RE: tasks at hand

mcampbell wrote:
>What are your thoughts on the categories of grants?  I am not sure what departments / categories of NSF to look for available funding?

>I think NSF grant path should be investigated and I am interested in looking into that area with you, but I not sure how to position the NSF request at this time.

Hi Marvin,

I've had a variety of thoughts on the subject of how grants could be handy sort of based on my own idiosyncratic ideas of work to be done. Here are just some thoughts I've had. Many of these I've talked to people about or written about, so some of you may be bored of hearing them:

1. Accessibility. I agree with what Gregory writes about SVG's promise for greater accessibility than alternative visual formats, because of its semantic substrate. I also think that graph theoretic constructs like connectors, like vePath, and like superPath provide exactly that sense of what things are connected to one another that can help the entire community to define the semantics of interconnected spatial information. Maps, diagrams, scientific models, and the like are all examples of visual presentations of data that is fundamentally, at some level, graph theoretic (in the sense of closed binary relations on a finite set). Ultimately, I think those concepts of relatedness and how best to represent them as declarative markup and API's to script is a topic ripe for exploration.

Other thoughts that I've had concerning funding for accessibility include the creation of a vector-based font for American Sign Language (or other sign languages). If the funding were to come from NSF, then ASL would be a likely target, whereas if it were to come from UNICEF, maybe another sign language would be appropriate. The key is not just in the development of a font but in the standardization of a way to get those characters into a computer. Accelerometers attached to many of our modern gadgets seem like a natural vehicle for languages that are already not merely visual but gestural. The SMIL aspects of SVG make its gestural expressiveness a prime candidate for development of such a platform. Last year at SVG Open I rambled on about the merits of ASV and other gestural languages and the possibilties of defining a language of semantic primitives for which gestural input through 3D accelerometers might, in fact, provide for more effective encoding of our ideas than either keyboards or speech. Such might be "accessible" to not only hearing impaired or sight impaired communities but to legions of old folks like me who can't abide texting because of the size of the darn keyboard!

Other ideas: cross-cultural developments in multilingualism:

Development of more expressive fonts for some non-western languages. I can't help but thing that Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris might find SVG very appealing. The whole topic of font development seems to be in need of a shot in the arm. I'm convinced (after listening to some folks whose opinions I value) that the SVG spec has handled fonts better than WOFF. How do languages like Arabic, Japanese and Chinese that do not lay text out from left to right, but which nevertheless engage in considerable artistic experimentation with the directionality of font-flow, actually govern their geometries? Some sort of cross-cultural study of the geometries of text-layout (in prepration for an expansion of SVG's concept of layout) is probably in order.

Mapping. Dr. Yan Li has presented some very compelling arguments for the expansion of the concepts of adjacency within SVG. I see some interesting possibilities for international collaboration here. Several different ways that regions intersect exist. Many of those have implications for the ways in which semantic labels of those features receive a locus in 2D space when mapped at given resolutions.

Scientific visualization. NSF funds lots of things on large and small scale data visualization. Tufte's books were not the final chapter in the story of how best to portray data in ways that humans (like policy makers) can make sense of data (as provided by scientists). SVG has yet to make proper inroads into that community, but the time is, I think, quite ripe. The visualization of simulations and models is another important category of this. SVG allows data spigots to be tapped and thence easily flowed into charts, diagrams, animated illustrations and plots containing rich gradients.

Psychophysical and human factors studies. I would argue that SVG enables classes of experiments to be done with crowdsourcing that would answer large numbers of fundamental questions pertaining to accessibility, semantic and perceptual proximity, all of which can help to define canonical user interfaces. When we wait for Apple or its competitors to define interfaces, they often do so with research that is less than comprehensive. (Observe the fact that 2 year olds and 80 year olds have a difficult time double clicking -- a bit less haste in brining the Lisa and Mac to market and Apple may not have burdened us with that unfortunate legacy.)

Related would be questions of how alternative versions of a spec that might address similar functionality might most easily be used by developers. Is declarative animation really quicker for develors than scripted animation? Do gradient meshes, diffusion curves or <replicate> provide a more accessible path for humans conceptualizion of the underlying three D objects the gradients often represent? Would <animatePath> be more accessible than keySplines for imparting curvilinear change into the plot of a multivariate function?

On a more ambitious scale, I could see the development of an international institute for research in graphical standards. Something that would not compete with W3C which actually builds standards but which might fuel some of the basic research that would help to inform the deliberations of the SVG WG and other standards bodies. In scanning through NSF's funding categories, recently, I see categories of funding that might be appropriate for such a thing.

Other possibilities exist, no doubt. These are just some of the things I've been thinking about.

cheers
David

Received on Wednesday, 15 September 2010 19:55:41 UTC