual genesis in the so-called "Golden Age" of Hellenic Civilization in the 5th Century BCE seemed obvious, and it was suggested that we could use this as a way to focus on the "Study of What is Human." It could be a keystone for our work. (Having a spokesperson for this recruiting theme, whose nickname happens to be "Man" is an interesting coincidence.)

It was further noted that even if we don't have time to put together a specific paper to submit for this workshop, we would be well served to have a professional representative on scene who has good credentials in the interest domain of knowledge sharing, such as Manos.

Rex brought up the topic of a request for conceptual descriptions of what constitutes a "peer" as distinct from a "stakeholder" within the context of what constitutes a valid "peer review" process. This is a topic under consideration for developing an XML Schema as a guideline by Owen Ambur, co-chair of the XML.gov Working Group, and is part of his on-going effort to develop a standardized process for identifying Emerging Technologies of interest for the Federal Government's wide variety of agencies and working units. James offered to send along his thoughts on the subject since he has served on several peer review committees. His general assessment was that in his field of Archeology, a recurrent stakeholder example would be the Archeology Teacher, while a Museum Curator for Arheological Exhibits or an Archeology Post Dcotoral Field Researcher represents a peer as someone who has professional credentials for conducting work "on record" in the field or domain, so to speak. In this set of examples Peers are Decision Makers and Stakeholders are Consumers or Beneficiiaries of the work done by Peers.

Ranjeeth noted that one of our central tenets, Intent, could also be used to differentiate between stakeholders whose intent is to use a body of work while peers intend to create or extend the body of work.

James further noted that, as peers, we need to cite use-case based, fundamentally concrete, examples for the uses of HPCDML research in the presentation we were working on for the December 9th Workshop, and that as an extension of this concept, we should schedule a specific first subcommittee meeting for the HPCDML SC in January and conduct our recruiting on the basis of finding individuals working in the field such as those involved with the Native Dancer project. Rex concurred.

James mentined that Terri Childs, of nps.gov, the National Parks Service would be a good contact for coordinating our work with regard to and for the purposes of supporting the work of protecting and preserving our National Heritage within the Department of the Interior, which also happens to be the federal cabinet department within which Owen Ambur works.

A particular project which could be a candidate area for study within HPCDML would be accessibility, such as maps for the blind, and closed captioning for the hearing impaired.

It was noticed at this point that we have actually run over our usual time limit, so we adjourned at 2:25 p.m. Eastern Time.

huml message