This Month's TC Meeting Minutes

March 10, 2004

Teleconference meeting of the OASIS HumanMarkup Technical Committee.

Dial in toll free: 877 950 6921
outside of USA toll: 1 203 277 0324

Roll Call:
Voting Members:

Rex Brooks
Sylvia Candelaria deRam
Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga
Russell Ruggiero
James Landrum III
Roger Alexander

Propsective Member:
John Sarazen

Invited Guest:
Rob Nixon

Minutes taken by TC Secretary Rex Brooks

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

Previous meeting minutes accepted for January.

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

We had a quorum. As a result, decisions, even somewhat tentative, that are indicated in these minutes should be treated approved unless otherwise stated.

We began by noting that our meeting last monthm February, was cancelled due to lack of attendance due largely to late notification of the change in both the time from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time to 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, and from the third to the second Wednesday of the month to avoid conflict with the some other commitments by some TC members.

As a result of that this meeting was largely devoted to updates from members on their on-going activities and a brief introduction of the first draft of the proposed charter and mission statement for the Mediation Subcommittee which was submitted to the TC mailing list before the meeting:

http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/huml/200403/msg00015.html

Sylvia reported that she had decided not to specifically cite a relationship with the HumanMarkup TC, or the Non-Profit 501 (c)(3) Coproration, Humanmarkup.org, Inc. in her Letter of Intent to file a Grant Proposal to NSF in the Topic Area of Human Social Dynamics, but was using a group of colleagues for her proposal. She described this research work as including Natural Language Understanding aided by inserting markup tag within text for emotions, and cultural context, using overlaps and comparisons for speculstive uses such a KIF, Knowledge Information Format, an international standard that describes knowledge representation in predicate logic. It is similar, Sylvia said, to RDF, and, thus may prove useful in the development of a Cognition in Environments Subcommittee. It is noted that this work will also likely have significance for the semantic web in frame-based ontological knowledge bases such as Protege with OWL.

We congratulated Sylvia on passing the initial deadline hurdle, and developing some positive movement in this direction.

Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga mentioned that this was also interesting for its connection to the Text Encoding Initiative, TEI, http://www.tei-c.org/

James noted that Human Social Dynamics as a topic area along with TEI and other encodings was adopted last fall by the NSF/Gov Working Group as part of the latest iteration of National Priorities. Specifically, the priority for research was described as aiming for better interfaces for federal agencies with regard to organizing and expressing metadata about agency work with the goal of improving the whole scope for cross-domain searching. James indicated that he would forward the specific information or urls for the information to the TC list. Rex will likewise post some information from a member of the Emergency Management TC which bears on a pilot program involving such search criteria.

James indicated that his current focus will remain on grant proposal writing and paper writing through April 11-19, and that he has accepted the request made to him to co-chair the HPCDML Subcommittee. In a more specific note, James mentioned that he has submitted the ITR Grant Proposal to NSF for work on a new, upgrade version of the XJ3D viewer for DANA-WH working with Yumetech which will include a wireless interface that might be applicable to VXML. James also mentioned that he will be working with Dr. Cornelius Rosse of the University of Washington for adapting the Digital Anatomist Foundational Model to use in developing an X3D Humanoid Animation markup language or adaptation of the Humanoid Animation 2001 specification for his working plan for the Native Dancer project under consideration at NIH. James further mentioned that he will be working with the University of Rome La Sapienza on a new collection for Anthropology.

James indicated that he is also watching the development of Internet 2, IPv6 for the development of a Research Channel for Television via the Internet.

Ranjeeth reported that he is excited by the new work going forward on the Mediation SC, but that he previous commitment to liaisoning with the eGov TC had proven unfeasible, so he is now going to concentrate on using his connections via the Fund for the City of New York to work on getting resources for HumanML work from the Non-profit sector working with Neville Hughes, specifically to develop viable grant proposals.

Sylvia suggested that in approaching the foundations who make grants to Non-Profit organizations, it would be a good idea to package our projects together so that the range of projects we have undertaken will be apparent.

Ranjeeth mentioned that he was trying to get meetings with foundations or associations of foundations which have exhibited an interest in funding projects associated with conflict resolutions. In this regard H-Net Matrix was mentioned. This isa project at the Michigan State university which seeks to provide a common interface environment for the Humanities.

A preliminary search on Google turned up two main components:

http://matrix.msu.edu/innermatrix/about.php

From the "About" page:

"Based at Michigan State University, MATRIX is devoted to the application of new technologies in humanities and social science teaching and research. The Center creates and maintains online resources, provides training in computing and new teaching technologies, and creates forums for the exchange of ideas and expertise in new teaching technologies. ..."

http://www.h-net.org/

From the index/'home' page:

"H-Net is an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Our edited lists and web sites publish peer reviewed essays, multimedia materials, and discussion for colleagues and the interested public. The computing heart of H-Net resides at MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, Michigan State University, but H-Net officers, editors and subscribers come from all over the globe. ..."

Rex Brooks reported that his uptake of the work of maintaining a connection to the eGov TC is proceeding well, as part of the overall work of initiating a Mediation Subcommittee, and opened the topic of the proposed charter and mission statement for the Mediation SC.

Sylvia noted that she was struck most by the phrase, inviting participation by individuals and organizations with "... an interest in mitigating conflict." It was proposed, without dissent that this phrase be highlighted prominently at the start of the document.

James said that it was necessary to make a distinction between standardized, structured vocabularies and formal legal vocabularies.

Rex indicated that his use of the term "legal" was in the formal sense, and it was agreed that the distinction, including greater clarity with regard to including formal legal vocabularies as one component of a Human Mediation Markup Language family of vocabularies.

Sylvia noted that a database of case law, called Westlaw should be consulted.

It turns out that Westlaw is a paid collection of databases maintained by Thomson Media, the publisher which has recently published several articles and reports by Russell Ruggiero and Rex Brooks.

http://web2.westlaw.com/signon/default.wl?bhcp=1

Sylvia also mentioned that building or finding a cross-disciplinary thesaurus for Mediation would be a wise decision to take.

James and Sylvia both noted that the Mediation Charter and Mission Statement needed to make it clear that this effort is aimed at individuals as well as groups and organizations.

Russell reported that he had made arrangements to attend the first day of the Federal Office Supply Exposition, FOSE, where the "Emerging Components Third Quarterly Conference is being held simultaneously. He will be attending the morning session: "Scanning Small Business Innovations: A New Source for Breakthrough eGovernment Performance." It should be noted that Christopher Lakey's firm, Image Matters, which will be working with us on SBIR/STTR Grant Proposals, will be making a presentation on the second day. This conference is part of the overall set of such initiatives which we have targetted and to which we made our presentation at the EA Collaboration Expedition Workshop #30 in December. So this effort works with the ongoing eGov TC effort.

Russell also updated us on the latest writing project he and Rex are working on, a report on Outsourcing, with particular attention paid to the case study example of the film camera industry.

Roger Alexander, who recently apprised us of the upgrade of the University of Texas' " 'Limited-Access Logic' Algernon" rules-based inference engine to include the ability to work with W3C OWL constructs as expressed in Stanford Medical Informatics' Protégé application, reported that he is teaming up with Sylvia on her work, while attending to his own efforts at Grant Proposal writing, and preparing papers.

New member John Sarazen reported that he is working with Russell, and with Rex, on the intersection of his work with Level 8's Cicero call-center desktop application integration software suite and VXML with particular emphasis on looking at the possibility of developing an telephonic input application to the Common Alerting Protocol Rex is working on in the Emergency Management TC applied in a WSRP Portal-Portlet environment during an emergency scenario.

John noted that he had managed Speech Processing research at Bell Labs in New Jersey in the 1980s and 1990s.

Sylvia asked about his opinion of the the Festival Speech Processing application 'Speak,' and referred to it as a voice generator.

Preliminary searches turned up:

http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/

"The Festival Speech Synthesis System

Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system developed at CSTR. It offers a full text to speech system with various APIs, as well an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques. It is written in C++ with a Scheme-based command interpreter for general control. ..."

CSTR is the Center for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh.

Sylvia also mentioned something called Argument ACT Research which she believed was associated with Rochester (Institute of Technology), but the writer's notes may be somewhat garbled at this point since this occurred near the end of a long meeting. Regardless, the writer apologizes to Sylvia for the possible misquote as well as John Sarazen and Rob Nixon, whose reports were nearly missed.

Preliminary research turned up

http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/

"Welcome to ACT-R

ACT-R is a cognitive architecture: a theory for simulating and understanding human cognition. Researchers working on ACT-R strive to understand how people organize knowledge and produce intelligent behavior. As the research continues, ACT-R evolves ever closer into a system which can perform the full range of human cognitive tasks: capturing in great detail the way we perceive, think about, and act on the world. ..."

This coincides with both Sylvia's interest in Cognitive Studies, and Carnegie Mellon University's former OZ Project as well as with its current program using CSTR's Festival Speech Synthesis System. So, it seems likely that this program is what she was referring to in what the writer heard and noted as "ACT argument."

There is also a note at the end of the meeting referring to a Mocrosoft v. ATT case over Codec 508, for which the only English language reference found was:

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:wlgN_La__JQJ:www-mobile.ecs.soton.ac.uk/books/voice-book-sample-chaps.pdf+%22Codec+508%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

This refers to a mobile wireless video/audio codec using for handheld PDAs and is no doubt linked to the topic of developing pilot programs or proofs of concept for the combined demonstrations the writer, Rex, anticipates working on with John for on-scene updates to CAP alert messages that simultaneously can be used for Incident Command System uses.

Rob Nixon reported that he will be attending a game conference in San Jose and that there may be opportunities as have been discussed in the recent past for incorporating his work in both cognition and automated behavior generation.

Rex apologizes for the somewhat disjoint nature of these last couple of entries, with the note that once our subcommittees are more firmly established, our TC meetings are likely to evolve in shorter sessions for reports from these subcommittees, whose own meetings will be the venues where more substantive work is done.

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