The ability to leverage open standards to improve communications human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine is becoming crucial to both the public and private sectors. An exploding volume of information surges like a deluge across a world of ubiquitous networked computing. In such a world, how can drawing upon the appropriate information and knowledge be facilitated in a timely manner? After all, the ultimate purpose is for humans to interact. People want to share their thinking, coordinate, work together to accomplish things, leave a legacy of knowledge and wisdom gained, entertain each other, and socialize. Information technology (IT) that mankind devises is merely means to accomplish that.
Human markup language (HumanML) is one possible technology for addressing some of these critical aspects of communication. 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. At the same time, the hope is to provide just enough of a high-level glimpse beyond that vision into the underlying technological context so that others not so well versed may gain sufficient understanding to appreciate how HumanML may play a role in addressing the issues alluded to above.
Some of the questions that the use of HumanML could hopefully address are: Is the retrieved document informational in nature? Is it intended as policy, as advertisement, propaganda or some other purpose? At the point in history of document creation, what was the unstated motivation to create and publish it? What was the author's attitude toward the subject? When extracting or quoting short sections for citation or comment, how can this context be carried forward without the need to include long background passages? How to avoid accidental release of protected information by ignoring or forgetting to include external markings? How to avoid distortion of original meaning or intent whether intentional or not? How to understand cross-culturally and interpret specialized lingo such as "governmentese" in current layman's terms and in the current context?
Beyond creating broader appreciation for what it can provide, the intended impact of this article is draw others into the processes developing and supporting HumanML that will help move it forward as a recognized and implemented global standard.
What is HumanML - How Did We Get Here?
HumanML is a new specification being developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).1 Work on HumanML migrated to a Technical Committee of OASIS after initially beginning independently in an ad hoc Yahoo Groups mailing list. Evolved from the informal practice of using emoticons to improve communication in a world of text-based e-mail, news groups and chat rooms, HumanML is aimed toward a more formal representation of human characteristics (e.g., cultural, physical, psychological, etc.). It is focused on enhancing the fidelity of human communication by providing machine processable subtext through the use of extensible markup language (XML).2 As such, the markup artifacts are buried within the digital document and normally hidden from view much as markup for Web (HTML) documents or those of other applications ( .doc, .ppt, .xls, .pdf, .odt, etc.).
HumanML and the Future of Collaboration
While the goal of HumanML may seem somewhat ambitious, the vision is very well timed for the dramatic changes currently taking place such as explosive Internet growth in the non-Western world. During the next fifteen years accurate information exchange between people of unlike cultures and origins is expected to be an ever-increasing concern with respect to Internet and other digital means of communication. Accordingly, there is a clear need for emerging technologies that will improve global communication to address the higher level of global interconnectedness.
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. Another goal of HumanML is also to provide document markup standards that permit adjustment of the human computer interface (HCI) to the system users' most effective modality. Additionally, HumanML provided standardized markup could facilitate automated handling and management processes that account for information protection and releasability of at any level of granularity.
The Curse Comes True
Perhaps it could be said that we are living out the ancient curse: "May you live in interesting times." Civilization has largely crossed the boundary from the industrial age into the information age and is already moving beyond into an age governed by a knowledge economy. The transition has thrust "interesting times" upon us. We are struggling to cope with the chaos of an explosive growth in the flux of information and novelty that is increasingly difficult to ignore. We need to deal with an ever-increasing pervasive nature of change where our privacy and personal time is ever more challenged. We can try to run from it, but places to hide are disappearing where we might escape from an onslaught represented by variety, volume and velocity (V3) of information and change.
