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See: News 2007

• [September 12, 2006]   Microsoft's Open Specification Promise Eases Web Services Patent Concerns.    In a move that should be welcome news to open-source software developers, Microsoft has announced a broad irrevocable declaration promising not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against anyone making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation of a list of Web Services specifications. The Microsoft Open Specification Promise has been published on the company's Interoperability web site. It applies individually to each of a list of some thirty-five (35) Covered Specifications, including specifications being developed at OASIS, W3C, WS-I, and elsewhere. According to Microsoft's announcement, the Open Specification Promise (OSP) "provides broad use of Microsoft patented technology necessary to implement a list of covered specifications. The goal of the OSP is to provide our customers and partners with additional options for implementing interoperable solutions." The published promise said to offer a "simple and clear way to assure that the broadest audience of developers and customers working with commercial or open source software can implement [the named Web Services] specifications through a simplified method of sharing of technical assets." The Open Specification Promise (OSP) is similar in many respects to patent non-assertion covenants and patent pledges provided by Computer Associates, IBM, Nokia, Novell, Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems in various contexts. [Full context]

• [June 15, 2006]   Sun Microsystems Publishes Non-Assertion Covenant for SAML Implementations.    Sun Microsystems has issued a 'SAML Non-Assertion Covenant' in connection with OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) specifications being created by the OASIS Security Services (SAML) TC. Sun's unilateral, voluntary waiver of its right to enforce possibly relevant patent claims alleviates the burden upon implementers to negotiate license terms, eliminates paperwork, and creates a favorable environment for the develoment of open source software. This most recent example of a non-assertion covenant follows Sun's declaration in connection with ODF: on September 30, 2005 Sun Microsystems published a declaration of non-enforcement of its U.S. and foreign patents against any implementation of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification or of any subsequent version of ODF. This non-assertion covenant was praised as a creative mechanism for patent management in the OASIS open standards development context. Similar declarations have been made by Fidelity Investments and RSA Security in relation to the SAML specification(s). [Full context]

• [March 17, 2006]   WS-Transfer, WS-Eventing, and WS-Enumeration Specifications Submitted to W3C.    On March 15, 2006, W3C acknowledged receipt of three Member Submissions from leading industry partners including BEA Systems, Computer Associates, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sonic Software, Systinet, and TIBCO Software for WS-* specifications relating to resources, events, and management. Also on March 15, 2006 a Joint White Paper Toward Converging Web Service Standards for Resources, Events, and Management was published by Hewlett Packard Corporation, IBM Corporation, Intel Corporation, and Microsoft Corporation. The Joint White Paper outlines a plan to "develop a common set of specifications for resources, events, and management that can be broadly supported across multiple platforms." The common functionality covered by these specifications is intended to include: (1) "Resources: the ability to create, read, update and delete information using Web services; (2) Events: the ability to connect Web services together using an event driven architecture based on publish and subscribe; (3) Management: providing a Web service model for building system and application management solutions, focusing on resource management." For information management, two new WS-* specifications (WS-Transfer Addendum, WS-ResourceTransfer) and a new version of an existing specification (WS-MetadataExchange) will be produced by HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. "These specifications layer on and compose with WS-Transfer and WS-Enumeration, which HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft will support." The new specifications will be published and refined over the next 18-24 months; some of these specifications will be published as early as 2Q06. The specifications will be refined using the WS-* workshop process, with eventual submission to a standards organization. [Full context]

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News Stories from 2005

• [December 28, 2005]   U.S. Federal Enterprise Architecture Data Reference Model (DRM) Version 2.0.    On December 21, 2005, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) Data Reference Model (DRM) Final Version 2.0. The FEA Data Reference Model is companion to four other FEA reference models "designed to facilitate cross-agency analysis and the identification of duplicative investments, gaps, and opportunities for collaboration within and across Federal Agencies." Other Federal Enterprise Architecture models include: the Business Reference Model (BRM), the Service Component Reference Model (SRM), the Technical Reference Model (TRM), and the Performance Reference Model (PRM). "In contrast to many failed architecture efforts in the past, the U.S. Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) is entirely business-driven. Its foundation is the Business Reference Model, which describes the government's Lines of Business and its services. This business-based foundation provides a common framework for improvement in a variety of key areas such as: budget allocation, information sharing, performance measurement, budget/performance integration, cross-agency collaboration, e-government, and component-based architectures." An unofficial (draft) version 0.3 FEA DRM XML Schema and a sample XML instance document have been posted for inspection. This XML Schema has been updated (relative to version 0.2) to bring it into line with the DRM Version 2.0 Abstract Model. The FEA DRM is a framework whose primary purpose is "to enable information sharing and reuse across the federal government via the standard description and discovery of common data and the promotion of uniform data management practices. As a reference model, the DRM is presented as an abstract framework from which concrete implementations may be derived. Its abstract nature will enable agencies to use multiple implementation approaches, methodologies and technologies while remaining consistent with the foundational principles of the DRM." The DRM describes artifacts which can be generated from the data architectures of federal government agencies. The DRM provides a flexible and standards-based approach to accomplish its purpose. The scope of the DRM is broad, as it may be applied within a single agency, within a Community of Interest (COI), or cross-COI." [Full context]

• [December 07, 2005]   IT Vendors Promote Service Component Architecture (SCA).    BEA Systems, IBM, IONA, Oracle, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, and Sybase have published a version 0.9 release of royalty-free specifications defining a Service Component Architecture (SCA). Xcalia and Zend Technologies have participated in the joint announcement with reference to their contributions on the companion Service Data Objects (SDO) specification. The SCA/SDO announcement describes a broad industry effort to "develop specifications and resulting collaborative technologies that simplify how organizations create and implement applications in a Service Oriented Architecture. Service Component Architecture (SCA) aims to simplify the development of creating business services, while the Service Data Objects (SDO) specification provides for accessing data residing in multiple locations and formats." The Service Component Architecture "provides an open, technology neutral model for implementing IT services that are defined in terms of a business function and make middleware functions more accessible to the application developer. SCA also provides a model for the assembly of business solutions from collections of individual services, with control over aspects of the solution such as access methods and security. Its Assembly Model describes (1) a model for the assembly of tightly coupled services and (2) a model for the assembly of loosely coupled service-oriented systems." SCA "divides up the steps in the building of a Service Oriented Application into two major parts: first, the implementation of components which provide services and which consume other services; second, the assembly of components to build the business application through the wiring of service references to services." [Full context]

• [November 11, 2005]   Open Invention Network Collects Patents to Promote Royalty-Free Linux.    A joint announcement from IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony describes the creation of a new Open Invention Network (OIN) dedicated to the promotion of technology innovation around Linux. Led by CEO Jerry Rosenthal, former Vice President of IBM's Intellectual Property and Licensing business, the partnership will build a collection of patents and "offer them royalty-free to promote Linux and spur innovation." The company is said to be the first of its kind: "Patents owned by Open Invention Network will be available on a royalty-free basis to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux operating system or certain Linux-related applications." Patent pools are more often created for offensive purposes: major patent holders in a narrow application domain privately agree to cross-license patents to each other, while creating an unopposable cartel that can fix royalty fees and demand payment from any other (non-cartel) companies. The Open Invention Network is something of the opposite: a patent pool created to promote patent non-enforcement, or non-aggressive patent use, to reduce patent litigation and create an opportunity for innovation in a patent-free (or mostly patent-free) global context. The Open Invention Network represents the latest in a series of similar patent contribution initiatives designed to limit the deleterious, stifling effect of patented technology in certain computing application areas. Previously, CA, IBM, Nokia, Novell, OSDL, RedHat, and Sun have announced programs of "patent disarmament" through contribution of patents to royalty-free use, creating the basis for a patent commons. According to several statements from Jerry Rosenthal and others, the goal of the OIN collaboration is not revenue collection, but freedom to innovate in a patent-free framework. [Full context]

• [November 09, 2005]   Business Rules and Web Architecture: W3C Creates Rule Interchange Format WG.    W3C has announced the formation of a new Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group tasked with the challenge of producing a "standard means for exchanging rules on the Web. Rules constitute a key element of the Semantic Web vision, allowing integration, derivation, and transformation of data from multiple sources in a distributed, transparent and scalable manner." The Rule Interchange Format WG has been chartered at least through November 2007 to "produce a core rule language plus extensions which together allow rules to be translated between rule languages and thus transferred between rule systems. The Working Group will have to balance the needs of a diverse community — including Business Rules and Semantic Web users — specifying extensions for which it can articulate a consensus design and which are sufficiently motivated by use cases." According to Tim Berners-Lee, announcing the new activity at the Information Juggernaut event in Galway, Ireland, the chartered work builds upon the foundation of years of industry and research work in rules languages. "bringing together business rules vendors, user companies, rule language designers, and Semantic Web developers to create a rules standard as an important step in achieving the full power of the Semantic Web." Creating a common Rule Interchange Format for the Web is expected to "provide a way to represent established and new rule languages, allowing rules written for one application to be published, shared, merged and re-used in other applications and by other rule engines. This in turn facilitates the integration of individual, departmental, corporate, and public data sources and the ability to draw new conclusions. A Rule Interchange Format will, for example, help businesses find new customers, doctors validate prescriptions, and banks process loan applications. With a Rule Interchange Format for the Web, conventional rules technology will be enhanced not only by the usual economies of standardization, but specifically by what the Semantic Web infrastructure provides: the ability to exchange and merge rules from different sources." [Full context]

• [October 28, 2005]   IBM Submits Web Services Polling (WS-Polling) Specification to W3C.    On October 26, 2005, the World Wide Web Consortium published a W3C Member Submission from IBM presenting the Web Services Polling (WS-Polling) specification. WS-Polling defines a mechanism to deliver messages destined to an unreachable endpoint by allowing the destination to poll the source for messages targeted for it. The WS-Polling specification is part of the WS-* "Composable Architecture" which uses the XML, SOAP, and WSDL extensibility models, designed to be composed with other WS-* specification "to provide a rich set of tools to provide security in the Web services environment. The WS-Polling specification specifically relies on other Web service specifications to provide secure, reliable, and/or transacted message delivery and to express Web service and client policy." WS-Polling defines a mechanism through which "an endpoint may initiate a connection to another endpoint for the purposes of allowing messages from the destination/service endpoint to be delivered back to the source/client. When sending SOAP messages in an environment where the two endpoints (source and destination) are not able to freely open connection in both directions, delivery of asynchronous messages becomes problematic. [For example], if the initiator (client) of a Web service call is behind a firewall, any messages initiated from the service back to the client can not be delivered; another common case is where the client does not have a SOAP listener (i.e., server) running to receive asynchronous messages. In order for the service to deliver a message to the "unreachable" client endpoint it becomes necessary for the client to initiate the connection, thus allowing the message to be sent back on the response flow of the connection." The WS-Polling draft is related to three principal W3C specifications: SOAP 1.2 (W3C Recommendation produced by the XML Protocol Working Group), Web Services Addressing 1.0 (developed by the Web Services Addressing Working Group), and WSDL 2.0 (developed by the Web Services Description Working Group). [Full context]

• [October 21, 2005]   Free OpenOffice.org 2.0 Office Suite Supports OASIS OpenDocument Format.    The OpenOffice.org Project is an open source community dedicated to building a leading international office suite which is free, will run on all major platforms, and provides access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format. The developers recently announced the release of OpenOffice.org Version 2.0 as a "productivity suite that individuals, governments, and corporations around the world have been expecting for the last two years." OpenOffice.org 2.0 is described as an "open, feature-rich multi-platform office productivity suite with a user interface and functionality is very similar to other products (e.g., Microsoft Office, Lotus SmartSuite); but in contrast to these commercial products, OpenOffice.org is absolutely free for download, use, and distribution. This multiplatform and multilingual office suite is compatible with all other major office suites." Other new or enhanced features in OpenOffice.org 2.0 include: a new Mail Merge Wizard; support for nested tables; support of digital signatures, with certificates stored in the regular repositories; native installation mechanisms (.MSI, .CAB; RPM files for Linux); Calc module expanded to support up to 65,536 rows of data; floating toolbars; enhanced PivotTable support for data analysis; additional animation effects and slide transitions; enhanced word count featues. According to the announcement, OpenOffice.org 2.0 "runs natively on Windows, GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris, Mac OS X (X11) and several other platforms, Supported by dozens of professional companies, OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be available in more than 60 languages. OpenOffice.org is increasingly the choice of businesses and governments throughout the world, and earlier versions have been downloaded over 49 million times since the project's inception." [Full context]

• [October 14, 2005]   First Release of the U.S. National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).    On October 7, 2005, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and their associated domains announced the first release of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Version 0.1. NIEM "establishes a single standard XML foundation for exchanging information between DHS, DOJ, and supporting domains, such as Justice, Emergency Management, and Intelligence." NIEM is a U.S. interagency initiative created to "provide the foundation and building blocks for national-level interoperable information sharing and data exchange. The NIEM project was formally announced on February 28, 2005, constituted as a joint venture between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), with outreach to other departments and agencies. NIEM establishes a single standard XML foundation for exchanging information between DHS, DOJ, and supporting domains such as Justice, Emergency Management, and Intelligence." The NIEM 0.1 release contains a collection of fifty-four (54) XML schemas and a Component Mapping Template for use by reviewers. Based in part upon the Global Justice XML Data Model (Global JXDM), NIEM 0.1 defines 250 types, of which 54 are Universal, 107 are Common, and 89 are Domain Specific. It also defines 2213 Properties, of which 273 are classified as Universal, 943 are Common, and 997 are Domain Specific. The NIEM Core collection of namespace includes a Universal namespace that holds components and properties utilized across all domains, and a Common namespace for components and properties that could be utilized by a minimum of two domains. The NIEM model also includes a Structure namespace for components and properties that identify functional relationships between information components. Naming conventions for XML components in the Schemas follow the major published Naming and Design (NDR) specifications: use of UpperCamelCase for XML types and elements, but lowerCamelCase for attribute names. [Full context]

• [October 13, 2005]   IBM and SAP AG Release WS-BPEL Extension for Sub-Processes (BPEL-SPE).    A technical white paper published jointly by IBM and SAP for WS-BPEL Extension for Sub-Processes: BPEL-SPE proposes an extension to WS-BPEL "that allows for the definition of sub-processes that can be reused within the same or across multiple WS-BPEL processes." A formal language specification defining the precise syntax and semantics of the BPEL-SPE extension is planned for later release. The design paper recognizes that "the problem of modularization and reuse in the BPEL language has been intensively discussed in different contexts, including the work on the upcoming WS-BPEL standard. However, the outcomes of those discussions show that there is no consensus on how the problem should be resolved. The paper describes different invocation scenarios and introduces a coordination protocol to be used for interoperable invocation of sub-processes across infrastructures from different vendors." A backgrounder document prepared by Ivana Trickovic (Standards Architect in SAP's Platform Ecosystem Industry Standards Group) discusses in detail the problem process designers are facing using the WS-BPEL language with respect to modularization and reuse of WS-BPEL process fragments or processes. This document explains why the authors believe the issue should be addressed directly in the language rather than simply as a modeling tool issue. According to IBM's summary statement, the BPEL language currently "does not support the explicit definition of business process 'fragments' that can be invoked from another (or the same) business process. The only way to approximate similar behavior today is by defining a complete business process as an independent service and invoking it using an <invoke> activity. The fact that the invoked activity is really implemented as another process is completely hidden from the parent process, in other words, there is no chance to establish any coupling of process instance lifecycles." A sub-process in this context is understood as "a fragment of BPEL code that can be reused within a process or across multiple processes. It may also be a long-running process, which includes interactions with other partners. However, the interaction of a subprocess with its parent process is typically limited to the initiating request message and the final reply message. A sub-process may be defined either locally within another BPEL process and reused only within that process or as a BPEL process and reused across other BPEL processes, where the latter kind of process can be used both as a sub-process as well as a business process on its own." [Full context]

• [October 04, 2005]   Sun Patent Non-Assertion Covenant for OpenDocument Offers Model for Standards.    On September 30, 2005 Sun Microsystems published a declaration of non-enforcement of its U.S. and foreign patents against any implementation of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification or of any subsequent version of ODF. This non-assertion covenant is being praised as a creative mechanism for patent management in the OASIS context — a "model for patent protection that doesn't involve the glorification of software patents." Sun's public non-assertion declaration may be summarized unofficially as an irrevocable covenant not to enforce any of its enforceable U.S. or foreign patents against any implementation of the OASIS OpenDocument specification; however, this commitment is not necessarily applicable to any individual, corporation, or other entity that asserts, threatens or seeks to enforce any patents or patent rights against any OpenDocument Implementation. Clarification of terms governing the use of the OASIS OpenDocument Standard is especially important because the final version of the Enterprise Technical Reference Model Version 3.5 published by The Commonwealth of Massachusetts and made effective on September 21, 2005 features the OpenDocument specification. As presented in the ETRM Version 3.5 Introduction and Information Domain final documents, the Commonwealth defines open formats as "specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community, affirmed and maintained by a standards body and are fully documented and publicly available." Three (3) Open Format Technology Specifications are identified in ETRM Version 3.5: [1] OASIS Open Document Format For Office Applications (OpenDocument) v. 1.0; [2] Plain Text Format; [3] Hypertext Document Format v. 4.01. The Sun OpenDocument Patent Statement was published apparently in response to a question about whether users of the OpenDocument standard would need to ask Sun for a [formal, explicit, executable] license, and whether users would have to explicitly give Sun a reciprocal license. Sun updated its vintage-2002 declaration with a clarification that no such license application or license paperwork are necessary. The non-assertion covenant is a public, blanket declaration asserting the freedom of anyone to implement the OpenDocument specification without needing to transact paperwork or otherwise to ask for Sun's permission. [Full context]

• [October 03, 2005]   OASIS Members Form Web Services Transaction (WS-TX) Technical Committee.    A new OASIS technical committee has been chartered to define a set of protocols to coordinate the outcomes of distributed application actions. The OASIS Web Services Transaction (WS-TX) Technical Committee will continue work on technologies now represented by the Web Services Transactions Specifications published by Arjuna Technologies, BEA Systems, Hitachi, IBM, IONA Technologies, and Microsoft. Three existing specifications will be submitted to the WS-TX Technical Committee as input to initial committee work: Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination), Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction), and Web Services Business Activity Framework (WS-BusinessActivity). Other contributions and changes to the input documents will be accepted for consideration, based on technical merit, insofar as they conform to the TC's published charter. The so-called Web Services Transactions specifications "define mechanisms for transactional interoperability between Web services domains and provide a means to compose transactional qualities of service into Web services applications. These specifications describe an extensible coordination framework (WS-Coordination) and specific coordination types for: (1) short duration, ACID transactions (WS-AtomicTransaction) and (2) longer running business transactions (WS-BusinessActivity)." Specifically, the OASIS TC proposes to "specify an extensible framework for developing coordination protocols through continued refinement of the Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination v 1.0) specification. In addition, the TC will continue refinement of protocols for two coordination types that use the WS-Coordination framework: atomic transaction (AT) and business activity (BA), based on the Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction v 1.0) and Web Services Business Activity (WS-BusinessActivity v 1.0) specifications as submitted to the committee. Members of the TC will "continue further refinement and finalization of the input documents to produce as output modular specifications that standardize the concepts, WSDL documents and XML schema renderings required to coordinate actions of distributed applications that conform to the specifications." [Full context]

• [September 26, 2005]   Massachusetts Supports OASIS OpenDocument in Final Reference Model V3.5.    The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has announced publication of its final version of the Enterprise Technical Reference Model Version 3.5, which became effective on September 21, 2005. Most of the Reference Model remains unchanged from the draft Enterprise Technical Reference Model Version 3.0 released in March 2005. ETRM Final Version 3.5 incorporates a new Discipline for Data Formats within the Information Domain, including Open Formats. The decision of the Commonwealth's Information Technology Division (ITD) has been watched closely in recent weeks, given the expectation that other jurisdictions may follow the lead of Massachusetts in its definition of Open Format and in requiring the use of non-proprietary, open data formats for official documents and archives. The ETRM Open Formats Technology Area "addresses open standards and specifications for the presentation of data as office documents, text, numbers, maps, graphics, video and audio. The selection of format must consider the access channel being used (Web, PDA, cell phone), the nature of the data and structure (legal requirements that address preservation of document structure), and ease of accessibility for users. The open formats identified below do not yet address all data types. Future versions of the ETRM will address open formats for map, graphics, video and audio data." The Commonwealth defines open formats as "specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community, affirmed and maintained by a standards body and are fully documented and publicly available. It is the policy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that all official records of the Commonwealth be created and saved in an acceptable format." Three Open Formats are identified in ETRM Version 3.5: [1] OASIS Open Document Format For Office Applications (OpenDocument) v. 1.0; [2] Plain Text Format; [3] Hypertext Document Format v. 4.01. According to the published Guidelines and Description, the XML-based OpenDocument format "must be used for office documents such as text documents (.odt), spreadsheets (.ods), and presentations (.odp). [Full context]

• [September 17, 2005]   WS-Management Specifications Submitted to DMTF for Standardization.    Microsoft and eleven industry partners have submitted the Web Services for Management (WS-Management) specification (Version 1, Edition 3) to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) for "further refinement and finalization as a Web services-based management standard." Originally published in October 2004 by AMD, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun, the WS-Management specification has been issued in two new major releases based upon interoperability testing. The co-authors now include Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), BMC Software Inc., Computer Associates, Dell Inc., Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Intel Corporation, Microsoft Corp., NEC Corp., Novell Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Symantec Corp., and WBEM Solutions Inc. WS-Management is designed to meet four key requirements: (1) "Constrain Web services protocols and formats so Web services can be implemented in management services with a small footprint, in both hardware and software; (2) Define minimum requirements for compliance without constraining richer implementations; (3) Ensure composability with other Web services specifications; (4) Minimize additional mechanism beyond the current Web service architecture." The WS-Management Web Services specification "addresses the cost and complexity of IT management by providing a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across their entire IT infrastructure. By using Web services to manage IT systems, deployments that support WS-Management will enable IT managers to remotely access devices on their networks, regardless of whether the systems are just out of the box, powered down or otherwise unavailable." According to the description from Sun Microsystems, the WS-Management specification "identifies a core set of Web service specifications and usage requirements to expose a common set of operations that are central to all systems management, supporting interoperability between management applications and managed resources. [Full context]

• [September 08, 2005]   W3C Publishes QA Handbook and Related Quality Assurance Specifications.    On September 06, 2005, W3C announced the publication of The QA Handbook, developed by members of the Quality Assurance Working Group as the latest of the W3C QA Framework documents. While some features of specification QA presented in the document are unique to W3C's technical process and software automation tools, several of the resources referenced by The QA Handbook have broad applicability to formal specification development in any similar standards organization. Release of the The QA Handbook follows publication of the QA Framework Specification Guidelines, QA Framework Primer, and Variability in Specifications Note in August 2005. The Handbook and related resources have been produced through the W3C Quality Assurance Activity and its maintenance program. The QA Handbook documents a set of good practices that helps Working Groups improve their deliverables and keep their schedules. It is a non-normative handbook describing "processes and operational aspects of certain quality assurance practices of W3C's Working Groups, with particular focus on testability and test topics. It is intended for Working Group chairs and team contacts. It aims to help them to avoid known pitfalls and benefit from experiences gathered from the W3C Working Groups themselves. It provides techniques, tools, and templates that should facilitate and accelerate their work. Supported by real-world stories and examples, it offers a practical guide to applying good practices and quality assurance techniques to WG activities, especially developing Recommendations and test materials." [Full context]

• [September 08, 2005]   OASIS Advances CAP and Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) Specifications.    Two specifications developed by the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee have advanced toward standardization, while work commences on a third XML-related standard for messaging. The Emergency Management TC was chartered to create incident and emergency-related standards for data interoperability. Working closely with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Emergency Interoperability Consortium (EIC), members of the TC are collaborating on the design and development of a suite of specifications under the name Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL). EDXL is a broad initiative to create an integrated framework for a wide range of emergency data exchange standards to support operations, logistics, planning and finance. EM TC participates in the design of format specifications (e.g., XML Schemas) based upon technical requirements provided by DHS and EIC. The Common Alert Protocol (CAP) v1.1 specification has recently been submitted by the Emergency Management TC to OASIS for consideration as an OASIS Standard. CAP functions both as a standalone protocol and as a payload for EDXL messages. It supports information exchange in order to advance incident preparedness and response to emergency situations. CAP 1.0 was successfully standardized in March of 2004. Voting on the CAP version 1.1 specification for approval as a Standard begins September 16, 2005. The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is a "simple but general format for exchanging all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings over all kinds of networks. CAP allows a consistent warning message to be disseminated simultaneously over many different warning systems, thus increasing warning effectiveness while simplifying the warning task. CAP also facilitates the detection of emerging patterns in local warnings of various kinds, such as might indicate an undetected hazard or hostile act." The TC has also released a Public Review Draft for the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) Distribution Element v1.0 specification. The primary goal of the EDXL project is to "facilitate emergency information sharing and data exchange across the local, state, tribal, national and non-governmental organizations of different professions that provide emergency response and management services. EDXL will accomplish this goal by focusing on the standardization of specific messages (messaging interfaces) to facilitate emergency communication and coordination particularly when more than one profession is involved." [Full context]

• [August 26, 2005]   IBM and SAP AG Propose WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People).    An informal specification describing a proposed extension to the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) has been released by IBM and SAP AG in the form of a white paper WS-BPEL Extension for People — BPEL4People. The paper describes business scenarios where users are involved in business processes and defines appropriate extensions to WS-BPEL to address these. The joint authors from IBM and SAP maintain that in order to support a broad range of scenarios that involves people within business processes, a WS-BPEL extension is required. BPEL4People "is defined in a way that it is layered on top of the BPEL language so that its features can be composed with the BPEL core features whenever needed"; additional BPEL extensions may be also be introduced which may use the BPEL4People extensions introduced in the white paper. According to the paper Abstract, "Human user interactions are currently not covered by the Web Services Business Processes Execution Language (WS-BPEL), which is primarily designed to support automated business processes based on Web services. In practice, however, many business process scenarios require user interaction. The spectrum of activities that make up general purpose business processes is much broader than simply activities of which can be assumed to be interactions with Web services with no additional prerequisite behavior. People often participate in the execution of business processes introducing new aspects, such as human interaction patterns. Workflow tools already cater for the orchestration of user interactions." For example, "people can be involved in business processes as a special kind of implementation of an activity — a communication step which may be called people activity. In some scenarios it is desirable to define which people are eligible to start a certain business process. During the lifetime of a long-running business process, conditions that require human involvement can occur; a process may be stuck because no one has been assigned to perform a particular task. In addition to simple task selection and execution actions, there are more complex patterns in the way humans interact with the process instances, and these need to be handled by BPEL4People. Sometimes it is not clear who should perform the task in hand. Escalation takes place if a task does not meet its modeled time constraints. If this occurs, a notification is sent to one or several people specified as escalation recipients using a people assignment definition." A companion article authored by Ivana Trickovic (SAP) provides additional rationale for creating the BPEL4People extension: "Currently there is no standard that spans both the service orchestration and user interactions. Rather then developing a new specification that particularly covers user interactions, SAP and IBM determined that it is most suitable to extend the existing BPEL specification, or more precisely, version 2.0... The BPEL4People extension is layered on top of the BPEL language so that its features can be composed with the BPEL core features. It is envisaged that additional BPEL extensions may be introduced that may in turn use the BPEL4People extension. In this way it can be avoided to build a monolithic specification that would contain numerous features and rather be pursued a more modular approach by building separate extensions on top of the BPEL core features. [Full context]

• [August 25, 2005]   DITA Open Toolkit 1.1: A Reference Implementation for OASIS DITA 1.0.    The open source DITA Open Toolkit being developed at SourceForge.Net has been released as a major upgrade in Version 1.1. The DITA Open Toolkit application transforms XML-based DITA content (maps and topics) into deliverable formats including XHTML, Eclipse Help, HTML Help, and JavaHelp. The toolkit "uses open source solution of ANT, XSLT, and Java to implement transformation functions from DITA content (XML-encoded data in maps and topics) into different deliverable formats. The whole process works like a pipeline. The pipeline input is DITA map, DITA XML files and property files. And the pipeline output is XHTML, Eclipse help, PDF, JavaHelp, etc. depending on what output user selects. The pipeline consists of various modules which performs different functions. The Toolkit implements a two-pass, map-driven architecture that resolves any conditional properties and content references on the first pass, then applies transformations to the normalized files on the second pass." The highlight of the version 1.1 release is implementation of the OASIS DITA 1.0 standard for DITA DTDs and Schemas: the Toolkit now provides reference implementation support for OASIS DITA 1.0, approved as an OASIS Standard in April 2005. A DITA map might contain topicrefs that reference topics using either the older IBM doctypes (e.g., the "1.3.2" DTDs) or the OASIS doctypes; each will be processed according to its own DTD. The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is "an XML-based, end-to-end architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering readable information as discrete, typed topics. It provides a technology for (1) managing readable information, (2) reusing information in many different combinations and deliverables, (3) creating online information systems such as User Assistance (help) or web resource, and (4) creating minimalist books for easier authoring and use." The DITA Open Toolkit version 1.1 provides new functionality to fulfill additional requirements, offers several feature enhancements, and fix bugs reported since the version 1.0.2 release. Providing a reference implementation for the DITA 1.0 Standard through its core transforms is the single most important feature. Release 1.1 also contains a new Eclipse transformation that produces as output a version of DITA XML that can be dynamically rendered in the Eclipse Help System. [Full context]

• [August 19, 2005]   Initiatives Ramp Up Work on XML Naming and Design Rules Specifications.    Several industry and government initiatives are now gaining momentum in their goal to craft guidelines and rules for naming XML components: XML namespace names, types, elements, attributes, code list enumerations, domain models, etc. Most of these initiatives have identical or similar goals, aimed optimizing semantic interoperability, modularity, extensibility, maintainability, and data element re-use through best-practice design of business components. One indication of increased interest in XML naming design rules/guidelines is seen in the three most recent meeting agendas of the XML.gov XML Community of Practice: the June, July, and August meetings have included major presentations by practitioners and other interested stakeholders who are seeking to design component naming models that interoperate inside and outside their domains. Some of the current design initiatives have their historical roots in the UN-CEFACT/ISO ebXML Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) and in the ebXML Technical Architecture Specification. The latter, for example, provides for consistent capitalization and naming convention across all family specifications, using "Upper Camel Case" (UCC) for XML elements [and types] and "Lower Camel Case" (LCC) for XML attribute names. [Full context]

• [August 11, 2005]   Business Narrative Markup Language (BNML) Proposed for eContracts.    Members of the OASIS LegalXML eContracts Technical Committee are considering approval of the Elkera Business Narrative Markup Language (BNML) as a host schema to serve as a base structural markup language for eContract documents. Produced by Elkera Pty Limited, BNML is a general purpose XML Schema capable of marking up most technical, legal and business narrative documents. BNML is currently defined in RELAX NG Compact syntax. In May 2005, members of the OASIS eContracts TC began a review of candidate "host schema" languages suitable for use in "Narrative Markup" required by eContracts. Evaluation was made in light of the TC's eContracts Structure Markup Preliminary Report produced by the eContracts Structure Subcommittee and the Requirements for Technical Specification based upon use cases collected in August-September 2004. An initial evaulation was made of XHTML, Structural Markup Document, DITA, S1000D, DocBook, BNML, WordML, TEI Text Encoding Initiative, the Open Office Markup. The eContracts TC developed a Schema Evaluation Criteria document and a corresponding Host Schema Evaluation Template for use in assessing the merits of a reduced list of candidate schemas. In July 2005, the TC produced a collection of evaluation reports for these candidates, including BNML, LegalXML Court Document format, Docbook, Open Document, Open Office, TEI Lite, Text Encoding Initiative (TEI Full), and WordML. The Business Narrative Markup Language (BNML) from Elkera has emerged as the lead candidate, which will be considered for approval as the TC's host schema in an August 17, 2005 meeting. Using simple, re-usable patterns, the Elkera BNML Schema is designed to "make it easier to develop XML authoring applications that will be easy to use and that will enhance author productivity." While some general purpose DTDs or schemas "contain a vast number of elements in an attempt to provide a smorgasbord of elements for different types of content, the core of the Elkera BNML Schema is a very small number of elements to model the generic structure of almost any kind of narrative document. To begin, an author only needs to know six or seven markup elements." [Full context]

• [August 10, 2005]   Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) Announces Patent Commons Project.    On the second day of the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, Open Source Development Labs CEO Stuart Cohen announced a new OSDL Patent Commons Project "designed to provide a central location where software patents and patent pledges will be housed for the benefit of the open source development community and industry." Several leading companies (e.g., Computer Associates, IBM, Nokia, Novell, RedHat, Sun Microsystems) have already contributed patents and patented technology to the "open source community," attempting to create a framework for patent-free software development. To date, no formal legal entity has been designated to coordinate the patent pledges, contributions, and legal declarations that would provide the structure for a patent pool. Plans for the OSDL Patent Commons Project call for the creation of a "library and database that aggregates patent pledges made by companies. The library will also aggregate other legal solutions, such as indemnification programs offered by vendors of open source software. It will include a collection of software patent licenses and software patents (issued and pending) held for the benefit of the open source community." p>Building upon patent contributions from several open source vendors, OSDL's proposal for the Patent Commons Project begins to give shape to an idea long dreamed about by open source advocates: the idea that "free software programmers [and others] could create a patent pool to support cross-licensing for free [and open source] software." [Full context]

• [August 01, 2005]   OASIS Members Form SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee.    A Call for Participation has been issued in connection with a new OASIS Service-Oriented Architecture Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee, chartered to develop, circulate, maintain, and update a set of example business profiles (adoption blueprints) which illustrate the practical deployment of services using SOA methods. Members proposing the SOA Adoption Blueprints TC state that there is often "a shortage of clear, demonstrable examples of working implementations based on real needs and requirements that can be used as best practices reference, to kickstart implementation projects and to compare implementations. One way to encourage these examples is to supply an archetypal blueprint set of business requirements and functions that can be fulfilled by SOA methods. In planning and building Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), concrete examples often are useful. SOA designers, vendors and users can reference a wealth of abstract guidelines, descriptions of functional layers and sets of specific standards or software that fulfill SOA requirements." The new Technical Committee provides a forum for continuation of work begun as the SOA Blueprints Initiative, originally founded by The Middleware Company and BEA Systems, Inc. The TC anticipates "starting with the original blueprint scenario created by The Middleware Company and its expert group. This scenario, the Generico core application set, will serve as a basic Adoption Blueprint. It is expected that additional blueprints will be developed to address other business requirement sets. Additional Adoption Blueprints may interoperate with the basic Generico blueprint, or may describe a new separate scenario." Each of the adoption blueprints "will provide a business problem statement, a set of business requirements, and a normative set of functions to be fulfilled — all on a vendor- and specification-neutral basis." Anticipated contributions from the SOA Blueprints Initiative include four documents: SOA Blueprints Initiative Definition, SOA Blueprints Concepts, SOA Blueprints Reference Example Requirements Specification, and SOA Blueprints: Occasionally Connected Profile. [Full context]

• [July 15, 2005]   IETF Atom Syndication Format Specification Declared Ready for Implementation.    With the July 14, 2005 release of the The Atom Syndication Format Version -10 specification by the IETF, the Atom Format Internet Draft has been declared an appropriate basis for implementation of Atom 1.0. Atom is an XML-based Web content and metadata syndication format. Atom will live alongside RSS Version 2.0, and is expected by many to gradually replace RSS ("RDF Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication). The The Atom Syndication Format has been produced by members of the IETF Atom Publishing Format and Protocol (atompub) Working Group under the direction of WG Co-Chairs Tim Bray and Paul Hoffman. The version -10 Internet Draft fixes a few things from the -09 draft sent to the IESG for final review. Eleven Internet drafts have been produced by the WG, beginning with Version -00 dated July 8, 2004. The IETF's specification for the Atom 1.0 data format is described as "cooked and ready to serve." According to an announcement from Tim Bray, "The Atom 1.0 spec still has one registered objection from a member of the IESG, but the WG agreed that the objection was reasonable and we think the latest draft linked above fixes it; assuming he agrees, Atom very soon becomes an IETF standard. It will eventually get an RFC number, but that may take a while, first because the RFC Editor machinery works slowly, and secondly because we have a normative reference to Ned Freed's re-work of the MIME-type RFCs, which isn't quite finished yet. Atom is "an XML-based document format that describes lists of related information known as feeds. Feeds are composed of a number of items, known as entries, each with an extensible set of attached metadata. For example, each entry has a title. The primary use case that Atom addresses is the syndication of Web content such as Weblogs and news headlines to Web sites as well as directly to user agents. However, nothing precludes it from being used for other purposes and types of content." [Full context]

• [July 14, 2005]   Microsoft and IBM Announce Submission of Security Specifications to OASIS.    An updated version of the Web Services Security Policy Language (WS-SecurityPolicy) specification has been released by IBM, Microsoft, RSA Security, and VeriSign. IBM and Microsoft have also announced that this WS-SecurityPolicy specification, together with Web Services Trust Language (WS-Trust) and Web Services Secure Conversation Language (WS-SecureConversation), will be submitted to OASIS for standardization in September 2005. The WS-SecurityPolicy specification defines a set of security policy assertions which apply to Web Services Security: SOAP Message Security, WS-Trust, and WS-SecureConversation. The July 2005 WS-SecurityPolicy Version 1.1 specification updates Version 1.0 released on December 18, 2002. It is characterized as a "public consultation draft release" appropriate for community evaluation and review; feedback on the specification is handled through the WS-* Workshop process under terms of a feedback license agreement. According to the specification Introduction, WS-Policy "defines a framework for allowing web services to express their constraints and requirements. Such constraints and requirements are expressed as policy assertions. WS-SecurityPolicy defines a set of security policy assertions for use with the WS-Policy. It defines a base set of assertions that describe how messages are to be secured. Flexibility with respect to token types, cryptographic algorithms and mechanisms used, including using transport level security is part of the design and allows for evolution over time. The intent is to provide enough information for compatibility and interoperability to be determined by web service participants along with all information necessary to actually enable a participant to engage in a secure exchange of messages." The WS-SecurityPolicy "is designed to work with the general Web Services framework, including WSDL service descriptions, UDDI businessServices and bindingTemplates and SOAP message structure and message processing model; WS-SecurityPolicy should be applicable to any version of SOAP. The current SOAP 1.2 namespace URI is used herein to provide detailed examples, but there is no intention to limit the applicability of this specification to a single version of SOAP." [Full context]

• [July 12, 2005]   Final Release of the Java XML Digital Signature API Specification (JSR 105).    Developers from Sun, IBM, and other companies have announced the final release of Java XML Digital Signature API Specification (JSR 105) Version 1.0, produced under the Java Community Process (JCP). The purpose of this Java Specification Request is "to define a standard Java API for generating and validating XML signatures. The APIs for XML digital signatures services of JSR 105 implement the W3C XML-Signature Syntax and Processing Recommendation, and provide for support of the W3C XML-Signature XPath Filter 2.0 and Exclusive XML Canonicalization Version 1.0 Recommendations. JSR 105 was developed by members of the JSR 105 Expert Group under the direction of Specification Leads Anthony Nadalin (IBM) and Sean Mullan (Sun Microsystems), who continue jointly in the role of JSR 105 Maintenance Lead. The Java Community Process under which which JSR 105 was developed is a standards framework which "produces high-quality specifications in 'Internet time' using an inclusive, consensus building approach that produces a specification, a reference implementation (to prove the specification can be implemented), and a technology compatibility kit (a suite of tests, tools, and documentation that is used to test implementations for compliance with the specification). JCP participants include the international Java community, working to develop and evolve Java technology specifications." JSR 105 has been approved in a Final Approval Ballot with votes from by Apache Software Foundation, Apple Computer, Inc., BEA Systems, Fujitsu Limited, Hewlett-Packard, IBM Corp., Intel Corp., IONA Technologies PLC, JBoss, Inc., Nortel Networks, SAP AG, and Sun Microsystems, Inc. The Java XML Digital Signature API Specification supports software development projects that need to use the JSR 105 API to generate and validate XML signatures. It is also designed for use by Java programmers "who want to create a concrete implementation of the JSR 105 API and register it as a cryptographic service of a JCA provider. A cryptographic service provider is a package or set of packages that supply a concrete implementation of a subset of the Java 2 SDK Security API cryptography features." [Full context]

• [July 08, 2005]   New Unicode Consortium Technical Report on Unicode Security Considerations.    Unicode Technical Report #36 on Unicode Security Considerations "describes some of the security considerations that programmers, system analysts, standards developers, and users should take into account [when using the Unicode Standard], and provides specific recommendations to reduce the risk of problems." A number of visual security issues have arisen in connection with (visual) spoofing, and this threat provides the basis for the technical report. The new Unicode Security Considerations Technical Report from the Unicode Consortium "provides an initial step towards reducing the risk of such problems while preserving the ability to have internationalized domain names for all the modern languages of the world." Security issues identified and addressed in the report include Internationalized Domain Names, Mixed-Script Spoofing, Single-Script Spoofing, Inadequate Rendering Support, Bidirectional Text Spoofing, Syntax Spoofing, and Numeric Spoofs. In many ways, acording to the TR introduction, "the use of Unicode makes programs much more robust and secure. When systems used a hodge-podge of different charsets for representing characters, there were security and corruption problems that resulted from differences between those charsets, or from the way in which programs converted to and from them. But because Unicode contains such a large number of characters, and because it incorporates the varied writing systems of the world, incorrect usage can expose programs or systems to possible security attacks." The authors of the Unicode Security Considerations Technical Report envision that the document "should grow over time, adding additional sections as needed. Initially, it is organized into two sections: visual security issues and non-visual security issues. Each section presents background information on the kinds of problems that can occur, then lists specific recommendations for reducing the risk of such problems." [Full context]

• [July 07, 2005]   OGC Releases GML Simple Features Profile Specification for Review.    The Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. has issued an invitation for public review of a GML Simple Features Profile specification. OGC's Geography Markup Language (GML), now being prepared for publication as ISO/IEC 19136 Geographic Information — Geography Markup Language by ISO/TC 211/WG 4 (Geographic Information/Geomatics). OGC Specification Profiles are subsets of existing OpenGIS Specifications. GML is an XML grammar written in XML Schema for the modelling, transport, and storage of geographic information. This GML profile is a product of OGC's Interoperability Program: "a global, collaborative, hands-on engineering and testing program designed to deliver prototype technologies and proven candidate specifications into the OGC's Specification Development Program. In OGC Interoperability Initiatives, international teams of technology providers work together to solve specific geo-processing interoperability problems posed by Initiative." The new GML Simple Features Profile defines a restricted but useful subset of XML-Schema and GML. The Geography Markup Language (GML) full specification defines "an XML grammar for the encoding of geographic information including geographic features, coverages, observations, topology, geometry, coordinate reference systems, units of measure, time, and value objects. The GML Simple Feature Profile candidate specification defines a set of schema encoding rules that allow simple features, such as points, lines, and polygons, to be described using GML application schemas." The Profile's restricted subset GML is designed to "lower the implementation bar of time and resources required for an organization to commit for developing software that supports GML. It is hoped that by lowering the effort required to manipulate XML encoded feature data, organizations will be encouraged to invest more time and effort to take greater advantage of GML's rich functionality." [Full context]

• [June 29, 2005]   W3C Publishes XML Key Management Specification (XKMS) 2.0 Recommendation.    The XKMS (XML Key Management Specification) Version 2.0 produced by members of the W3C XML Key Management Working Group has now been issued as a W3C Recommmendation in two parts: the main XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0) document and the companion XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0) Bindings. The primary XKMS document comprises two parts: the XML Key Information Service Specification (X-KISS) and the XML Key Registration Service Specification (X-KRSS). Advancement to a W3C Recommendation signifies a specification that, "after extensive consensus-building, has received the endorsement of W3C Members and the Director. W3C recommends the wide deployment of its Recommendations, which are similar to the standards published by other organizations." The XKMS Activity is managed as part of the W3C Technology and Society Domain. The XML Key Management Specification Version 2.0, acccording to W3C's published announcement, is "part of the W3C XML Security Framework, which includes the XML Signature, XML Encryption, and Canonical XML Recommendations. XKMS, a cornerstone of Web applications security, adds public key management to the W3C XML Security Framework. The XKMS specification defines key functionality essential for Web Services Security, as "Web applications and services security rely on interoperable components that make it possible to sign, seal, encrypt, and exchange electronic documents. All of these functions rely on management and processing of public keys. Before XKMS, these services lacked openly specified, non-proprietary interfaces (APIs). Today, XKMS offers an open, standards-based interface to key management services that has already demonstrated its utility in distributed enterprise security applications." [Full context]

• [June 28, 2005]   Candidate Recommendation for Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 2.1.    W3C's Voice Browser Working Group has released a new version of the Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 2.1 specification at Candidate Recommendation level. VoiceXML "enables integration of voice services with data services using the familiar client-server paradigm. It is is designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed initiative conversations." The W3C Voice Browser Working Group, chartered through January 31, 2007, is developing XML-based specifications to "bring the benefits of Web technology to the telephone, enabling Web developers to create applications that can be accessed via any telephone, and allowing people to interact with these applications via speech and telephone keypads. The W3C Speech Interface Framework is a suite of markup specifications aimed at realizing this goal. It covers voice dialogs (VoiceXML), speech synthesis (SSML, PLS), speech recognition (SRGS, SISR), telephony call control for voice browsers (CCXML) and other requirements for interactive voice response applications, including use by people with hearing or speaking impairments." VoiceXML Version 2.1 defines a set of eight (8) markup elements, either newly introduced or enhanced from VoiceXML 2.0; they represent features now commonly implemented by VoiceXML applications. According to the Candidate Recommendation Introduction, "the popularity of VoiceXML 2.0 spurred the development of numerous voice browser implementations early in the specification process so that VoiceXML 2.0 has been phenomenally successful in enabling the rapid deployment of voice applications that handle millions of phone calls every day. This success has led to the development of additional, innovative features that help developers build even more powerful voice-activated services. While it was too late to incorporate these additional features into version 2.0, the purpose of VoiceXML 2.1 is to formally specify the most common features to ensure their portability between platforms and at the same time maintain complete backwards-compatibility with VoiceXML 2.0." A new <data> element in VoiceXML 2.1 "allows a VoiceXML application to fetch arbitrary XML data from a document server without transitioning to a new VoiceXML document; the XML data fetched by the <data> element is bound to ECMAScript through the named variable that exposes a read-only subset of the W3C Document Object Model (DOM). V2.1 also supports dynamic concatenation of prompts using a new <foreach> element; it allows a VoiceXML application to iterate through an ECMAScript array and to execute the content contained within the <foreach> element for each item in the array. A new attribute for <grammar> supports referencing grammars dynamically; <property> now controls platform settings; <script> can references a document containing client-side ECMAScript; the <transfer> element may support any combination of bridge, blind, or consultation transfer types to transfer the user to another destination. Normative Appendix B provides the VoiceXML Schema and and non-normative Appendix A supplies a VoiceXML Document Type Definition (DTD). [Full context]

• [June 20, 2005]   U.S. Interagency FEA DRM Working Group Releases Draft XML Schema.    As part of the ongoing revision of the Data Reference Model (DRM) for the U.S. Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), the DRM Working Group has issued a new DRM XML Schema for public review. Working Group members are eager to receive feedback from reviewers as they work toward the planned October 17, 2005 release of the new multi-part FEA Data Reference Model. The draft FEA DRM XML Schema is designed to "support the DRM's primary use case of facilitation of interagency information sharing. It facilitates the inventory, cataloging, and discovery of information holdings as required by law and policy (OMB Circular A-130, Management of Federal Information Resources), with support for harmonization across the federal government of data artifacts, and establishment of authoritative data sources. The Schema provides an open and well-documented standard to enable the organization and categorization of government information, in ways that are searchable, and interoperable, across agencies." The Federal Enterprise Architecture being developed by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is described as a "business-based framework for Government-wide improvement." The FEA DRM is designed to "promote the common identification, use, and appropriate sharing of data/information across the federal government. It describes three basic standardization areas: (1) Categorization of data; (2) Exchange of data; (3) Structure of data. Information sharing can be enabled through the common categorization and structure of data. By understanding the business context of data, DRM users will be able to communicate more accurately about the content and purpose of the data they require." The newly released XML Schema for the FEA DRM is a W3C XML Schema that serves as an abstract metamodel for the DRM; it represents all three of the DRM's major standardization areas. The Data Description section "provides a standard means for agencies to describe their data and data sources clearly, concisely, and unambiguously. The Data Sharing section provides a standard means for describing interagency data exchanges and data sharing capabilities. The XML Schema's Data Context section provides a standard means for representing taxonomies that an agencies use to categorize their data." [Full context]

• [June 16, 2005]   DERI Announces Submission of Web Services Modeling Ontology (WSMO) to W3C.    The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), a leading European research institute in the field of Semantic Web and Semantic Web services technology, has announced the submission of its Web Services Modeling Ontology (WSMO) to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The multi-part submission package was made on April 04, 2005 by five institutions: DERI Innsbruck at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria; DERI Galway at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland; British Telecom (BT, UK), The Open University (UK), and SAP AG (Germany). The Web Service Modeling Ontology, according to DERI's announcement, "has been under development over the past two years within the WSMO working group. It provides a comprehensive framework for addressing Semantic Web services challenges and it is designed to help overcome the current problems of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). WSMO provides a conceptual framework and a formal language for semantically describing all relevant aspects of Web services in order to facilitate the automation of discovering, combining and invoking electronic services over the Web." The Web Service Modeling Ontology Primer presented as part of the Member Submission describes the objective of WSMO as an attempt "to solve the application integration problem for Web services by defining a coherent technology for Semantic Web services. WSMO takes the Web Service Modeling Framework (WSMF) as starting point and further refines and extends its concepts. In order to achieve automated discovery, composition, and execution of Web services a conceptual model alone is insufficient. In addition, a formal language is required to write down annotations of Web services according to the conceptual model. Logical inference-mechanisms can be applied to the descriptions in this language. In order to allow appropriate, satisfactorily logic-based reasoning on Semantic Web services, the description language has to provide reasonable expressivity, together with well-defined formal semantics. The Web Service Modeling Language (WSML) is a family of languages which formalizes WSMO." Three primary prose specifications are included in the WSMO Submission. The Web Services Modeling Ontology (WSMO) document provides ontological specifications for the core elements of Semantic Web services. This document "describes the overall structure of WSMO by its four main elements: ontologies, which provide the terminology used by other WSMO elements; Web service descriptions, which describe the functional and behavioral aspects of a Web service; goals that represent user desires; and mediators, which aim at automatically handling interoperability problems between different WSMO elements. Along with introducing the main elements of WSMO, the syntax of the formal logic language used in WSMO is provided." [Full context]

• [June 15, 2005]   Sun Service Registry for SOA Supports UDDI 3.0 and ebXML Registry 3.0 Standards.    Sun Microsystems has announced the development of a Web Services Registry and Repository for building Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). The Sun Service Registry "enables service oriented architectures by providing centralized access to discovery, use, and reuse of web services as well as secure, federated information management. By offering a unique single-registry solution that supports both UDDI v3 and ebXML Registry 3.0 standards, Sun's Service Registry enables customers to publish, manage, govern, discover and reuse services within a broad range of applications." Sun's Service Registry is based upon the open source 'freebXML' registry (ebXML Registry Reference Implementation Project), developed at SourceForge.net. The Service Registry supports secure, federated information management for any type of electronic artifacts, and information artifact discovery using domain-specific queries (SQL, XML filter query syntax). It provides for validation of information artifacts using domain-specific business rules, with version control, life cycle management, and governance of information artifacts. Both standard and user-defined taxonomies may be used to classify information artifacts, and the Sun Service Registry offers the ability to define associations between those information artifacts based on custom, fine-grained role based access control. Notification of changes to information artifacts may be sent to subscribers, recorded in a complete audit trail and event log of changes." Common use cases for Sun's Service Registry include: (1) "Publication, management, governance, discovery and reuse of Web Services and related SOA Artifacts; (2) Taxonomy management; (3) XML Schema management; (4) Vocabulary Management; (5) Business Process registry; (6) Medical content repository. It features a single registry solution supports wide customer adoption across diverse domains." Development of the Sun Service Registry was guided by a realization that the "ability to register, discover, and govern Web services is an essential requirement for any Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation. This need may not be fully appreciated in the early stages of an SOA roll-out when dealing with a small number of services. However, large organizations will typically need to support a large number of Web services, and as the number of services deployed grows to dozens or hundreds, centralized facilities for access and control of service metadata and artifacts becomes critical. A service registry provides these capabilities and is a key infrastructural component and cornerstone for SOA deployments." [Full context]

• [June 14, 2005]   DMTF Releases Draft Server Management Command Line Protocol Specification (SMASH CLP).    A Version 1.0 Preliminary Standard defining the Server Management Command Line Protocol Specification (SM CLP) has been released by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The document "specifies a common command line syntax and message protocol semantics for managing computer resources in Internet, enterprise, and service provider environments." Statements of support for SMASH CLP have been provided by Avocent, Dell, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, The Open Group, Peppercon, RLX Technologies, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), and Sun Microsystems. The SMASH CLP specification addresses "the growing need to rely on multi-vendor, out-of-band hardware and software management solutions as core components of interoperable, heterogeneous enterprise-wide management solution. By the extending the DMTF Specifications to include a CIM-based command line protocol for managing out-of-band and out-of-service devices, the DMTF comes closer to realizing its vision of enabling end-to-end, multi-vendor interoperability in management systems." The principal goal of the specification is to "define a light-weight, human-oriented command line protocol which is also suitable for scripting environments. This includes a direct mapping to a subset of the CIM Schema. The command line protocol will specify the syntax and semantics used to allow the manipulation of the Managed Elements within servers, as collections or individually." The SMASH CLP specification builds upon the DMTF Common Information Model (CIM), which includes an implementation-neutral schema for describing overall management information in a network/enterprise environment. The DMTF Command Line Protocol defines XML output data ('clpxml') as one of three structured data formats; CSV (Comma Separated Value) mode and modes for plain text output are also allowed. "XML was chosen as a supported output format due to its acceptance in the industry, establishment as a standard, and need for Clients to import data obtained through the CLP into other applications." Specification Appendix B supplies the Command Response XML Schema required for use in by implementations that support XML message data. [Full context]

• [June 06, 2005]   Eclipse Announces Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Version 1.0.    The Eclipse Foundation has announced general availability of the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project version 1.0. The BIRT Project "exploits the convergence of analytics and operations in application development, with its trend toward embedding BI functionality within Java applications. Its goal is to allow Java developers to easily integrate business intelligence and reporting capability into enterprise Java applications and commercial products." Eclipse is a not-for-profit "open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. Eclipse provides extensible tools and frameworks that span the software development lifecycle, including support for modeling, language development environments for Java, C/C++ and others, testing and performance, business intelligence, rich client applications and embedded development." The Eclipse open platform for tool integration uses a "common public license that provides royalty free source code and world wide redistribution rights. Eclipse based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor environment." The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project was created as a top level Eclipse project in September 2004. The release of BIRT version 1.0 "marks the culmination of Eclipse community participation during which hundreds of members of the community provided their feedback to shape the future of the project. BIRT has been downloaded 9,000 times since a preview version was made available in late February." BIRT version 1.0 includes a report designer, a report engine, and a complete set of APIs which provide the ability to integrate and extend BIRT. The Eclipse Report Designer is "an Eclipse-based desktop authoring environment that generates reports based on a comprehensive XML-based report design. In addition, it provides a rich business chart generation capability." [Full context]

• [June 02, 2005]   Microsoft Announces Adoption of XML for Default File Formats in 'Office 12'.    Microsoft Corporation has announced its plan to use XML schemas in the new "Microsoft Office Open XML Formats" for its next version of Microsoft Office editions, now referenced under the code-name "Office 12." Although binary formats will be supported as well, for example in the ZIP package format and the 'Excel 12 Binary Workbook (.xlsb), Office 12 will use XML in its "default" file formats for Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which "are expected to be released in the second half of 2006." The new XML file formats are designed as an "extension of the WordprocessingML and SpreadsheetML schemas introduced in previous versions of Office," and are intended to be interoperable with binary formats in Office 2000 and later. Free tools will be made available to "enable users of Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003 to open and save to the new formats. Documents created with the current binary file formats in Office also will be fully compatible with Office 12 applications, so workers can save documents to their current formats and exchange those documents with people using 'Office 12'; when they upgrade to 'Office 12,' they can continue to use their existing binary documents." Similar to the XML-based technology documented in the OASIS Standard Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument), the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats use ZIP to package and compress constituent parts of compound XML documents. A white paper "The Microsoft Office Open XML Format: Preview for Developers" provides details on the XML File Structure. Each file is composed of "a collection of multiple XML parts describing file data, metadata, customer data. Non-XML parts supported as native files" (e.g., images, VBA projects, OLE objects), and XML structures support the encoding relationships that define any specific file structure. ZIP itself provides the wrapper, or container, providing compression and CRC-based integrity checking for individual file components. [Full context]

• [May 27, 2005]   New Release of Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) from SourceForge.    SourceForge developers have issued two recent updates to Version 3 of the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML). Considered to be the most widely deployed data mining standard, PMML is an XML markup language used to describe statistical and data mining models. Formally defined in a W3C XML Schema language, PMML "describes the inputs to data mining models, the transformations used prior to prepare data for data mining, and the parameters which define the models themselves. PMML is used for a wide variety of applications, including applications in finance, e-business, direct marketing, manufacturing, and defense. PMML is complementary to several other data mining standards: its XML interchange format is supported by XML for Analysis (XMLA), JSR 73, and 'SQL/MM Part 6: Data Mining'. As of PMML Version 3.0.2, the specification is said to represent a mature standard such that deployment through the creation of PMML scoring engines is now straight-forward. For PMML version 3.1 and following the development team will continue to add new statistical and data-mining models, reducing the need to use approved extension mechanisms. They also plan to enhance support for data preparation, which is still a labor-intensive task for some applications. PMML specification development has been advanced for several years by the independent, vendor-led Data Mining Group (DMG), though end user companies are now showing heightened interest. According to a published "Overview of PMML Version 3.0" by Stefan Raspl (IBM), PMML is an application and system independent interchange format for statistical and data mining models. More precisely, the goal of PMML is to encapsulate a model in an application and system independent fashion so that two different applications (the PMML Producer and Consumer) can use it. PMML Version 3.0 adds the ability to compose certain data mining operations. For example, the outputs of regression models can be used as the inputs to other models (model sequencing) and a decision tree or regression model can be used to combine the outputs of several embedded models (model selection)." Three new models in PMML Version 3 include rule sets, support vector machines, and text models. [Full context]

• [May 24, 2005]   W3C Workshop to Address Improved Interoperability of Schema-Aware Software.    W3C has issued a Call for Participation in connection with the June 21-22, 2005 "Workshop on XML Schema 1.0 User Experiences," to be held at the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. The deadline for submission of a user experience report has been extended through May 27, 2005. The purpose of this W3C Workshop is to "gather concrete reports of user experience with XML Schema 1.0, and examine the full range of usability, implementation, and interoperability problems around the specification and its test suite. Topics of discussion include, but are not limited to, the use of XML Schema in vocabulary design, Web Services description and toolkits, XHTML, XML Query, and XML Schema editors." The W3C XML Schema specification was released in a Second Edition Recommendation on October 28, 2004. This Second Edition incorporated the changes dictated by the corrections to errors found in the first edition, published as a W3C Recommendation on May 2, 2001. Since its approval as a W3C Recommendation, XML Schema 1.0 "has been widely adopted by vendors and as a foundation for other specifications in the Web Services area, in XML query systems, and elsewhere." The W3C Workshop on XML Schema 1.0 User Experiences will provide an opportunity for users to identify usability problems, to document the most serious interoperability problems users have experienced with schema-aware software, to design improvements to the XML Schema test suite, and to discuss future work to improve interoperability of schema-aware software. As with other W3C Workshops, this "Workshop on XML Schema 1.0 User Experiences" is open to the public, but will be limited to 60 attendees. Participants are required to submit a user experience report (by May 27, 2005); these papers will be included in the published proceedings of the Workshop. [Full context]

• [May 19, 2005]   OASIS Advances Common Alerting Protocol and Emergency Data Exchange Language.    Members of the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee have released a Version 1.1 Committee Draft for the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) specification, and invite public review through July 15, 2005. Members of the TC are also actively developing an XML-based Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL), intended to provide a broader integrating framework for a wide range of emergency data exchange standards and application types. Version 1.0 of the Common Alerting Protocol was approved as an OASIS Standard in April 2004 and has been adopted widely. CAP is "a simple but general format for exchanging all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings over all kinds of networks. CAP allows a consistent warning message to be disseminated simultaneously over many different warning systems, thus increasing warning effectiveness while simplifying the warning task. CAP also facilitates the detection of emerging patterns in local warnings of various kinds, such as might indicate an undetected hazard or hostile act. CAP also provides a template for effective warning messages based on best practices identified in academic research and real-world experience." The CAP format "is compatible with emerging techniques, such as Web services, as well as existing formats including the Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) used for the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Radio and the Emergency Alert System (EAS). CAP also offers enhanced capabilities that include: (1) flexible geographic targeting using latitude/longitude shapes and other geospatial representations in three dimensions; (2) multilingual and multi-audience messaging; (3) phased and delayed effective times and expirations; (4) enhanced message update and cancellation features; (5) template support for framing complete and effective warning messages; (6) compatible with digital encryption and signature capability; (7) facility for digital images and audio." [Full context]

• [May 16, 2005]   Microsoft and Sun Publish Web Single Sign-On (SSO) Identity Specifications.    Sun Microsystems and Microsoft Corp held a joint press conference on May 13, 2005 to announce the publication of two new identity management specifications and plans for additional collaborative effort to support product interoperability. A new Web Single Sign-On Metadata Exchange Protocol specification "defines how a service can query an identity provider for metadata that describes the identity-processing protocol suites supported by that provider, to increase the service's ability to communicate successfully and efficiently with the provider." The companion Web Single Sign-On Interoperability Profile "defines an interoperability profile of the web single sign-on metadata exchange protocol that allows using either Liberty Identity Federation or WS-Federation based Identity Providers to interact with a service. It defines how the service determines the protocols supported by the client's identity provider thereby allowing identity processing to occur." Release of the identity specifications is said to represent first steps by the two companies "towards improving interoperability for customers using Liberty and WS-* web service architectures with the joint development of two draft specifications for web single sign-on interoperability. These new specifications will ultimately enable browser-based web single sign-on between security domains that use Liberty ID-FF and WS-Federation." The two companies welcome developer participation in the further development of the Web SSO specifications; this design work will be managed through the Web services protocol workshop process. Subsequently, the two specifications will be submitted to a standards organization for finalization and ratification as industry standards. Initially, the Microsoft Windows Server and the Sun Java Enterprise System will support the Web SSO specifications: "Products that support the Web SSO MEX Protocol and the Web SSO Interop Profile will enable companies to provide users with an improved SSO experience from their Web browsers. For example, if a company implements an employee portal using Sun Java Enterprise System, and the company's benefits provider deploys a Web-based application using Microsoft Windows Server, then an employee will be able to access the benefits application from the portal without having to log in separately." [Full context]

• [May 12, 2005]   W3C Proposed Recommendation for XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0).    The W3C XML Key Management Working Group has released a Proposed Recommendation for the XKMS specification version 2.0, including XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0) and XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0) Bindings. Operating within the W3C Technology and Society Domain, the XML Key Management (XKMS) Activity "specifies protocols for distributing and registering public keys, suitable for use with the standard for XML Signatures defined by W3C and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its companion standard for XML encryption." The Working Group was chartered to build upon the March 2001 XML Key Management Specification (XKMS) submitted to W3C by VeriSign Inc, Microsoft Corporation, and webMethods Inc. As presented in the May 2003 XML Key Management (XKMS 2.0) Requirements, XML-based public key management "should be designed to meet two general goals. The first is to support a simple client's ability to make use of sophisticated key management functionality. This simple client is not concerned with the details of the infrastructure required to support the public key management but may choose to work with X.509 certificates if able to manage the details . The second goal is to provide public key management support to XML applications that is consistent with the XML architectural approach. In particular, it is a goal of XML key management to support the public key management requirements of XML Encryption, XML Digital Signature, and to be consistent with the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)." The XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0) is published in two parts: the XML Key Information Service Specification (X-KISS) and the XML Key Registration Service Specification (X-KRSS). "XKMS does not require any particular underlying public key infrastructure (such as X.509) but is designed to be compatible with such infrastructures. The X-KISS protocol allows an application to delegate to a service the processing of key information associated with an XML signature, XML encryption, or other usage of the XML Signature ds:KeyInfo element. The X-KRSS protocol supports the registration of a key pair by a key pair holder, with the intent that the key pair subsequently be usable in conjunction with X-KISS or a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) such as X.509 or PKIX." The XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0) Bindings document defines different protocol bindings with security characteristics for the XML Key Management Specification. Security requirements "vary according to the application: in the case of a free or un-metered service the service may not require authentication of the request. A responder that requires an authenticated request must know in that circumstance that the request corresponds to the specified response." The document addresses Confidentiality, Request Authentication, Response Authentication, Persistent Authentication, Message Correlation (Response Replay and Request Substitution), Request Replay, and Denial of Service. [Full context]

• [May 10, 2005]   W3C Mobile Web Initiative to Define Best Practices and 'mobileOK' Trustmark.    The World Wide Web Consortium announced the launch of a new Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), designed to make "Web access from a mobile device as simple, easy and convenient as Web access from a desktop device." The W3C Mobile Web Initiative has been activated to address "interoperability and usability problems that make the Web difficult to use for most mobile phone subscribers. The Mobile Web Initiative proposes to address these issues through a concerted effort of key players in the mobile production chain, including authoring tool vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and mobile operators. W3C MWI initially will focus upon developing best practices for 'mobileOK' Web sites, creating device information needed for content adaptation, and marketing and outreach activities." Two new W3C Working Groups have been formed to support MWI. The Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) Working Group has been chartered to "develop a set of technical best practices and associated materials in support of development of Web sites that provide an appropriate user experience on mobile devices." The MWBP Working Group will define a 'mobileOK' trustmark based on existing standards and best practices. A trustmark, in this context, is "a mark or badge that indicates adherence to a set of criteria. Relevant examples of trustmarks include the Conformance Logos promoted by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative and the TRUSTe seal developed and promoted by TRUSTe. In both of these examples, a visible mark is used to indicate adherence to a set of best practice criteria in a particular domain." The new MWI Device Description Working Group (DDWG) has been chartered to "enable the development of globally accessible, sustainable data and services that provide device description information applicable to content adaptation." Chaired by Rotan Hanrahan of MobileAware, the WG will seek to enhance "provision and access to device descriptions that can be used in support of Web-enabled applications that provide an appropriate user experience on mobile devices." The Device Description Working Group will "work with the OMA's UAProf sub working group to development requirements for a repository of device descriptions; it will develop requirements for extensions to technologies where gaps exist, for example in the area of highly dynamic device characteristics. W3C's Mobile Web Initiative is being funded through a sponsorship program. Initial MWI sponsors include France Telecom, HP, Vodafone, MobileAware, Segala M Test, and Volantis. [Full context]

• [May 06, 2005]   Open Archives Initiative Releases Specification for Conveying Rights Expressions.    The Open Archives Initiative has published an Implementation Guideline specification for Conveying Rights Expressions About Metadata in the OAI-PMH Framework. This specification defines mechanisms for data providers to associate XML-based rights expressions with harvested metadata that is queried and delivered via service providers using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The rights expressions indicate how data may be used, shared, and modified after it has been harvested. Detailed examples are provided in the specification for declaring rights using the Creative Commons and GNU licenses; however, the rights expression mechanism under the OAI-PMH data model is agnostic as the particular rights expression language used by the data provider. The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) has now become the most widely adopted approach for publication of both "data" and "metadata" by online digital libraries and archive centers. A list of registered OAI conforming repositories (perhaps not current) identifies some 286 digital library projects using this federated database approach, and the OAIster Digital Library Production Service at the University of Michigan stores some 5,366,375 records of digital resources from 472 institutions. The essence of the open archives approach is "to enable access to Web-accessible material through interoperable repositories for (meta-)data sharing, publishing and archiving. OAI develops and promotes a low-barrier interoperability framework and associated standards based upon open protocols. In the OAI model, a data provider maintains one or more repositories (web servers) that support the OAI-PMH as a means of exposing metadata; a service provider issues OAI-PMH requests to data providers and uses the metadata as a basis for building value-added services. According to the online tutorial, OAI-PMH provides "a simple technical option for data providers to make their metadata available to services, based on the open standards HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol) and XML (Extensible Markup Language). The metadata that is harvested may be in any format that is agreed by a community (or by any discrete set of data and service providers), although unqualified Dublin Core is specified to provide a basic level of interoperability. MARCXML, METS, and OLAC are also popular supported formats. The OAI-PMH protocol is based on HTTP with support for flow control. Request arguments are issued as GET or POST parameters. OAI-PMH supports six request types, known as verbs; responses are encoded in XML syntax. OAI-PMH supports any metadata format encoded in XML, and OAI-PMH defines a single XML Schema to validate responses to all OAI-PMH requests." [Full context]

• [May 04, 2005]   Call for Participation in the OASIS Web Services Reliable Exchange (WS-RX) TC.    On May 03, 2005, OASIS issued a Call for Participation in a new Technical Committee chartered to define a protocol for reliable message exchanges between two Web services, through continued development of the Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM) specification. The OASIS Web Services Reliable Exchange (WS-RX) Technical Committee will operate in the 'RF on RAND Terms' IPR mode as defined in the new OASIS IPR Policy. Some forty-one (41) individuals identified as TC Proposers have already agreed to support the work of the new TC, representing ACORD, Actional, Adobe, Arjuna, BEA Systems, Blue Titan, Choreology, Entrust, Ericsson, Hitachi, IBM, IONA, Microsoft, NEC, Nortel, Novell, OAGi, Oracle, Reactivity, SAP, SeeBeyond, Sonic Software, Sun Microsystems, Systinet, TIBCO, United Kingdom e-Government Unit, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and webMethods. A 'reliable message transfer" is one in which "certain reliability assurances exist between two parties even in the presence of a variety of failures. There can be multiple, concurrent and independent reliable exchanges between two parties. Reliability assurances make statements about the type of reliability provided to a message exchange." The WS-RX TC will continue development of the (BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, and TIBCO Software) Web Services Reliable Messaging specification (WS-ReliableMessaging) submitted to the TC. The defined mechanism by which Web services express support for reliable messaging and related useful parameters "will be based upon the Web Services Reliable Messaging Policy Assertion (WS-RM Policy) specification," also to be submitted to the TC. The WS-RX work will be designed to compose with the WSS TC specifications and will utilize the WS-Addressing functions where appropriate, and avoiding the creation of overlapping functions. The first meeting of the WS-RX will be held as a F2F meeting June 23-24, 2005 in Palo Alto, California, hosted by SAP. The WS-RX TC Convener is Paul Cotton (Microsoft Corporation); the proposed TC Chairs are Paul Fremantle (IBM) and Sanjay Patil (SAP). [Full context]

• [May 03, 2005]   Globus Toolkit Version 4.0 Features Support for Key Web Services Standards.    The Globus Consortium has announced the release of the Globus Toolkit Version 4.0 (GT4) as a stable, enterprise ready set of services and software libraries incorporating the latest web services standards, with new security and authorization features. The Globus Consortium, announced January 24, 2005, "is comprised of global computing leaders who support the Globus Toolkit. HP, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems are the Globus Consortium's Founding members; supporting entities also include Nortel Networks, Univa, and others. According to Ian Foster, Board Member with the Globus Consortium, "The leading enterprise Grid vendors and standards bodies are standing behind GT4 as the preferred open source software for enterprise Grids. For nearly a decade, a global community of Grid developers have contributed to Globus Toolkit code." The Globus Toolkit is "an open source software toolkit used for building enterprise-level Grid systems and applications. Freely available in open source format on the Web, the Globus Toolkit provides applications for security, information infrastructure, resource management, data management, communication, fault detection, portability, and more. Grid computing, as defined by the Globus Toolkit implementation, refers to "an information technology infrastructure that enables the integrated, collaborative use of computers, networks, databases, and scientific instruments owned and managed by many different organizations in many different locations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing and often require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries." The Globus Toolkit Version 4 (GT4) supports "interoperability, flexibility and the freedom to choose the best vendor products and equipment" to implement enterprise Grid solutions. The Globus Consortium announcement identifies four new areas of support for interoperable computing solutions: (1) GT4 complies with the latest Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) web services standards, which provides maximum interoperability between different environments.; (2) GT4 includes initial support for important authorization standards, including Security Markup Language (SAML) and Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML); these provide business with a foundation for building a secure web-services enabled Grid infrastructure; (3) GT4 implements the Web Services Resource Framework (WS-RF) and Web Services Notification (WS-N) specifications, which are emerging standards in OASIS backed by major vendors for web services enablement of Grid and resource management systems; (4) GT4 features sophisticated authorization and security capabilities so as to make the toolkit 'enterprise ready' from a security perspective." [Full context]

• [April 30, 2005]   OASIS TC Addresses Software Deployment, Configuration, and Lifecycle Management.    OASIS has announced the formation of a new Technical Committee to develop standardized schemas which describe the characteristics of an installable unit (IU) of software that are relevant for core aspects of its deployment, configuration, and maintenance. The OASIS Solution Deployment Descriptor (SDD) Technical Committee will continue work on a technology formerly called the Installable Unit Deployment Descriptor (IUDD) schema. It is documented in a June 2004 Member Submission to W3C from IBM and Novell, co-authored by InstallShield Software and Zero G Software, presented under the name Solution Installation Schema. TC proposers include indivuduals from Computer Associates, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Macrovision, NEC, Novell, Softricity, Sun Microsystems, and Zero G. Participation from other companies is expected, and invited, because the technical solution envisioned by the initial proposers is to be standardized for multi-platform use in heterogeneous environments. The technical activity and its deliverables will be of interest to "ISVs and independent developers who wish to create software packages for managed or unmanaged environments, and to internal corporate software development organizations. IT staff who need to manage deployment and lifecycle within their infrastructure and software consumers who want reliable and predictable software installation and lifecycle may have a stake in the work. The specifications will be used by developers of tooling which is used either for packaging of software for installation or used in the process of software life-cycle management." A solution, in the context of 'Solution Deployment Descriptor', is "any combination of products, components, or application artifacts addressing a particular user requirement. This includes what would traditionally be referred to as a product offering (e.g.,, a database product), as well as a solution offering (e.g.,, a business integration platform comprising multiple integrated products), or a user application (e.g.,, a set of application artifacts like J2EE applications and database definitions). All the software constituents of a solution can be represented by a single Solution Deployment Descriptor (SDD) as a hierarchy of installable unit aggregates." [Full context]

• [April 29, 2005]   First Public Working Draft for XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.1.    The W3C XML Core Working Group has produced a First Public Working Draft for XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.1 and requests feedback from W3C Members and other interested parties. XLink Version 1.0 was approved as a W3C Recommendation in June 2001. The XLink Version 1.1 Working Draft defines mechanisms to allow markup constructs "to be inserted into XML documents in order to create and describe links between resources. It uses XML syntax to create structures that can describe links similar to the simple unidirectional hyperlinks of today's HTML, as well as more sophisticated links." Background information on this revision is published in a January 2005 Note Extending XLink 1.0, edited by Norman Walsh. The Note recognizes that XLink has been adopted by several markup vocabularies since its publication as a Recommendation, but "the current trend to migrate from DTD-based validation to schema-based validation poses additional challenges that could hamper its continued adoption." Four small changes in XLink Version 1.0 were identified which could "make XLink easier to use, reduce XLink's dependence on annotations provided by external grammars (XML DTDs or XML Schema, for example), and increase interoperability by reducing the risk of markup errors or misinterpretations." The proposed changes in Extending XLink 1.0 were: (1) to make simple XLinks an application-level default; (2) to reserve all attributes in the XLink namespace; (3) to allow Internationalized Resource Identifier [IRIs], not just URIs, to be used to identify XLink properties; (4) to provide Sample XML Schema and RELAX NG Grammars. The Version 1.1 specification now "implements all of the XLink 1.1 requirements documented in the W3C Note Extending XLink 1.0. XLink is not without its critics and the changes in this specification do not address all of the criticisms that have been leveled at XLink. But these changes do make XLink more useful in the places where it is already being used and make it practical in a variety of similar vocabularies." [Full context]

• [April 27, 2005]   Orbeon Submits XML Pipeline Language (XPL) Version 1.0 to W3C.    W3C has acknowledged receipt of a Member Submission for the draft XML Pipeline Language (XPL) Version 1.0 specification from Orbeon, Inc. The XPL XML Pipeline Language defines an XML vocabulary for describing a processing model for XML components, particularly with respect to XML Infosets. The purpose of Orbeon's XPL submission is described as an attempt "to advance work around an XML pipeline language, also known as XML processing model." It responds especially to two W3C Notes previously published in 2002 and 2004. The specification as submitted lists a number of open issues, some of which are raised in the W3C XML Processing Model Requirements Note. An XPL program or program in the XPL language "is a well-formed XML document whose syntax is well-formed XML conforming to the Namesp