Notes for Huml Primary Base Revision

There will be 2 specifications, created simultaneously, an XML Schema in the .xsd file format and an RDFS Schema in the .owl format, representing a complete, unified specification. A version in the OASIS format will be produced after the initial revision is approved by the HumanMarkup Technical Committee.

The goal of this revision is to make the primary base schemata consistent with the International Council of Museums (CIDOC) Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), cidoc_v4.2.rdfs.xml available at http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/official_release_cidoc.html

The reason for this is so that it unifies at least one overarching domain of human digital information which will act as the intermediate ontology between the many anticipated domain-specific sub ontologies of the Huml family of individual human digital information domains, e.g Health Informatics, Medicine, Personal Health Records, Temporal (TimePeriod or Time-Span)-Specific Electronic Health Records, etc.

It is based largely on the intersection, as interpreted by TC co-chair Rex Brooks, of Dr. Sylvia Candelaria De Ram's revision 0.93a, the prior existing HumanMarkup Technical Committee Specification huml primary base XML Schema, using the OWL-specific version of Protégé from Stanford Medical Informatics and XMLSPY 2006 Home Edition.

In general terms, the goal is to create for the Human Markup Language a single basis specification which can act as an upper ontology for the subdomains within its stated target domain of individual and global human-specific digital information with the specific purpose of improving the fidelity of human to human, human to machine and machine to machine communication about, between, for or concerning human data, information and knowledge.

In keeping with this set of goals, and due to the fact that as an upper ontology for this set of domains, one objective of this revision is to remove all lists of specific instances of a classification category, such as love, hate, anger, joy and sadness in the category of Emotion. So, where such lists serve the purpose of providing examples, any such examples will be contained within the documentation/annotation of the Elements or Classes. The exception to this rule is the simpleType for Locator where the rules for simpleType validation requires a restriction or sequence enumeration, in which case, the word "placeholder" has been used for the purpose allowing the schema to validate.

The broad, general correspondence between Ontology as expressed in OWL-RDF/S and Controlled Vocabulary as expressed in XML/S is that Ontology Classes correspond to Vocabulary Elements and Ontology Properties correspond to Vocabulary Attributes

However, there are many subconcepts, such as attributeGroups in XML Schema that do not specifically correspond to a subconcept in Properties, except insofar as one may consider that a single property can have a number of relationship types which is, at least, a somewhat similar concept.

However, there being no standard set of rules for such conversions or translations from one format to the other, such distinctions are simply being ignored for this revision, which is keeping to the rough correspondences at this point in time.

Where specific concepts, such as temporal considerations such as TimePeriod in the primary base are specifically related to a concept in the CIDOC CRM, in this case the cidoc_v4.2 rdfs: rdfsCLASS RDF id="E52. Time-Span, this relationship is cited in the documentation of the xmls and the commens in rdfs.