Subject: CIS 6930-01 assignment #1 Resent-Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 13:43:09 -0400 Resent-From: Geoffrey Fox Resent-To: Geoffrey Fox Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 00:07:37 -0400 (EDT) From: Dangzhi Zhao To: Geoffrey Fox Disaster Management and Distance Education and Information Services In a typical developing country today, there are two areas that are of particular national concern as stumbling blocks on the way to improving the national plight. In no particular order, raising the general level of education in the population has been shown to be the single most important predictor of improved health and income levels; in the same vein, providing access to information vital to every community - health, agriculture, weather and climate forecasts, legal information, product information - is a formidable enabling boost to a developing nation's population. With an increase in general informedness, the single most detrimental stumbling block on the way to development remaining is frequently recurring natural desasters - such as the recent hurricane that devastated Honduras. In this case, even though these desasters cannot be prevented, what can be done is to reduce their negative effects by, first of all, timely fore- warnings, and second, well-coordinated preparations and recoveries. In the first of these problem areas, distance education -- reaching every little rural family with education and information -- heavily depends on wireless technology; in some cases, modern versions of wireless technology that are completely independent of central powerlines are a necessary requirement. China is currently undergoing such a "leap-frogging" of the much too expensive laying of telephone lines in favor of a rapid expansion of wireless communication services. In distance education, multilinguality becomes of primary concern, and especially in the highly formalized areas of science, representing knowledge in a universal XML-based language enables the use of automatic localization of content to different languages and dialects, even to the extent of voice production instead of (or in addition to) textual representations. Mathematical documents, for example, if written in Content-MathML with OpenMath and OMDoc extensions (all XML-based content markup languages for mathematical documents, of different levels of sophistication), could be displayed or read aloud in whichever language a user might have. In a similar but largely orthogonal vein, efforts are underway in the international natural language processing community to allow XML-based markup to be added to online web texts in such a way that computer-understanding and automatic translation of such disambiguated texts becomes feasible. In some developing countries, with dozens or hundreds of languages, offering distance education based on single-language teaching materials together with general translation mechanisms of this kind is perhaps the only hope. In disaster management, NASA are already investigating, together with the United Nations, ways of using XML and Java to facilitate communication and coordination between the hundreds of desaster aid organizations and local organizations and authorities in case of a major desaster such as the one that struck Honduras a couple of years back. Wireless technology plays multiple roles in this particular scenario: on the one hand, to replace communications infrastructure destroyed or damaged by the desaster; on the other hand, satellite imagery to aid in analyzing the desaster area while first aid is still being deployed, or even to discover a desaster in the first place. XML- based communication on the other hand plays a crucial role in getting the hundreds of aid organizations from across the world to efficiently coordinate their efforts, by using a common vocabulary to negotiate quantities and kinds of desaster relief items, personnel and their specialties, transportation needs and capacities, urgency levels, target areas, etc. In coordinating preparation for imminent disasters, a universally comprehensible analysis of satellite data (e.g., projected storm tracks, wind velocities, and the like) could trigger early warnings in every local library with internet access, say, just by having one of their Internet computers run a Java applet that regularly requests this kind of information from a web site that digests the corresponding bits of information from a diverse array of weather services, each of which would need to provide its services in a universal XML-based format, too. http://www.xml.com http://www.ucc.ie/xml/ http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/sgml-xml.html http://www.w3.org/Math/ http://www.openmath.org http://java.sun.com/features/1999/03/xml.html _____________________________ ______________________________ Dangzhi Zhao Where is the wisdom we have Doctoral Student, SIS lost in knowledge? Louis Shores Bldg, Box cc Where is the knowledge we have Florida State University lost in information? Tallahassee, FL 32306-2100 ----- T. S. Eliot _____________________________ ______________________________