Cover Pages: Cover Pages News Clippings 2003-01

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[January 31, 2003] Modular Namespaces (MNS) Language Supports Validation from Multiple Independent Namespaces. A posting from James Clark announces the design and implementation of a language called Modular Namespaces (MNS). "The XML Namespaces Recommendation allows an XML document to be composed of elements and attributes from multiple independent namespaces. Each of these namespaces may have its own schema. The problem then arises of how the schemas can be composed in order to allow validation of the complete document. In RELAX Namespace, Murata Makoto pioneered the idea of dividing the document into islands, with each island containing a single namespace, and validating each island separately against the schema for its namespace. RELAX Namespace formed the basis for the recently published Committee Draft of Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) -- Part 4: Selection of Validation Candidates. [This] language named Modular Namespaces (MNS) is an evolution of the ideas in RELAX Namespace and DSDL Part 4. RELAX Namespace was designed to work well with RELAX Core. RELAX Core cannot deal with documents that use multiple namespaces, nor does it provide any namespace-based wildcards. These limitations of RELAX Core are reflected in the design of RELAX Namespace. MNS is designed to be able to take advantage of more recent schema languages, such as RELAX NG, that are not limited in this way... There's a new release of Jing that includes a sample implementation. MNS is designed to be useful when: (1) you have an instance that uses elements and attributes from multiple namespaces; (2) you have one or more schemas (not necessarily all in the same schema language) each of which deals with one or more of these namespaces; (3) you want to use all these schemas to validate the instance..." See also: (1) "Document Schema Definition Language (DSDL)"; (2) "Namespaces in XML."
[January 30, 2003] VoiceXML Users Group Spring Meeting 2003. A Call for Participation has been issued for the VoiceXML Users Group Spring Meeting 2003. The meeting will be held March 31 - April 03, 2003 in San Jose, California in conjunction with the AVIOS 2003 Speech Developers Conference and Exposition. "The VoiceXML Forum is looking to the VoiceXML user community to share its experience to-date by provide live demos of their VoiceXML Technologies and/or sharing practical feedback on their experiences with VoiceXML. Some possible topics would include live demos and/or experience reports in the areas of: (1) Writing Portable VoiceXML Applications (2) Speech Application Development; (3) VoiceXML Platforms; (4) Speech Application Tuning; (5) Deployment concerns; (6) Grammar development; (7) Systems Integration Issues." Contact Brett McDowell by February 21, 2003 for proposals. See general references in "VoiceXML Forum."
[January 24, 2003] XML Schema for Simple Dublin Core Metadata. An updated (W3C) XML Schema defining terms for Simple Dublin Core has been posted on the DCMI website, referenced from DCMI term declarations represented in XML schema language. This XML schema in the earlier 2002-03-12 version defined the fifteen (15) elements from the http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ namespace, with no use of encoding schemes or element refinements; the default content type for all elements was xs:string with an xml:lang attribute available. Viz., title, creator, subject, description, publisher, contributor, date, type, format, identifier, source, language, relation, coverage, [and] rights. The update version has been "amended to remove namespace declaration for http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace namespace, and to reference the optional lang attribute via built-in xml: namespace prefix. The xs:appinfo has also been removed." XML schemas for Qualified Dublin Core are currently under development and are expected to become available in early 2003. See also the DCMI term declarations represented in RDF schema language, in preparation. See also the list of current DCMI elements and element refinements. "The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global workshops, conferences, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices." Local references in "Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)."
[January 24, 2003] Updated IBM Lightweight Services Application. A new version of IBM Lightweight Services provides enhancements to the Eclipse perspective, support for SOAP complex types, and several bug fixes. "IBM Lightweight Services (LWS) is a J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) application that provides an event-driven hosting environment for lightweight services. Lightweight services are persistent, transactional, server-side programs developed in lightweight programming languages such as JavaScript and Python. Developers of these services have high-level, extensible access to IBM middleware, enabling services that communicate via Web services, Sametime instant messaging, and high-performance publish/subscribe. The LWS development tools, paired with a flexible deployment and administration model, allow rapid composition, installation, instantiation, and debugging of server-side applications. Though LWS is a general-purpose development tool, it is especially suited for developing personal services, which are server-side applications that operate on behalf of individual users. In recognition of this programming style, the term agent is used to refer to a program installed on the server and agent instance to refer to a running copy of that program. An agent depends on a runtime to host its source code and on extensions to provide functionality, such as middleware access. IBM Lightweight Services is a WebSphere enterprise application consisting of an agent manager and a base set of runtime and extension plug-ins. The Web administration interface configures runtimes and extensions, manages installed agents, and monitors agent instances. Agents are built, installed, and debugged using the Lightweight Services plug-in for WebSphere Studio Application Developer. The development tool provides a "one-click deploy and debug" experience, facilitating a rapid cycle of modification and testing. See the FAQ document, Example Agents and Scripting Reference.
[January 21, 2003] OSCON 2003 Call For Participation. Simon St.Laurent posted a Call For Participation in connection with the July 2003 Open Source Software Convention (OSCON). "O'Reilly and Associates has opened the Call For Participation for the 2003 Open Source Conference, which will be held in Portland, Oregon, USA, from July 7th to the 11th. There are two tracks which are probably of special interest to XML-DEV: an XML track and an Apache XML track. The XML track is open to presentations which cover the intersections between XML and Open Source. This can include open source software for processing or presenting XML, tools for structuring or creating XML documents, or XML vocabularies that have a strong connection to open source projects. You can get a rough idea of the kinds of things that were presented last year at: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/15/presentations.html. The Apache XML track is open to presentations focused on the work of the XML Apache project. There are also tracks on Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Applications, Apache, and Apache Java... The theme this year is 'Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software.' Few companies use only one vendor's software on desktops, back office, and servers. Variety in operating systems and applications is becoming the norm, for sound financial and technical reasons. With variety comes the need for open unencumbered standards for data exchange and service interoperability..." The deadline for submitting papers and proposals is February 15, 2003.
[January 21, 2003] Extreme Markup Languages 2003 Call for Participation. IDEAlliance and Mulberry Technologies have issued a Call for participation in the Extreme Markup Languages 2003 Conference program: August 4 - 8, 2003, Hilton Hotel, Montréal, Québec, Canada. "We offer a single unabashedly hard-core conference as a gathering place for the technically-oriented members of the information interchange and knowledge representation community; a place for these people to meet and refresh each other with ideas, advice, and camaraderie. The conference is agnostic with respect to commercial and political persuasion; it is passionate about providing a forum for technical ideas. At Extreme Markup Languages we devote the better part of a week to the unfettered pursuit of better understanding of: markup practice and theory; knowledge access and navigation; formal languages; information philosophy; development of markup and knowledge aggregation software; and ontologies, taxonomies, and vocabularies." Schedule highlights: (1) Peer Review Applications Due: March 20, 2003; (2) Tutorial Proposals Due: March 20, 2003; (3) Paper Submission Deadline: April 3, 2003; (4) Speakers Notified: May 20, 2003; (5) Revised Papers Due: June 24, 2003; (6) Tutorials: August 4, 2003; (7) Conference: August 5-8, 2003. Chair: B. Tommie Usdin, Mulberry Technologies, Inc. Co-Chairs: Deborah A. Lapeyre, Mulberry Technologies; James D. Mason, Y-12 National Security Complex; Steven R. Newcomb, Coolheads Consulting; C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, World Wide Web Consortium/MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
[January 21, 2003] Prototype for One-to-Many Links Using HTML. A posting from Bob DuCharme references a (demo) prototype implementation for "1-to-many" links using HTML: "While reading Micah's SkunkLink proposal, I was struck by the simplicity of using an A element to represent one-to-many links in HTML. I remember seeing an argument against this somewhere, but don't remember it, so I went ahead and prototyped an implementation. If you go to http://www.snee.com/xml/linking/1toMdemo.xml you should see a page where the green links are 1-to-many links. A [browser] View Source will show that the file is basic XHMTL, except that the green links are marked up as nested 'a' links. View Source will also show that an XSLT stylesheet is used, http://www.snee.com/xml/linking/1toM.xml (1toMdemo.xml explains why the stylesheet has an 'xml' extension) that just copies all elements through but converts 'a' elements with 'a' children to menus implemented with some JavaScript code that I learned about from a Netscape DevEdge article at http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/smith_menu/smith_menu.html. Changing the XHTML content model for the 'a' element to allow nesting of them is an awfully small change to make to its DTD. (What would you with with deeper nesting levels? Turn them into submenus.) For 1-to-many linking in more generalized linking constructs outside of XHTML (e.g., XLink and any of the successors cropping up), this combination of XSLT plus the DevEdge menuing code makes prototyping of the linking surprisingly easy..." See followups in the XML-DEV thread. See also SkunkLink: A Common Ground for XML Linking Skunkworks by Micah Dubinko (23-December-2002) and the associated posting. General references in "XML Linking Language."
[January 21, 2003] OpenOffice.org XML File Format Specification in RELAX NG, RELAX NG Compact, and W3C XML Schema Notation. Daniel Vogelheim (Editor, OASIS Open Office XML Format TC) has prepared RELAX NG and W3C Schemas for the OpenOffice.org XML file format specification based upon conversion of the XML DTDs contributed by Sun Microsystems, 2002-12-11: One of my action items was to provide converted DTDs... To do the conversions, I had to fix to problems with namespaces in the contributed OOo DTDs. John already noted these. Attached is: OOo_RelaxNG.zip: The contributed DTDs converted to Relax-NG using James Clark's DTDInst. OOo_XSD.zip: The contributed DTDs converted to W3C Schemas using James Clark's DTDInst. OOo_RelaxNG_Compact.zip: The schema from OOo_RelaxNG.zip converted to RelaxNG compact notation using an XSLT conversion from pantor.com... I really like the RelaxNG compact syntax. It's a lot more readable than the others. The automatic conversion does seem to cause some artefacts that would not appear in a manually written schema, but it should provide us with an excellent starting point. For some other comments about DTD/schema conversion, please observe John Cowan's mail on the office-comment list..." Note: Clark's DTDinst is "a program for converting XML DTDs into an XML instance format. The key feature of DTDinst is its handling of parameter entities. It is able to reliably turn parameter entity declarations and references into a variety of higher-level semantic constructs. It can do this even in the presence of arbitrarily deep nesting of parameter entity references within parameter entity declarations. At the same time, it accurately follows XML 1.0 rules on parameter entity expansion, so that any valid XML 1.0 DTD can be handled. If a parameter entity is used in a way that does not correspond to any of the higher-level semantics constructs supported by DTDinst, then references to that parameter entity will be expanded in the DTDinst output." Trang is a related program "for converting between different schema languages, focused on RELAX NG; in particular, it can convert between the compact and XML syntaxes, it can convert between RELAX NG and DTDs, and it can convert from RELAX NG to W3C XML Schema." See: (1) OASIS Open Office XML Format Technical Committee; (2) RELAX NG website at the Thai Open Source Software Center.
[January 14, 2003] Two-Day ebXML Showcase at XML Europe 2003. OASIS and UN/CEFACT will co-sponsor ebXML Showcase, a special two-day event at XML Europe 2003, 5-6 May 2003 in London. Conference organizers encourage all organizations that have implemented ebXML to consider taking part in this program. It promises to be a great opportunity for ebXML communities to learn about planning for, integrating with, and augmenting ebXML applications. For developers and users, the ebXML Showcase will provide an international forum to discuss the business problems solved, methods employed, and value received from using the ebXML specifications. The deadline for proposals is 31-January-2003. Presentations must be submitted via the online form. Each proposal requires an abstract, not exceeding 500 words. Members of the Steering Committee of the OASIS UN/CEFACT Joint Marketing Team (JMT) on ebXML will review the papers and select the presentations. If selected for the ebXML Showcase, speakers will need to submit a complete paper marked up in XML using a DTD designed for conference papers; this deadline is 15-March-2003. IDEAlliance will provide authoring tools to help write the papers and presentations. For questions about the ebXML Showcase, contact Alan Kotok via email at akotok@disa.org or by phone at +1 703-518-4174. For more information about the XML Europe 2003 Conference please contact Jane Harnad, XML Europe 2002 Conference Director, at jharnad@idealliance.org.
[January 14, 2003] Royalty-Free License Terms in Microsoft's Web Services Security IPR Disclosure. A 2003-01-14 posting from John Shewchuk (Microsoft) to the OASIS Web Services Security TC mailing list outlines the disposition of Microsoft on WS-Security licensing: "As called for, this note is to advise OASIS that Microsoft believes it has pending patent application(s) that include claims that are necessary to implement the Web Services Security contribution submitted on June 26, 2002, to the WS-Security Technical Committee... Microsoft will update this statement if and when such pending patent application(s) issue. Microsoft is willing to provide licenses to interested parties to any Necessary Claims (as defined in the WS-Security license at http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/docs/wss_license.asp), as follows: If an OASIS Standard incorporating this Contribution is adopted by OASIS pursuant to the WS-Security Technical Committee Charter at the time the Contribution was submitted, Microsoft will grant, for the limited purposes of implementing and complying with the required portions of the resulting OASIS Standard, a ROYALTY-FREE, worldwide, non-sublicenseable, non-transferable, license to any such Necessary Claims to implement the Contribution under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions, provided a reciprocal patent license is granted to Microsoft and other implementers of the OASIS Standard..." See related references in: (1) "Web Services Security Specification (WS-Security)"; (2) "Patents and Open Standards."
[January 14, 2003] TM4J Version 0.8.0 Java Toolkit for Topic Maps Provides New Persistent Storage Model. On behalf of the TM4J Project Team, Kal Ahmed posted an announcement for the release of TM4J version 0.8.0. "TM4J is a Java toolkit for parsing, manipulating and exporting topic map data. Topic maps are a standard paradigm for the interchange of knowledge structures. TM4J supports (1) import of XTM and LTM topic map interchange formats; (2) a complete data model with a variety of persistence mechanisms; (3) an implementation of the tolog topic map query language. It provides a collection of command-line tools and programming utility classes to make it easy to work with topic map data in an application development environment. The latest stable release of TM4J incorporates a new persistent storage model which supports a variety of relational backends. TM4J can be downloaded from the project's SourceForge page, and additional information can be found by browsing the (topic-map based) project website. Bug reports and any contributions to the project are welcome." The TM4J Project Team aims to produce a complete suite of tools for creating, processing and publishing topic map information. See general references in "(XML) Topic Maps."
[January 14, 2003] Advisory and Notification Markup Language (ANML) from OpenSec. A communiqué from Nasseam Elkarra announces development of an Advisory and Notification Markup Language (ANML) by the Open Security Organization. First in a planned suite of related standards, the Advisory and Notification Markup Language (ANML) "is an XML-based specification for describing advisories and other types of notifications. ANML intends to solve the inconsistent use of terminology by software vendors in their advisories and make it easy for applications to read these advisories. This will make way for the necessary tools to automatically update systems. Although ANML will have its biggest impact for security advisories, it can be used for any type of notification. Some examples include bug-fixes, feature enhancement, upgrade availability, and many more." The developers solicit involvement from interested parties. Other standards planned for development include: (1) System Information Markup Language (SIML) -- an XML-based specification for describing a system's properties and providing a detailed inventory of software, hardware, and configuration information; (2) Software Description Markup Language (SDML) -- an XML-based specification for describing the properties of software and its environment. ANML, SIML, and SDML are designed to form the core of the OpenSec Framework. "The OpenSec Framework is a set of guidelines on how to use these technologies to aid system management. The OpenSec goal is to be able to send an SDML file to a web service that will respond with an ANML file. A system manager will compare elements of the ANML file to elements of the SIML file to assess the system and install the necessary updates." See also: (1) "DMTF Common Information Model (CIM)"; (2) "XML and Emergency Management."
[January 08, 2003] ISOGEN Internationalization (i18n) Support Library. W. Eliot Kimber announced a downloadable internationalization support library, available under the GNU Public License (GPL). The internationalization support library from ISOGEN International LLC is a Java package that demonstrates basic document internationalization services for use primarily with XML editors and formatters. It was originally driven by the need to centralize the definition of, and access to, generated text generated by style sheets for XML documents, but could be useful in any context in which translations of strings are required. It allows, for example, multiple style sheets to share a single database of translated terms and phrases. It also keeps the text strings separate from the style sheet code, reducing the cost of creating and maintaining the generated text and its tranlations. The demonstration package includes a generic base library which can then be integrated with different tools through thin Java binding layers. The demonstration code includes a Saxon binding but this code has also be integrated with the Epic XML editor as well as other XSLT engines. The library provides the following services: (1) Access to translations of fixed text strings (as would be used in style sheets for generating print or HTML renderings of XML documents). (2) Access to back-of-the-book index configuration information (primarily for use by XSLT transforms, but potentially usable by other processors). (3) Access to language-specific Java Collator objects, dynamically configured by the active index configuration. (4) Miscellaneous services needed by style sheets that work with multi-language documents..." The Java docs provide API details, various unit tests, and the Saxon integration library examples showing how to use the library. See "Using XSL Formatting Objects for Production-Quality Document Printing" for an extended example. Related resources are referenced in "XSL/XSLT Software Support."
[January 08, 2003] Update of Jing and Trang from James Clark. James Clark has announced an updated version of jing and trang, available from the RELAX NG website at the Thai Open Source Software Center. Jing is "a RELAX NG validator in Java; it is an adaptation of the validator for TREX, written on top of SAX2. Jing uses a vendor-independent Java interface for RELAX NG datatype libraries, developed by James Clark and KAWAGUCHI Kohsuke and hosted at SourceForge in the relaxng project. Jing can use any datatype library that implements this interface." Trang is "a program for translating RELAX NG schemas into other formats. Trang can be used to translate: (1) a RELAX NG schema in the compact syntax into the XML syntax; (2) a RELAX NG schema in the XML syntax into the compact syntax; (3) a RELAX NG schema in either the XML or compact syntax into a DTD; (4) a RELAX NG schema in either the XML or compact syntax into a W3C XML Schema. Trang aims to produce human-understandable schemas; it tries for a translation that preserves all aspects of the input schema that may be significant to a human reader, including the definitions, the way the schema is divided into files, annotations and comments." New in the 2003-01-08 release: (1) trang can output the compact syntax; (2) the compact syntax parser used by jing and trang now matches the compact syntax committee spec; (3) trang XSD output preserves comments; (4) trang XSD output can take advantage of substitution groups.


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