The Human markup language (HumanML) is a new specification developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) -- and also our new acronym for this week. One of its goals is to improve human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications. This long article from DM Review, which covers business intelligence and data mining, says that this new markup language can be the basis for tools helping us mining massive volumes of textual and multimedia content. In fact, HumanML wants to represent human characteristics (cultural, physical, psychological, etc.) in such a formal way it can be delivered as machine readable subtext via the use of extensible markup language (XML). Read more.
Here is a short introduction to HumanML.
This article is intended to expound upon a vision for how HumanML may play a role in doing so and how it may be applied in the government and private sectors to improve overall collaboration. Focusing on what functional niches HumanML may fill, this article will hopefully provide context of vision for those already steeped in advancing IT state of the art and are already well versed in the underlying foundations, upon which HumanML is being constructed.
Before going further, let me warn you about its -- somewhat -- marketing tone.
HumanML is focused precisely on facilitating the key human abilities needed to deal with the challenges brought on by the times - to share, collaborate and relate. As an open standard, HumanML is aimed at helping to sort through mountains of textual and multi-media material by providing for inclusion of human related contextual clues such as the authors' and publishers' intent in the form of standardized document markup. Providing a standardized means to convey and establish contextual meaning is intended to allow authors a chance to rise above the chaos described below and permit researchers more opportunity to timely pull valuable nuggets of information and knowledge out of that same chaos.
According to the author, both governmental and non-governmental areas can benefit from HumanML. In the first sector, this new HumanML specification could ease interoperability across agencies and departments at all levels of government.
In his comprehensive delight in all experience Dickens resembles Walt Whitman, but he was innocent of that nebulous transcendentalism that blurred Whitman’s universe into vast misty panoramas and left him, for all his huge democratic vistas, unable to tell a story or paint a single concrete human being.
—Edgar Johnson (1912–1990)
And for the industry, HumanML could be a basis for helping people to locate the specific information and knowledge they are looking for -- especially on the Net.
By providing a standardized means to convey and establish contextual meaning, the use of HumanML would provide authors a chance to rise above the noise floor in the chaos of the Internet. At the same time, such use would offer researchers richer means to separate the wheat from the chaff to find the valuable nuggets of information and knowledge they need.
Finally, here is the last paragraph of the article.
By enriching communication, employment of HumanML would aid understanding even across intra-cultural lingo and multi-media context barriers while, at the same time, permitting deep interoperable access to the material for knowledge mining and other forms of automated services.
Isn't ironic that the author uses the word 'lingo'?
Source: Jay Peltz, for DM Direct Newsletter, July 29, 2005
human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or “broken heart,” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
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