Cover Pages: SGML and XML News 2007 Q1

Last modified: February 11, 2008

News

SGML and XML News - 2007

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[February 11, 2008] New OASIS Standard: XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) v1.2. OASIS has announced the approval of the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) specification Version 1.2 as an OASIS Standard. The specification was produced by members of the OASIS XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) Technical Committee. The purpose of the XLIFF vocabulary is to store localizable data and carry it from one step of the localization process to the other, while allowing interoperability between tools. The specification is tool-neutral, supports the entire localization process, and supports common software, document data formats, and markup languages. The specification provides an extensibility mechanism to allow the development of tools compatible with an implementer's data formats and workflow requirements. The extensibility mechanism provides controlled inclusion of information not defined in the specification. The XLIFF file format serves as a container for externalized data to be interchanged between software publishers, documentation writers (including, but not limited to documents written in DITA, Docbook, HTML, and other XML document formats), localization tools, and software services providers in order to facilitate all the phases of the localization process. [Full context]
[January 31, 2008] OGC Approves Sensor Web Observations and Measurements Encoding Standard. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced that its members have approved version 1.0 of the Observations and Measurements Encoding specification as a final OpenGIS Implementation Standard. The two-part Observations and Measurements Encoding specification "defines an abstract model and an XML schema encoding for observations and measurements. This framework is required for use by other OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards as well as for general support for OGC compliant systems dealing in technical measurements in science and engineering. As a new international consensus standard in an era of increasing scientific cooperation, O&M promises to play an important role in Web-based publishing of real-time and archived scientific data across research disciplines and application domains." An "Observation" is an action with a result which has a value describing some phenomenon. The observation is modelled as a Feature within the context of the General Feature Model. An observation feature binds a result to a feature of interest, upon which the observation was made. The aim of the OpenGIS O&M Standard is to "define terms used for measurements and the relationships between them, mainly to improve the ability of software systems to discover and use live and archived digital data produced by measuring systems. When scientists and engineers encode data in O&M, they can easily publish the data (or live data feeds) in catalogs and registries so others can efficiently discover, access and use the data, using relatively simple software. The scope of the specification covers observations and measurements whose results may be quantities, categories, temporal and geometry values, coverages, and composites and arrays of any of these." [Full context]
[January 22, 2008] Public Draft for HTML 5: A Vocabulary and Associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced the publication of a First Public Working Draft of HTML 5: A Vocabulary and Associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. The specification is intended to replace, viz., become the new version of, what was previously defined in the HTML4, XHTML 1.x, and DOM2 HTML specifications. The HTML 5 specification defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: HTML. In this version: (1) new features are introduced to help Web application authors, (2) new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and (3) special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. The new features are presented in the companion Working Draft HTML 5 Differences from HTML 4. According to the W3C announcement, the HTML 5 specification "helps to improve interoperability and reduce software costs by giving precise rules not only about how to handle all correct HTML documents but also how to recover from errors. Ajax and related innovations have propelled demands for a new standard that allows people to create Web applications that interoperate across desktop and mobile platforms. Some of the most interesting new features for authors are APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling audio and video content, maintaining persistent client-side data storage, and for enabling users to edit documents and parts of documents interactively." The new specification differs from previous versions of "HTML" in that it defines an abstract language for describing documents and applications, as well as some APIs for interacting with in-memory representations of resources that use this language. [Full context]
[January 16, 2008] W3C Publishes SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language Semantic Web Standard. SPARQL (a recursive acronym for "SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language," pronounced "sparkle") has been released as a standard by W3C. The three-part specification was produced by members of the RDF Data Access Working Group, which is part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity. It defines a standardized query language for RDF enabling the 'joining' of decentralized collections of RDF data. RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web. RDF "integrates a variety of applications from library catalogs and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and events using XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF specifications provide a lightweight ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Web." As explained in the W3C announcement, SPARQL allows people to "focus on what they want to know rather than on the database technology or data format used behind the scenes to store the data. Because SPARQL queries express high-level goals, it is easier to extend them to unanticipated data sources, or even to port them to new applications." Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director: "Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL. SPARQL makes it possible to query information from databases and other diverse sources in the wild, across the Web." Three SPARQL implementation reports accompany the prose specifications. W3C reports that fourteen implementations of SPARQL are already documented, many of which are available as open source software. [Full context]
[January 14, 2008] OASIS Members Propose Charter for WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People) TC. OASIS announced that consortium members have submitted a charter proposal for a new WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People) Technical Committee. Companies sponsoring the proposal include Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems. The designated TC Convenor is Jeff Mischkinsky (Oracle). This technical Committee proposal follows a June 2007 statement from a group of six technology vendors, including Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, and SAP AG, announcing that the two-part BPEL4People specification would be submitted to OASIS in the near future. The Web Services Business Process Execution Language Version 2.0 (WS-BPEL) specification was published as an approved OASIS Standard in April 2007. It provides a language for the specification of executable and abstract business processes, extending the Web Services interaction model to support business transactions. The FAQ document published by the OASIS Web Services Business Process Execution Language Technical Committee recognizes that "BPEL was not designed for human workflow." The proposed BPEL4People Technical Committee would define: (1) extensions to the OASIS WS-BPEL 2.0 Standard to enable human interactions, and (2) a model of human interactions that are service-enabled. This work will be carried out through continued refinement of the Version 1.0 documents released in June 2007, consistent with the WS-BPEL Extension for People — BPEL4People Joint White Paper published by IBM and SAP in July 2005. In particular, the new TC work will focus upon: (1) Defining the specification of a WS-BPEL extension enabling the definition of human interactions ("human tasks") as part of a WS-BPEL process; (2) Defining the specification of a model enabling the definition of human tasks that are exposed as Web services; (3) Defining a programming interface enabling human task client applications to work with human tasks. [Full context]
[December 13, 2007] W3C Forms Emergency Information Interoperability Framework Incubator Group. W3C has announced the formation of a new Emergency Information Interoperability Framework Incubator Group as part of the W3C Incubator Activity. The Group has been chartered through 01-December-2008 to "review and analyse the current state-of-the-art in vocabularies used in emergency management functions and to investigate the path forward via an emergency management systems information interoperability framework. These activities will lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive approach to ontology management and semantic information interoperability leading to a proposal for future longer-term W3C Working Group activity." The EIIF Incubator Group will primarily conduct its work on the public mailing list 'public-xg-eiif'. The The XG's Initial Chairs are Renato Iannella (NICTA) and Chamindra de Silva (Lanka Software Foundation/Virtusa). Initiating Members of the EIIF Incubator Group include National ICT Australia (NICTA) Ltd, Google, Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), and IBM Corporation. The Emergency Information Interoperability Framework Incubator Group "will form a strong liaison to the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee, via the Chair, who is a member of that group. The XG intends to collect and categorize numerous emergency management related vocabularies and in the process will gain a comprehensive picture of the key stakeholders. This will include other standards groups, national and international emergency management groups, and international resilience and relief organisations." [Full context]
[November 30, 2007] OASIS Members Propose New TC for Testing and Monitoring Internet Exchanges. In November 2007 OASIS issued a proposed charter for a new "OASIS Testing and Monitoring Internet Exchanges Technical Committee." While the proposal is not associated with a supporting (pre-TC-formation) Technical Committee Discussion List, technical issues addressed in the TC Charter Proposal are similar to some being treated by the current OASIS Test Assertions Guidelines (TAG) TC and OASIS ebXML Implementation Interoperability and Conformance (IIC) TC, and by the closed OASIS Conformance Technical Committee. In particular, Event-Driven Test Scripting Language (eTSL) Version 0.85 under development within the OASIS ebXML Implementation Interoperability and Conformance (IIC) TC is proposed for contribution to the TaMIE TC. The proposed TaMIE TC will define an event-centric test case scripting markup and execution model for systems that use Internet-based messages or events in collaborations between partners, or between components, where collaboration is achieved by the means of choreographed exchanges of discrete units of data. The proposal notes that while "electronic collaborations over Internet between business partners (e-Business / e-Government) appear to be converging toward well-established types of message exchange patterns, the notion of event is increasingly promoted for asynchronous communication and coordination in Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) that are considered as either complementary to or part of SOA systems... in e-Business transactions as in EDAs, partners or components must agree on the use of a combination of standards in order to interoperate with each other." The TaMIE TC would produce four key deliverables, including (1) a requirements document, which may include use cases for Internet exchanges, test assertions for related standards, references to existing test case dialects or existing logging formats or systems; (2) a specification defining a test case execution model and scripting that supports both the testing and monitoring of message and business data exchanges; (3) a set of examples and use cases; (4) an implementation of the specification used for proof of the proposed concept and principle. [Full context]
[November 20, 2007] W3C Web Services Policy 1.5 Primer and Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors. W3C has announced the publication of Web Services Policy 1.5 - Primer and Web Services Policy 1.5 - Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors, complementing the two W3C WS-Policy specification Recommendations issued in September 2007. The W3C Web Services Policy Working Group was chartered "to standardize a general policy framework for expressing Web service capabilities and requirements. The framework consists of a policy data model for expressing capabilities and requirements of a Web Service, a processing model for combining and comparing Web service capabilities and requirements and an XML Information Set representation for the policy data model." W3C recently announced the publication of two key Web Services Policy 1.5 deliverables from the WS-Policy Working Group as Recommendations: Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework and Web Services Policy 1.5 - Attachment. The Web Services Policy 1.5 Primer document provides an introductory description of the Web Services Policy language. It should be read alongside the formal descriptions contained in the WS-Policy and WS-PolicyAttachment specifications. The Web Services Policy 1.5 Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors document is intended to provide guidance for Assertion Authors that will work with the Web Services Policy 1.5 Framework and Attachment Recommendations. It provides best practices and patterns to follow as well as illustrates the care needed in using WS-Policy to achieve the best possible results for interoperability. It is a complementary guide to using the WS-Policy specifications. [Full context]
[November 02, 2007] SNIA Demonstrates Extensible Access Method (XAM) Interoperability. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) recently announced successful interoperability demonstrations of the Extensible Access Method (XAM) specification at the Storage Networking World Solutions Center. Four distinct information management applications based on the XAM specification are provided by EMC, HP, Sun Microsystems, and Vignette. The demonstration illustrates XAM's ability to protect end user information from technology lock-in by decoupling storage systems from data applications. The three-part Extensible Access Method (XAM) specification addresses the problem of preserving and managing reference information, also called fixed content. Fixed content, as distinct from transactional content, "consists of data such as digital images, e-mail messages, presentations, video content, medical images and check images that don't change over time. Unlike transaction-based data, whose usefulness is short, fixed content data must be kept for long periods of time, often to comply with retention periods and provisions that government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 have specified [NetwordWorld]. According to several estimates, most data born digital is now fixed content, and is rapidly gaining prominence over transactional data. The XAM (Extensible Access Method) Interface specification "defines a standard access method (API) between Consumers (application and management software) and Providers (storage systems) to manage fixed content reference information storage services. XAM includes metadata definitions to accompany data to achieve application interoperability, storage transparency, and automation for ILM-based practices, long term records retention, and information security. XAM will be expanded over time to include other data types as well as support additional implementations based on the XAM API to XAM conformant storage systems." [Full context]
[October 30, 2007] XForms 1.0 Third Edition Published as a W3C Recommendation. W3C has announced the publication of XForms 1.0 (Third Edition) as a W3C Recommendation, signifying that there is significant support for the specification from the Advisory Committee, the W3C Team, W3C Working groups, and the public. Forms are an important part of the Web, and they continue to be the primary means for enabling interactive Web applications. Web applications and electronic commerce solutions have sparked the demand for better Web forms with richer interactions. XForms 1.0 is the response to this demand, and provides a new platform-independent markup language for online interaction between a person (through an XForms Processor) and another agent, usually remote. XForms is an XML application that represents the next generation of forms for the Web. It splits traditional XHTML forms into three parts: XForms model, instance data, and user interface. By this means, XForms separates presentation from content, allows reuse, and provides strong typing. This design reduces the number of round-trips to the server, and offers device independence with a reduced need for scripting. XForms 1.0 XForms strives to improve authoring, reuse, internationalization, accessibility, and overall usability. The XForms Recommendation document responds to implementor feedback, brings the XForms 1.0 Recommendation up to date with second edition errata, and reflects clarifications already implemented in XForms processors. W3C reports that the Recommendation-level specification contains 343 diffs that have significantly hardened XForms for enterprise deployment. The XForms 1.0 Third Edition Test Suite was used in interoperability testing, including tests for : Document Structure; Processing Model; Datatypes; Model Item Properties; XPath Expressions in XForms; Form Controls; XForms User Interface; XForms Actions; Submit Function; XForms and Styling. More than twenty-five (25) XForms Implementations were reported as of 2007-10-29. [Full context]
[October 26, 2007] Muradora GUI for Fedora Repository Uses SAML and XACML for Federated Identity. The DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) development team at MELCOE, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia has announced the release of Muradora Version 1.0, described as a turnkey GUI for the Fedora Repository supporting federated identity and flexible access control. Fedora is a general purpose repository system developed jointly by Cornell University Information Science and the University of Virginia Library. The Fedora Project is devoted to the goal of providing open-source repository software and related services to serve as the foundation for many types of information management systems. The Fedora software is available under the terms of the Educational Community License 1.0 (ECL). Fedora was selected for Muradora because it is widely used, is recognized as scalable (supporting more than one million objects), and has an excellent digital object model. The project goals are to support collaboration between researchers for access and search across institutional protected repositories, with an easy to use and maintain access control system requiring little or no intervention from system administrators. Muradora incorporates a suite of software modules to deal with the needs for federated identity and flexible authorisation for repositories. Key Muradora modules include Shibboleth (SAML) authentication for federated identity/single-sign-on, a Fedora authorization framework based on XACML, an extended XACML engine using DB XML for policy enforcement, and web service interfaces for XACML requests and responses. [Full context]
[September 13, 2007] W3C GRDDL Recommendation Bridges HTML/Microformats and the Semantic Web. The World Wide Web Consortium has announced the publication of Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) as a W3C Recommendation, together with a separate GRDDL Test Cases Recommendation. The GRDDL specification represents "an important link between Semantic Web and microformats communities. With GRDDL (pronounced 'griddle'), software can automatically extract information from structured Web pages to make it part of the Semantic Web. Those accustomed to expressing structured data with microformats in XHTML can thus increase the value of their existing data by porting it to the Semantic Web, at very low cost." Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director compared GRDDL to style specifications: "Sometimes one line of code can make a world of difference. Just as stylesheets make Web pages more readable to people, GRDDL makes Web pages, microformat tags, XML documents, and data more readable to Semantic Web applications, opening more data to new possibilities and creative reuse." The GRDDL specification introduces markup based on existing standards for declaring that an XML document includes data compatible with the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and for linking to algorithms (typically represented in XSLT), for extracting this data from the document. The markup includes a namespace-qualified attribute for use in general-purpose XML documents and a profile-qualified link relationship for use in valid XHTML documents. The GRDDL mechanism also allows an XML namespace document (or XHTML profile document) to declare that every document associated with that namespace (or profile) includes gleanable data and for linking to an algorithm for gleaning the data. [Full context]
[September 11, 2007] Open Virtual Machine Format Specification (OVF) Submitted to DMTF. Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource have submitted the Open Virtual Machine Format Specification (OVF) to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) for further development into an industry standard. The OVF specification describes an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of (collections of) virtual machines. Its goal is to facilitate the automated, secure management not only of virtual machines, but the appliance as a functional unit. Most importantly, according to the DMTF announcement: "OVF specifies procedures and technologies to permit integrity checking of the virtual machines (VM) to ensure that they have not been modified since the package was produced. This enhances the security of the format and will alleviate security concerns of users who adopt virtual appliances produced by third parties. OVF also provides mechanisms that support license checking for the enclosed VMs, addressing a key concern of both independent software vendors (ISVs) and customers. Finally, OVF allows an installed VM to acquire information about its host virtualization platform and run-time environment, which allows the VM to localize the applications it contains and optimize its performance for the particular virtualization environment." The proposed OVF uses existing packaging tools to combine one or more virtual machines together with a standards-based XML wrapper, giving the virtualization platform a portable package containing all required installation and configuration parameters for the virtual machines. This allows any virtualization platform that implements the standard to correctly install and run the virtual machines. [Full context]
[August 28, 2007] W3C Publishes Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema Recommendation. The World Wide Web Consortium announced the publication of the Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema specification as a W3C Recommendation, together with a Usage Guide document, an Implementation Report, and a Test Suite. The specification was produced by members of the W3C Semantic Annotations for WSDL (SAWSDL) Working Group. The Usage Guide presents examples illustrating how to associate semantic annotations with a Web service; these annotations can be used for classifying, discovering, matching, composing, and invoking Web services. The Recommendation builds upon technology described in W3C Member Submission W3C Web Service Semantics — WSDL-S, contributed to W3C by the University of Georgia Research Foundation and International Business Machines Corporation, published 07-November-2005. Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema defines how to add semantic annotations to various parts of a WSDL document such as input and output message structures, interfaces and operations. Specifically, it defines a set of extension attributes for the Web Services Description Language and XML Schema definition language that allows description of additional semantics of WSDL components. A semantic annotation in this context is "additional information that identifies or defines a concept in a semantic model in order to describe part of that document. In SAWSDL, semantic annotations are XML attributes added to a WSDL or associated XML Schema document, at the XML element they describe. Semantic annotations are of two kinds: explicit identifiers of concepts, or identifiers of mappings from WSDL to concepts or vice versa. A concept must be identifiable by URIs. A concept can be, for example, a classifier in some language, a predicate logic relation, the value of the property of an ontology instance, some object instance or set of related instances, an axiom, etc." The specification defines how semantic annotation is accomplished using references to semantic models, e.g., ontologies. A semantic model "is a set of machine-interpretable representations used to model an area of knowledge or some part of the world, including software. Examples of such models are ontologies that embody some community agreement, logic-based representations, etc. Depending upon the framework or language used for modelling, different terminologies exist for denoting the building blocks of semantic models. [Full context]
[August 27, 2007] VoiceXML Forum Publishes Session Log Annotation Markup Language (SLAML) Spec. The VoiceXML Forum recently announced the publication of a new draft specification which describes a methodology for collecting, storing, and retrieving runtime data for speech-based services and will help make data-analysis and service-tuning tools platform-independent. The public comment period closes on November 9, 2007. The Session Log Annotation Markup Language (SLAML) specification was produced by members of the Forum's Data Logging Working Group, itself one of four working groups within the VoiceXML Tools Committee. Other WGs include the Metalangauge Working Group, Advanded Dialogs Working Group, and Open Source Grammars Working Group. The SLAML specification design recognizes that data generated by a speech-based application during runtime can provide valuable visibility into the performance of the application and the user interaction. However, "data capture has not been adequately addressed by or integrated into any relevant speech industry standards," according to David Thomson, Chair of the VoiceXML Forum Tools Committee. "The SLAML specification will enable service providers to mix-and-match development tools, application servers and VoiceXML browsers, while maintaining a consistent data-logging format. Additionally, industry-wide adoption of the specification will make field data easier to analyze and use, improving speech system performance and usability." The Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) standard 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. Its major goal is to bring the advantages of Web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response (IVR) applications. [Full context]
[August 10, 2007] OGC Releases Transducer Markup Language (TML) Implementation Specification. An announcement from The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) describes the publication of the OpenGIS Transducer Markup Language (TML) Implementation Specification as an approved OpenGIS Publicly Available Standard. Sensor systems "have two basic parts: a sensing element and a transducer that converts energy from one form to another form (usually an electric signal) that can be interpreted. The OGC TML specification defines the conceptual model and XML Schema for describing transducers and supporting real-time streaming of data to and from sensor systems. TML thus defines (a) a set of models describing the response characteristics of a transducer, and (b) an efficient method for transporting sensor data and preparing it for use with other data through spatial and temporal associations." TML response models "are formalized XML descriptions of known hardware behaviors. The models can be used to reverse distorting effects and return artifact values to the phenomena realm. TML provides models for a transducer's latency and integration times, noise figure, spatial and temporal geometries, frequency response, steady-state response and impulse response. Traditional XML wraps each data element in a semantically meaningful tag. The rich semantic capability of XML is in general better suited to data exchange rather than live delivery where variable bandwidth is a factor. TML addresses the live scenario by using a terse XML envelope designed for efficient transport of live sensor data in groupings known as TML clusters. It also provides a mechanism for temporal correlation to other transducer data." The TML Implementation Specification has been produced as part of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement activity. In this effort, OGC members are "specifying interoperability interfaces and metadata encodings that enable real time integration of heterogeneous sensor webs into the information infrastructure. Developers will use these specifications in creating applications, platforms, and products involving Web-connected devices such as flood gauges, air pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, mobile heart monitors, Webcams, and robots as well as space and airborne earth imaging devices." [Full context]
[August 08, 2007] W3C Member Submission: Web Services Policy Attachment for Endpoint Reference. The World Wide Web Consortium has acknowledged receipt of a WS-PAEPR Member Submission from Axway, BEA Systems, Inc., JBoss Inc., Nokia, Oracle, and Progress Software Corporation. The Web Services Policy Attachment for Endpoint Reference (WS-PAEPR) specification as contributed defines a mechanism to attach policies written using the W3C Web Services Policy 1.5 — Framework specification to an endpoint reference, defined by the Web Services Addressing 1.0 — Core Recommendation. Intellectual Property Statements from the six companies conforming to W3C rules have been filed, including copyrights and W3C Royalty-Free patent licensing requirements. Background: The W3C WS-Addressing Recommendation defines an XML Infoset-based representation for specifying endpoint references. The corresponding XML syntax involves an EndpointReference element with contained elements Address, ReferenceParameters, and Metadata. The Metadata element allows child elements from any namespace. Such metadata can be used to define the 'the behavior, policies and capabilities of the endpoint.' Typically, these are used to include WSDL definitions that apply to that endpoint as well as Policies or Policy References that apply to that endpoint. The Web Services Addressing 1.0 — Metadata specification defines how to include WSDL metadata in an EPR's metadata section. The contributed Web Services Policy Attachment for Endpoint Reference (WS-PAEPR) specification "defines how to include Policies and Policy References within the Metadata element as well as the semantics of such inclusion. It also addresses the semantics of Policies and Policy References directly included within the Metadata element in combination with Policies and Policy References included within WSDL definitions that are also included in the Metadata element." [Full context]
[July 06, 2007] Six Technical Committees Proposed for the OASIS Open CSA Member Section. OASIS has published six (6) Proposed Charter documents for new Technical Committees to be created within the Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA) Member Section. Formation of new Technical Committees was anticipated in the announcement of March 21, 2007, where eighteen technology vendors reported that key Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) specifications had completed incubation, and would be formally submitted to OASIS for advancement through its open standards process. On April 11, 2007, OASIS announced the formation of the Open CSA Member Section. TC abbreviated names are SCA-Assembly, SCA-Policy, SCA-Bindings, SCA-J, SCA-BPEL, and SCA-C. Some sixty-three (63) names are given as proposers (or supporters) in the six TC Proposed Charters, representing thirty-two (32) different individuals. Eleven (11) company names are associated with the proposers, including BEA, Cape Clear, IBM, Interface21, Oracle, Progress, Quovadx, Rogue Wave, SAP, Siemens, Sun, and TIBCO. Vendors participating in the initial joint announcement included BEA Systems, Cape Clear, IBM Corporation, Interface21, IONA, Oracle, Primeton Technologies, Progress Software, Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, SAP AG, Siemens AG, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, TIBCO Software, Xcalia, and Zend. The TC Charters as proposed would build upon the existing Service Component Architecture Version 1.0 Specifications, as described in earlier announcements. [Full context]
[July 03, 2007] Major Revision of Massachusetts Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM). The U.S. Commonwealth of Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD) announced a new major release of the Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM). The ETRM Version 4.0 Introduction identifies four additional and updated specifications now included in the 'Summary of Technology Specifications' table. Newly added specifications include "WS-I Basic Security Profile v. 1.0" and "Ecma 376 - Office Open XML Formats (Open XML)". Specification updates are listed for "OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v. 1.1" and W3C "XPath v. 2.0". The ITD Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) "provides an architectural framework used to identify the standards, specifications and technologies that support the Commonwealth's computing environment. The ETRM uses the concepts of Domains, Disciplines, Technology Areas and Technology Specifications to define the enterprise architecture. This framework borrows from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Enterprise Architecture Tool Kit as well as the work done by the federal government's Federal Enterprise Architecture Program. Implementation of the ETRM will result in a Service Oriented Architecture for the Commonwealth that uses open standards solutions where appropriate and industry interoperability best practices to construct and deliver online government services. Agencies are expected to migrate towards compliance with the ETRM as they consider new information technology investments or make major enhancements/replacement to existing systems. The addition of "Ecma-376 Office Open XML File Formats (Open XML)" as an "Open Format" represents a significant change in ETRM Version 4.0. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts "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." ETRM now classifies four (4) formats as "Open Formats": (1) OASIS Open Document Format For Office Applications (OpenDocument) v. 1.1; (2) Ecma-376 Office Open XML Formats (Open XML); (3) Hypertext Document Format v. 4.01; (4) Plain Text Format. [Full context]
[June 25, 2007] BPEL4People Specifications Integrate Human Interactions Into Business Process. A group of six technology vendors, including Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, and SAP AG, has announced the publication of 'BPEL4People' specifications, which define an approach for integrating human interactions using Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) 2.0. In July 2005, IBM and SAP jointly issued a white paper "WS-BPEL Extension for People — BPEL4People." It describes scenarios where users are involved in business processes, and motivates and outlines appropriate extensions to WS-BPEL to address these scenarios. BPEL4People as released in 2007-06 is now comprised of two specifications: "WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People) Version 1.0" and "Web Services Human Task (WS-HumanTask) Version 1.0". These two specifications take the ideas outlined in the white paper and together provide a concrete realization of them. BPEL4People extends the capabilities of WS-BPEL to support a broad range of human interaction patterns, allowing for expanded modeling of business processes within the WS-BPEL language. WS-BPEL focuses on business processes that orchestrate Web service interactions. However, in general, business processes are comprised of a broad spectrum of activities that most often require the participation of people to perform tasks, review or approve steps and enter data — for example, a credit approval scenario that may require approval on certain transaction limits or activity levels. These human interactions are now addressed in the new BPEL4People specifications. The authors of BPEL4People plan to submit the specifications to OASIS in the near future, and will propose a Technical Committee to produce an OASIS standard based on it. [Full context]
[May 21, 2007] OGC Public Review for GeoXACML and OpenGIS Image Geopositioning Service (IGS). The Open Geospatial Consortium announced a call for public comment on two draft OpenGIS Implementation Specifications: GeoXACML and OpenGIS Image Geopositioning Service (IGS). The draft Geospatial Extensible Access Control Markup Language (GeoXACML) Implementation Specification defines a geo-specific extension to the Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) OASIS Standard. The OGC GeoXACML draft clarifies that access control systems enable management of access to information only until it is obtained by the user and stored locally, as opposed to rights management systems that remain in force regardless of where the content of the original resource is located or reproduced. Attention is therefore drawn to the point that the document defines a Policy Language in the context of access control, and not a Rights Expression Language, typically used to enforce usage rights in the context of Digital Rights Management. The second OGC draft released for public comment is the OpenGIS Image Geopositioning Service (IGS) Draft Implementation Specification. This document defines an Image Geopositioning Service (IGS) interface to services that perform triangulation. This service is a specific Sensor geometry model adjustment service, as listed in Subclause 8.3.5.2 of ISO 19119 and OGC Abstract Specification Topic 12. This service might alternately be named Image Triangulation Service, Image Registration Service, or Image Adjustment Service; suggested additions, changes, and comments on this draft are welcome and encouraged. Accompanying the IGS draft specification is a separate OpenGIS Image Geopositioning Metadata Geography Markup Language (GML) Draft Application Schema, which is structured to provide consistency between the IGS and other OGC Web Services (OWS) specifications. OGC also recently published KML 2.1 Reference — An OGC Best Practice. KML is a file format used to display geographic data in an Earth browser, such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Maps for Mobile. KML uses a tag-based structure with nested elements and attributes and is based on the XML standard. [Full context]
[May 15, 2007] WS-ReliableMessaging Version 1.1 Submitted for Ballot as an OASIS Standard. OASIS announced that members of the Web Services Reliable Exchange (WS-RX) Technical Committee approved WS-ReliableMessaging Version 1.1 as a Committee Specification and submitted it for consideration as an OASIS Standard. The specification has gone through two Public Review periods, and is being balloted May 16-31, 2007. WS-ReliableMessaging Version 1.1 is now a three-part specification, each with a prose document, separate XML namespace, and XML schema: Core Web Services ReliableMessaging 1.1, Web Services ReliableMessaging Policy 1.1, and Web Services MakeConnection 1.0. "The core WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1 document defines a protocol for reliable message exchange between two Web services, even in the presence of network or system failures. For example, the protocol can ensure the resending of messages that have been lost, and can ensure that duplicate messages are not delivered. The protocol allows Web service nodes to implement a variety of delivery assurances, including At Most Once, At Least Once, Exactly Once and In Order delivery of messages. The protocol fundamentally defines a one-way reliable channel (known as a Sequence), but also includes mechanisms to optimize the creation of two-way reliable exchanges. The protocol is designed to compose with other relevant standards such as WS-Security and WS-SecureConversation. The protocol allows developers to add reliable delivery of messages to their applications on a variety of platforms, including Java and .NET. The WS-ReliableMessaging Policy 1.1 document defines an XML policy language that enables Web services to advertise their support for the WS-ReliableMessaging specification. The specification is designed for use with the WS-Policy Framework. The language aids the interoperability of nodes that support WS-ReliableMessaging by publishing their support and requirements for aspects of reliable messaging. For example, an endpoint may use this specification to indicate that it requires that the reliable message protocol to be secured using transport level security. WS-ReliableMessaging Policy is designed to be used with other policy languages, such as WS-Security Policy, in the scope of the WS-Policy Framework. The WS-MakeConnection 1.0 document defines a protocol that can be used to allow two-way communications when only a transport specific back-channel (such as the HTTP response mechanism) is available. For example, this allows a client to establish a two-way reliable message exchange even in the presence of firewalls and network address translation, that otherwise would prevent the server from initiating connections to the client." [Full context]
[April 27, 2007] First W3C Working Draft for Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced the publication of a First Public Working Draft for MathML which specifies a new version of the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML 3.0), at present under active development. The Working Group was re-chartered to enhance MathML to better support internationalization of mathematics, accessibility, semantic encoding of mathematics, Unicode alignment, and precise control of rendering for print publishing. MathML is an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text. According to the specification abstract, MathML can be used to encode both mathematical notation and mathematical content. About thirty-five (35) of the MathML tags describe abstract notational structures, while another about one hundred and seventy provide a way of unambiguously specifying the intended meaning of an expression. Additional chapters discuss how the MathML content and presentation elements interact, and how MathML renderers might be implemented and should interact with browsers. Finally, this document addresses the issue of special characters used for mathematics, their handling in MathML, their presence in Unicode, and their relation to fonts. While MathML is human-readable in all but the simplest cases, authors use equation editors, conversion programs, and other specialized software tools to generate MathML. Several versions of such MathML tools exist, and more, both freely available software and commercial products, are under development. [Full context]
[April 20, 2007] Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) Version 3: Second Public Review. The UN/CEFACT Techniques and Methodologies Group (TMG) has announced the release of the UN/CEFACT Core Components Technical Specification (UN/CEFACT CCTS) Version 3 for a Second Public Review. The Core Components Technical Specification defines meta models and rules necessary for describing the structure and contents of conceptual and physical/logical data models, process models, and information exchange models. The CCTS is dependent on the Unified Modelling Language (UML) in terms of how it is expressed in this specification, but does not require UML in its implementation. According to the TMG announcement, the CCTS "describes and specifies a semantic-based approach to the well-understood problem of the lack of information interoperability within and between applications and data bases in the e-business arena. It focuses especially on a dynamic, flexible and interoperable way of standardizing business semantics of libraries for electronic business data exchange. Therefore, CCTS describes a revolutionary approach for developing a common set of semantic building blocks that represent the general types of business data in use today. This approach provides for the creation of new business vocabularies as well as restructuring of existing business vocabularies to achieve semantic interoperability of data. It defines meta models, and rules necessary for describing the structure and contents of conceptual and logical, and physical data models that can be used for collaborative business processes and information exchange." This Second Public Review of CCTS Version 3.0 corresponds to Step 5 in the UN/CEFACT Open Development Process (ODP). The comment phase extends through 15-May-2007. [Full context]
[April 06, 2007] WS-I Basic Security Profile Version 1.0 Published as Final Material. The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) has announced the release of the Basic Security Profile Version 1.0 as Final Material. The Profile consists of a set of non-proprietary Web services specifications, along with clarifications to and amplifications of those specifications which promote interoperability. Publication of BSP 1.0 has been praised by Web Services security experts as a key enabling technology to enhance interoperability and improve security. The Basic Security Profile Version 1.0 was produced by members of the WS-I Basic Security Profile Working Group, chaire by Paul Cotton. The Basic Security Profile Working Group was chartered to "develop an interoperability profile dealing with transport security, SOAP messaging security and other Basic-Profile-oriented Web services security considerations. The Working Group is developing and selecting a set of usage scenarios and their component message exchange patterns to guide the profiling work. In addition, the Basic Security Profile Working Group will use the WS-I Security Plan Framework, particularly its collection of usage scenarios and use cases, and the WS-I Work Plan for Web Services Security Interoperability as input to its work." The WS-I Basic Security Profile is an interoperability profile that addresses transport security, SOAP messaging security, and other security considerations. Specifically, the BSP 1.0 document focuses on the interoperability characteristics of two technologies: [Full context]
[April 05, 2007] W3C Publishes Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0 as Recommendation. W3C has released Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0 as a Recommendation. This latest Web Standard from W3C "makes it easy to create internationalized XML content. Such content can be adapted, at lower cost, to the language, cultural and other requirements of a specific target market, a process called localization." According to the announcement, ITS is a technology to easily create XML which is internationalized and can be localized effectively. On the one hand, the ITS specification identifies concepts (such as "directionality") which are important for internationalization and localization. On the other hand, the ITS specification defines implementations of these concepts (termed "ITS data categories") as a set of elements and attributes called the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS). The ITS Recommendation provides implementations for three schema languages: XML DTD, XML Schema, and RELAX NG. ITS 1.0 addresses a number of internationalization requirements, including being able to identify the language of a piece of text, to specify the directionality of text (such as right-to-left Hebrew and Arabic or mixed directionality texts), to provide Ruby annotations (used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation), and to indicate whether content should be translated (an important requirement for people building tools to help with localization). An internationalized XML schema takes into consideration these requirements and others, ideally early in the design process. With ITS 1.0, XML schema designers can build localization-ready schemas at lower cost by reusing the predefined ITS 1.0 constructs, such as the its:dir attribute to specify text directionality. ITS 1.0 also enables people to improve the internationalization of existing XML documents without modifying them. [Full context]
[April 04, 2007] UN/CEFACT Releases XML Schema for Cross Industry Electronic Invoice (CII). An announcement from the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) describes the release of an International e-Invoice designed for use by the Steel, Automotive, or Electronic industries, as well as in the retail sector or Customs and other Government Authorities. Mike Doran Chair of the UN/CEFACT Forum Management Group, noted that the Cross Industry Invoice (CII) has the potential to create the necessary critical mass of national and international business and government partners required in order to reap the benefits of the huge savings offered by e-invoicing. According to text in the CII schema's annotation/documentation element, "The cross industry invoice is an electronic document exchanged between trading partners with a prime function as a request for payment. It is an important accounting document and has potential legal implications for sender and receiver. It is also used in the European Union as the key document for VAT declaration and reclamation, for statistics declaration in respect of intra community trade, and to support export and import declaration in respect of trade with countries outside the European community." Tim McGrath, Co-Chair of the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) Technical Committee, noted that the first candidate release of UN/CEFACT's Cross Industry Invoice schema provides an opportunity to further collaboration with UN/CEFACT. [Full context]
[March 26, 2007] Member Submission of Service Modeling Language (SML) Specification to W3C. W3C has acknowledged receipt of a Member Submission for the Service Modeling Language (SML) specification, which may be used to model complex IT services and systems, including their structure, constraints, policies, and best practices. The submission request was made by BEA, CA, Cisco, EMC (Documentum), HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems with the recommendation that W3C form a Working Group whose mission would be "to produce W3C Recommendations for Services Modeling Language by refining the Submission, addressing implementation experience, and interoperability feedback from the Submission." The SML submission includes the primary Service Modeling Language, Version 1.0 specification, together with a companion SML Interchange Format Version 1.0. As defined in the Service Modeling Language Specification, an SML model is a collection of XML documents that may be used to describe such things as a set of IT resources, services, and their interrelations. The SML Interchange Format (SML-IF) document defines an implementation-neutral interchange format that preserves the content and interrelationships among the documents that make up an SML model, or a portion of an SML model. SML models typically include information about configuration, deployment, monitoring, policy, health, capacity planning, target operating range, service level agreements, and so on. An SML model, realized as a set of interrelated XML documents, contains information about the parts of an IT service, as well as the constraints that each part must satisfy for the IT service to function properly. [Full context]
[March 23, 2007] DMTF Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH) Initiative. On March 22, 2007, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced a new DASH Initiative (Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware). DASH Initiative Work Groups will produce a suite of specifications taking full advantage of the DMTF's Web Services for Management (WS-Management) specification to deliver standards-based Web services management for desktop and mobile client systems. The new initiative is designed to provide the next generation of standards for secure out-of-band and remote management of desktop and mobile systems. DASH becomes one of several DMTF Management Initiatives, providing a comprehensive framework for syntax and semantics necessary to manage computer systems, independent of machine state, operating platform, or vendor. Since the DMTF's Desktop and Mobile Working Group (DMWG) was announced, the group has attracted more than 180 members from over different companies, demonstrating a strong commitment by vendors and users across the industry to collaborate on this effort. Statements of support for the new DASH Initiative have been provided by AMD, Avocent, Broadcom, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, NVIDIA, Symantec, and WBEM Solutions. The WS-Management protocol stack for DASH is based on the Web Services. The network and physical layers are the two bottommost layers in the stack. The transport layers that carry SOAP messages are next in the stack. These layers include TCP, which provides reliable, stream-oriented data transport; TLS, which provides various security attributes, and HTTP 1.1, which provides user authentication and request-response semantics. TCP and HTTP 1.1 are required by DASH. TLS support is conditional on support for security profiles that require it. At the next layer, SOAP/XML messaging is handled. The security profiles specified in the DASH Implementation Requirements Specification define the security mechanisms required. Above the SOAP/XML layer is the data transfer layer, which is based on multiple Web Services specifications. These are WS-transfer, WS-Enumeration, and WS-Eventing for transferring the management information. The top three layers represent the WS-Management applications. The DASH profiles are mapped over the WS-Management protocol stack using the WS-Management CIM Binding. [Full context]
[March 21, 2007] Open SOA Collaboration Vendors Advance SCA and SDO Specs for Standardization. The OSOA Collaboration represented by eighteen leading technology vendors announced that key Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) specifications have completed incubation and will be submitted to OASIS and the Java Community Process for advancement through formal standardization processes. The vendors include BEA Systems, Cape Clear, IBM Corporation, Interface21, IONA, Oracle, Primeton Technologies, Progress Software, Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, SAP AG, Siemens AG, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, TIBCO Software, Xcalia, and Zend. The Service Component Architecture (SCA) specifications have been in progress since 2005, and are now considered mature; the industry partners intend to turn over their standardization process to OASIS. Additionally, the partners have completed work on the SDO specifications, designed to enable uniform access to data residing in multiple locations and formats, and will turn over stewardship of SDO/Java work to the Java Community Process (JCP), and non-Java (C++) work to OASIS. The OSOA industry partners will continue to incubate and drive technology initiatives focused on simplifying SOA application development. Additionally, the group's vendor-neutral Web site (www.OSOA.org) will continue to serve as an information resource for access to draft specifications and white papers, and provide a forum for industry input and feedback. [Full context]
[March 20, 2007] Proposed Charter: OASIS Web Services Federation (WSFED) Technical Committee. OASIS has acknowledged receipt of a draft TC charter proposal to establish a new Web Services Federation (WSFED) Technical Committee. The TC would accept as input the December 2006 Version 1.1 "WS-Federation" specification as published by BEA Systems Inc., BMC Software, CA Inc., IBM Corporation, Layer 7 Technologies, Microsoft Corporation, Novell Inc., and VeriSign Inc. The purpose of the WSFED TC is to extend basic federation capabilities enabled by other Web service Security specifications (WS-Security, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Trust, WS-SecurityPolicy) to provide advanced federation capabilities. The proposed charter is open for commment through on April 02, 2007. Federation capabilities envisioned by the TC proposers "includes, but is not limited to: structure and acquisition of federation metadata; sign-out notifications; the use of pseudonym and identity mapping services and attribute services in conjunction with Security Token Services; claims-based authorization; and protection of a principal's privacy with respect to claims asserted in security tokens. In addition, the TC will define an HTTP serialization mechanism allowing the richness of WS-Trust security token based mechanisms for SOAP Web services — brokered trust relationships and distributed authentication and authorization — to be used in browser-based scenarios. This work will be carried out through continued refinement of the Web Services Federation Language Version 1.1 specification. [Full context]

News Stories from 2006

[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]

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 Tech


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