Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 15 February 2007

A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS and Sponsor Members
Edited by Robin Cover

This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by:
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Headlines

Google Earth Gets Overlay Search Feature
Microsoft Is SOA-Ready for Wall Street
How Much Open Source Progress Flies Under Your Radar?
XML for Perl Developers: Advanced Manipulating and Writing Techniques
IESG Requests Comments on 'The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set'
Enabling Read Access for Web Resources
OSGi Alliance Announces Five New Members

Google Earth Gets Overlay Search Feature
Juan Carlos Perez, InfoWorld

Google has created a searchable index of Google Earth data files, a feature that should make it easier for users to find and adopt third-party overlays for this popular mapping application. Google Earth's search engine now returns KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files which developers have created to add data to the application's maps, the Mountain View, California, company said Wednesday. "Users can now search through all of the world's KML files, making the millions of Google Earth layers on the Web instantly accessible for geobrowsing and exploration," wrote Chikai Ohazama, a Google Earth product manager in an official company blog. Google expects to later extend this capability to its mapping Web site Google Maps, Ohazama wrote. Google Earth is a free, downloadable PC application that taps a multiterabyte database of aerial and satellite images to let users "fly" around the globe using a video-game type user interface. By creating overlays in the KML file format, users can create markers to pinpoint places and provide all sorts of information about an area, making Google Earth a repository of local business listings, homes for sale, photos, architectural drawings, videos, historical facts and geographical data. KML users range from casual, individual users to large organizations like Discovery Networks, the U.S. National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic. KML can also be used to add data files to Google Maps, a mapping Web site that is one of the most popular among developers for creating mashups, which are Web applications that use data and features from an existing site or online service via application programming interfaces. Online maps, in combination with local search engines, have become very popular in recent years, giving people a way to discover local businesses and attractions, obtain driving directions and view satellite images of an area, among other things. [Note: "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. You can create KML files with the Google Earth user interface, or you can use an XML or simple text editor to enter 'raw' KML from scratch. KML files and their related images (if any) can be compressed using the ZIP format into KMZ archives."]

Microsoft Is SOA-Ready for Wall Street
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

Microsoft is ready to take on the Wall Street service-oriented architecture scene with its latest developer and infrastructure technologies, said a consultant in building IT systems for financial services companies. Michael DeSanti, a partner with Eikos Partners, New York, spoke at the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street conference said Microsoft's .Net Framework 3.0 meets the needs of financial services firms trying to build extensible SOAs. DeSanti said the .Net Framework 3.0 and its components—the WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), Windows WF (Workflow Foundation) and CardSpace—enable Microsoft to meet real-world SOA needs: "Microsoft has been integrating SOA technology into all of its enterprise offerings from its operating system to Microsoft Office 2007 and various elements of the Microsoft enterprise application development environment... Meanwhile, some financial services enterprises are using Microsoft Excel, SharePoint and Web services to reduce risk in structured product environments. And financial services firms are using workflow to model credit derivative processing, to model and manage large corporate loans, and to manage hedge fund processing... Microsoft was instrumental in the development of XML and XML Schema, the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and the building out of the WS-* Web services stack and the WSDL (Web Services Description Language)... They're breaking a lot of new ground, largely because they're consuming most of this stuff internally..."

See also: ebXML.org

How Much Open Source Progress Flies Under Your Radar?
Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet Blog

Some of what we know about open source plays out in public. But much else—perhaps most of the progress—flies under our radar. This is not because the people involved don't write about it. It's because most of us don't have time to read about it. Think about it as the flip side of the economics of abundance. One example from Ed Dodds in North Carolina: It's about the very real progress being made by ebXML, a system of XML codes for electronic business. The note was posted on the ebXML Forum by Alan Kotok, and details some pretty big achievements. The Public Health Information Network, run by the Centers for Disease Control, is now using ebXML to connect public health agencies and first responders. The Digital Trade and Transport Network in Hong Kong is now exchanging messages about dangerous cargo using ebXML. The U.S. Department of Defense is maintaining a metadata registry based on ebXML. Trygdeetaten, Norway's award-winning public health scheme, has replaced EDI with ebXML. Energy trading across the European electrical grid is now taking place using ebXML. T-Mobile uses ebXML messaging for its provisioning and maintenance in Europe. These are just a few examples the note highlights. XML has been around for over a decade now. It's a set of tags, like those used in HTML, whose meaning is agreed to by folks for some business purpose. It saves businesses and trading partners billions of dollars per year, allowing them to route business information over the Internet, in the background, seamlessly. If you and your trading partners want to create your own flavor of XML you can do so, using any tags you want. So long as all of you attach the same meanings to the tags, so long as there is consensus and transparency, your scheme works for all of you. But the benefits really start growing when whole industries, or industry as a whole, uses the same set of tags, as in ebXML.

XML for Perl Developers: Advanced Manipulating and Writing Techniques
Jim Dixon, IBM developerWorks

Part 1 of this article series began by showing that you can convert most XML documents in a single step (using XML::Simple) to and from easily manipulated Perl data structures. Part 2 introduced more powerful tools for parsing XML: DOM-style tree parsers and the SAX event-based parsers. XML::SAX::Base can be used to build sources, handlers, and sinks of SAX events. This article, the third in a three-part series, uses the parsing techniques introduced in Part 2 to build tree structures that can be transformed, navigated, and written, and how to manage document transformations using XSLT, SAX, and SQL. You will then see how to feed transformed parse trees into SAX pipelines, further transform them, and write them as text or to SQL databases. Finally you will learn how to reverse this, using database content to drive SAX pipelines.

IESG Requests Comments on 'The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set'
John A. Kunze (ed), IETF Internet Draft

The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider "The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set" as an Informational RFC. The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments by 2007-03-14. The Dublin Core Metadata Workshop Series began in 1995 with an invitational workshop which brought together librarians, digital library researchers, content experts, and text-markup experts to promote better discovery standards for electronic resources. The resulting metadata element set is perhaps the most widely adopted convention for structuring resource descriptions designed to bridge networked information systems and content providers in the publishing, library, museum, scholarly, archival, and government communities. It defines fifteen metadata elements for resource description in a cross-disciplinary information environment. This document, containing the text of ANSI/NISO Z39.85 plus corrections for consistency and clarity, obsoletes Internet RFC 2413, which was the first published version of the Dublin Core. The differences are that the present RFC recommends lowercase element names (consistent with RDF property types) and remains silent about the unrestrictedness of element ordering and repeatability (application profiles being the proper place to discuss such topics). Sections 2-5 and 10-12 are taken directly from ANSI/NISO Z39.85. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is responsible for the development, standardization and promotion of the Dublin Core metadata element set.

See also: DCMI

Enabling Read Access for Web Resources
Anne van Kesteren and Brad Porter (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C's Web Application Formats (WAF) Working Group has released an updated Working Draft for "Enabling Read Access for Web Resources." The document provides a mechanism for a web resource to relax typical browser sandbox restrictions on cross-site access to it. Using either a HTTP header or XML processing instruction (or both) resources can indicate they allow read access from specified hosts (optionally using patterns). When a pattern is used you can also exclude certain hosts. The world wide web has a rich set of resources that can be combined to build content and feature-rich web sites. Websites are permitted to include a reference (either a link or an image inclusion) to web resources residing on another site. For security reasons, web browsers typically do not permit a website to read, process, or otherwise interrogate the contents of any web resource residing on a different domain. In order to make the experience safe for the end user, web browsers must tightly control access to web resources. Web pages or XML documents often contain sensitive information such as account balances or personal correspondences or corporate financial information. Consequently, the browser must prevent an example.com application from making a request from your browser that would allow it to "read" your sensitive information. Because the web browser can not tell which web pages or XML documents contain sensitive information and which do not, the browser sandbox by default restricts all "read" requests. An application in example.com can not load or inspect the contents of data from any other document. Some browsers make an exception if the "read" request is for data from the same host or domain. Sandbox restrictions on cross-site access to browsers can be relaxed with the mechanism described in this TR. An HTTP header or XML processing instruction or both can indicate read access is allowed.

See also: W3C Rich Web Clients

OSGi Alliance Announces Five New Members
Stafff, OSGi Alliance Announcement

The OSGi Alliance announced today that five new members joined the alliance following its recent initiatives in the enterprise applications market. OSGi specifications enhance the service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy driving server-side businesses today, modularizing and componentizing Java applications and allowing applications to be adapted remotely and in real time. These new members will help the alliance drive adoption of the OSGi Service Platform in enterprises and other markets. BEA Systems, IONA Technologies, Jayway AB, Eclipse and Interface21—developer of the Spring Framework -- use the Java platform and OSGi specifications. BEA, IONA and Jayway are part of the alliance's Enterprise Expert Group (EEG) charged with enhancing OSGi specifications for enterprise application. OSGi technology is a component integration platform with a service-oriented architecture and lifecycle capabilities that enable dynamic delivery of services. These capabilities greatly increase the value of a wide range of computers and devices that use the Java platform. The OSGi specifications provide the platform for universal middleware and are deployed by Fortune 100 companies in home, automotive, mobile and enterprise markets. The OSGi Service Platform provides the functions to change the composition dynamically on the device of a variety of networks, without requiring restarts. To minimize the coupling, as well as make these couplings managed, the OSGi technology provides a service-oriented architecture that enables these components to dynamically discover each other for collaboration. The OSGi Alliance has developed many standard component interfaces for common functions like HTTP servers, configuration, logging, security, user administration, XML and many more.

See also: the web site


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