RE: tasks at hand

Nice and interesting reply. I suspect your suggestions are more in keeping with what many think the agenda of the Interest Group is. On the other hand, the mission of the Interest Group [1] leaves quite a bit more breadth than that which is why I put out some feelers to see if others might be interested in pursuing slightly more ambitious directions. Some might argue that it is silly to head in new directions while the original tasks agreed on  (ostensibly) were left unfinished. Another perspective might be that new directions are precisely the antidote to collective inaction. (btw, there is movement on the Primer front.)

I think basic research related to human factors is completely consistent with the mission of the Interest Group for example. In terms of competing with W3C, that is not the intention at all of a research institute. When I first got involved with the W3C I thought it was a research institute, but, I have been often reminded by its staff that it is a "standards organization." The drafting and maintaining of standards is hard detail oriented work. My sense is that while Apple, Google, Canon and others may have the budgets to commission basic research, the W3C doesn't. In part because of screwball internal corporate attitudes toward IP portfolios, a lot of internal research cannot be outwardly shared with W3C.  If there were an appendage or island closely affiliated with W3C that in fact had a research mission, then research which might help to guide the development of future specs (several years in advance) could be done. Currently, with the pressure upon implementers to maintain huge galaxies of legacy content, the specifications under development may not see actual implementation for several years. Implementers might be relieved to be able to see a game plan more than two years in advance for sake of product planning. It's not necessarily an easy sell, but spec writers are not necessarily researchers and vice versa. The two activities, however, could be seen as complementary, and synergistic. I know of some folks who share many of these thoughts, and I will likely be pursuing some of these sorts of activities in upcoming years. Maybe others see points of overlap.

cheers
David

[1] http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/
________________________________
From: public-svg-ig-request@w3.org [public-svg-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of mcampbell@svgsystems.net [mcampbell@svgsystems.net]
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 5:49 PM
To: public-svg-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: tasks at hand

Thanks David and Gregory,

I appreciate receiving those ideas and thoughts on new research tasks relating to SVG.  They all have merit with the exception of the International Institute of Research; I not sure how you would not compete with the W3C.   I think most of those ideas should be a sovereign project outside of the realm of the Interest Group.

 I apologize I think I did not state the NSF grant question correctly.  Let me try again.

After reading the email threads, it seems like we have one unfinished task (SVG Primer) and one task that a recommendation was made to cancel.  The overwhelming concern is everyone is busy ?right now? with their daily work load; we have less time to participate in the Interest Group tasks.

I was thinking in terms of whether it was possible for two or three Interest Group members to write a grant proposal under the category ?Education? which would allow us to assign a task with a deadline to an individual for pay.

In your earlier email, you mentioned ?Real Human Time? when highlighting the efforts of executing Torture Test and the production of the SVG Primer.  Also, you mentioned Rob?s and Ruud?s presentation as a future source for a new public document.

My restated question is; do you think it is possible to write a grant that will assist us in our Interest Group task?   What NSF category or department would we used?   In Gregory Grant; it was the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) in the Department of Education.
-----Original Message-----
From: Dailey, David P. [mailto:david.dailey@sru.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 03:55 PM
To: mcampbell@svgsystems.net, public-svg-ig@w3.org
Subject: 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 provide a more accessible path for humans conceptualizion of the underlying three D objects the gradients often represent? Would 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 Saturday, 18 September 2010 01:16:37 UTC