Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 18 September 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:
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

Headlines

OASIS Launches Emergency Interoperability Member Section
Security Threats and Requirements for Emergency Call Marking and Mapping
Third SDO Emergency Services Coordination Workshop
Speaking the Same Language: Standards Are Critical
OpenOffice Update Charts Course to New Features
W3C Last Call Working Draft for MTOM Policy Assertion
Integrate XForms with the Google Web Toolkit, Part 1
Simplifying RDFa Notation

OASIS Launches Emergency Interoperability Member Section
Staff, OASIS Announcement

The OASIS Emergency Interoperability (EI) Member Section has been formed to accelerate the development, adoption, application, and implementation of emergency interoperability and communications standards. The Member Section will represent and serve the needs of all constituents in the marketplace: practitioners, technology providers, and national, international and multinational oversight agencies. The EI Member Section will oversee the work of the OASIS Emergency Management (EM) Technical Committee, which produces information exchange standards that advance incident preparedness and response to emergency situations. Founded in January 2003, the EM TC's accomplishments include the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) Distribution Element and the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) OASIS Standards, both of which are widely used in the emergency community. The Member Section also welcomes suggestions for forming new Committees to address other issues related to emergency interoperability. The Steering Committee for the EI Member Section will include David Lamendsdorf, David Aylward, and Tracy Ryan of the Emergency Interoperability Consortium, Elysa Jones of Warning Systems (Chair of the OASIS EM TC), and Dr. Donald Ponikvar of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Future Steering Committee elections will be held annually.

Security Threats and Requirements for Emergency Call Marking and Mapping
Tom Taylor (ed), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Emergency Context Resolution with Internet Technologies (ECRIT) Working Group have released an updated Internet Draft for "Security Threats and Requirements for Emergency Call Marking and Mapping." The document reviews the security threats associated with the marking of signalling messages to indicate that they are related to an emergency, and the process of mapping from locations to Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) pointing to Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs). This mapping occurs as part of the process of routing emergency calls through the IP network. Based on the identified threats, this document establishes a set of security requirements for the mapping protocol and for the handling of emergency-marked calls. Marking of call signalling enables entities along the signalling path to recognize that a particular signalling message is associated with an emergency call. Signalling containing the emergency identifier may be given priority treatment, special processing, and/or special routing. Mapping involves a mapping client, a mapping server, and the protocol that passes between them. The protocol allows the client to pass location information to the mapping server and to receive back a URI which can be used to direct call signalling to a PSAP. The supporting WG requirements document defines terminology and enumerates requirements for the context resolution of emergency calls placed by the public using voice-over-IP (VoIP) and general Internet multimedia systems, where Internet protocols are used end-to-end, with the overall goal of making emergency calling more robust, less costly to implement, and multimedia-capable. A related document from the Working Group ("LoST: A Location-to-Service Translation Protocol") describes an XML-based protocol for mapping service identifiers and geodetic or civic location information to service contact URIs; in particular, it can be used to determine the location-appropriate PSAP for emergency services.

See also: ECRIT WG requirements

Third SDO Emergency Services Coordination Workshop
Hannes Tschofenig, IETF ECRIT Working Group Announcement

A posting from Hannes Tschofenig (Co-Chair of the IETF Emergency Context Resolution with Internet Technologies Working Group) announces the program for the public Third SDO Emergency Services Coordination Workshop, to be held October 30, 2007 - November 1, 2007 in Brussels, Belgium. The goals of this workshop are to learn more about the ongoing and upcoming emergency related work, to synchronize standardization efforts, and to provide/receive feedback. Motivation: Today many standardization activities take place with regard to various parts of the emergency service architecture. They are, however, not as coordinated as they could be. There is the danger that uncoordinated activities lead to solutions that either do not work in some circumstances or to solutions that lead to duplicate work due to lack of knowledge of work done by other SDOs. Two SDO emergency services workshops have been held already and a number of other smaller coordination activities took place... Summoning police, fire department, ambulance or other emergency services in case of emergency is one of the fundamental and most-valued functions of the telephone. As telephone functionality moves from circuit-switched telephony to Internet telephony, its users rightfully expect that this core functionality will continue to work at least as well as is has for the older technology. New devices and services are being made available which could be used to make a request for help which are not traditional telephones, and users are increasingly expecting them to be used to place emergency calls. However, many of the technical advantages of Internet multimedia require re-thinking of the traditional emergency calling architecture. This challenge also offers an opportunity to improve the operation of emergency calling technology, while potentially lowering its cost and complexity. Instant messaging, wideband speech codecs and video could improve the ability to communicate and evaluate the situation and to provide appropriate instruction prior to arrival of emergency crews. Future emergency services will allow the creation of sessions of any media type, negotiated between the caller and PSAP using existing SIP protocol mechanisms." Program chairs include Harry Worstell, Henning Schulzrinne, Stephen McCann, Christian Militeau, Hannu Hietalahti, Roger Hixson, Raymond Forbes, Marc Linsner, and Hannes Tschofenig. The supporting 'es-coordination' mailing list allows various SDOs working on emergency calling services to coordinate their activities, e.g., by announcing new work, new drafts, or to ask questions.

See also: the mailing list

Speaking the Same Language: Standards Are Critical
Alice Lipowicz, Washington Technology

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's new national broadband network for public safety will enable first responders to share data throughout much of the country starting as soon as 2009. But the new pipeline probably won't achieve its full potential until more standards and systems for such data exchanges are widely adopted. The FCC-authorized network is being established as a commercial system that must be available for emergency use by public safety agencies. Construction is expected to begin in 2009, and the network must reach 75 percent of the nation's population by 2013. Taking full advantage of the new network will likely mean completion and integration of existing standards and development of additional features, such as those for controlling access to the network and possibly for validating the identities of safety officials using the network. Although information-sharing standards for homeland security are advancing, much of the technical work has followed separate paths. For example, state and local agencies are adopting the Global Justice and National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) data models to help police agencies, prisons, courts and sheriff's departments share data. The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), an open standard enabling emergency managers to quickly distribute public warning alerts to one another and the public, has made substantial inroads among state, local and federal agencies in the three years since its creation. The Hospital Availability Exchange, a standard that will soon be released, lets hospitals exchange information automatically on topics such as the number of beds available and whether their emergency rooms are full. The existing standards, although effective in their spheres, are not yet integrated with one another. The NIEM, managed by the Homeland Security and Justice departments, is providing a central repository. Although NIEM has incorporated emergency management and medical terms into its universal lexicon, NIEM administrators say that so far the model is not widely used beyond law enforcement agencies... 'We have not yet reached a tipping point' into convergence, said Paul Wormeli, executive director at the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute, a nonprofit corporation that released NIEM 2.0 on behalf of DHS and Justice. Even so, Wormeli is optimistic about NIEM and CAP working together.

OpenOffice Update Charts Course to New Features
Eric Lai, ComputerWorld

The OpenOffice.org group updated its open-source suite of desktop applications on Monday [2007-09-17], saying that its new release enhances the ability of users to create charts and other graphics from spreadsheet data. And with the free office software facing reinvigorated competition from Office and other commercial rivals, OpenOffice.org also touted new statistics about its users in an attempt to [counter] the stereotype that the open-source technology only attracts young, undemanding fans. In addition to simplifying the suite's Chart component and adding more features to it, the OpenOffice.org 2.3 update includes display improvements within Writer, its counterpart to Microsoft Corp.'s Word software. The update also provides better compatibility between the OpenOffice suite's Calc application and Excel, plus other new features. Users can download OpenOffice.org 2.3 from the open-source project's Web site. Versions are available for all releases of Windows after Windows 98, as well as Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. The release of the update comes just two days before the start of OpenOffice.org's annual developers conference, which will take place from Wednesday through Friday in Barcelona. Last week, IBM said it would officially join OpenOffice.org and contribute code it has written for its Lotus Notes collaboration software. OpenOffice.org 2.3 lacks the ability to import and open files created in the Office Open XML document format that is native to Office 2007, although developers at Sun are working on that capability. The update can open and save files in Microsoft's older Office document formats, according to the open-source group. Version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org was released nearly two years ago. Although OpenOffice.org says its namesake software has been downloaded 96 million times, the suite still holds a small share of the overall productivity software market.

W3C Last Call Working Draft for MTOM Policy Assertion
Christopher Ferris and Yves Lafon (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C's XML Protocol Working Group has released a First Public and Last Call Working Draft for the "MTOM Serialization Policy Assertion 1.1" specification. The Last Call period ends 15-October-2007. The specification describes a domain-specific policy assertion that indicates endpoint support of the optimized MIME multipart/related serialization of SOAP messages defined in section 3 of the "SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM)" specification. This policy assertion can be specified within a policy alternative as defined in "Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework (WS-Policy)" and attached to a WSDL description as defined in "Web Services Policy 1.5 - Attachment (WS-PolicyAttachment)." For backwards compatibility, the policy assertion can also be used in conjunction with the SOAP 1.1 Binding for MTOM 1.0 Member Submission. The document defined a namespace URI: "http://www.w3.org/2007/08/soap12-mtom-policy". MTOM describes an abstract feature and a concrete implementation of it for optimizing the transmission and/or wire format of SOAP messages (to optimize hop-by-hop exchanges between SOAP nodes).

Integrate XForms with the Google Web Toolkit, Part 1
Michael Galpin, IBM developerWorks

The Google Web Tookit (GWT) has become a very popular way to develop Ajax applications. It allows Java developers to rapidly create Ajax applications by leveraging their knowledge of Java technology without requiring any knowledge of JavaScript. XForms represents an evolution in the HTML standard, and allows for simple constructs to create complex, dynamic behavior. Both GWT and XForms are powerful enough to provide complete solutions to many problems. This four-part series demonstrates how to use the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and XForms together to create a dynamic Web application. Part 1 starts with a bottom-up approach to the problem of using GWT and XForms together. It takes a look at some of the underpinnings of each technology, examining the common ground between them that will allow for their peaceful coexistence. This will lay the foundation for developing a Web application that uses both GWT and XForms together. XForms is a standards-based technology that will be central in the next generation of the HTML specification. XForms uses the familiar Model-View-Controller paradigm. The key to XForms is separating data from the physical view of the data. Sound like a familiar concept? With the data separated, it can be viewed in any HTML-way you can imagine. It can also be bound to form elements to allow for a seamless way to enter data and to edit existing data. With a model declared, you can easily create views from the data encapsulated by the model. XForms contains numerous common controls for working with model instance data. Each control can reference data from the model's instance data. The instance data is in an XML format, so we can easily navigate and reference it arbitrarily using XPath. XForms supports the full XPath 2.0 specification.

See also: XML and Forms

Simplifying RDFa Notation
Kurt Cagle, DevX.com

In this article you discover how to use namespace prefixes to define taxonomies and categorization through compact URI encoding (CURIE) to make the semantic web more accessible for web development. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is not the world's most beloved standard: Perhaps the biggest problem that RDF faces is those pesky namespaces. in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) universe, namespaces are also notable in that they have associated (and more important) unique Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). For instance, if you want to describe a vocabulary for electronic business cards, you'd likely end up using something like the vcard specification. Recently, Mark Birbeck of x-port.net and Shane McCarron of Applied Testing and Technology edited a number of articles for the W3C, including a primer on attributes for RDF (RDFa). However, they also produced a document entitled, "CURIE Syntax 1.0: A syntax for expressing Compact URIs," (W3C Working Draft 7, March 2007). A CURIE is, as the name implies, a Compact URI Encoding... While formally endorsing the concept as "canonical," Birbeck and McCarron also recommend one change; namely, to disambiguate CURIEs from URIs or other protocols by enclosing such terms within square brackets ([]). Note that CURIEs (albeit without the square bracket notation) already are in use in certain areas... Put another way, a CURIE is a term in a constrained taxonomy. It may have some associated meaning, which manifests as replacement text, programmatic bindings, or the like, but ultimately it should be seen as a way of embedding formal taxonomies into traditional web documents. It is in this role that CURIEs will likely play a big part through the introduction of RDFa.The CURIE model—using namespace prefixes to define taxonomies and categorization—opens up some interesting doors in the W3C model and provides a particularly intriguing way to make the semantic web more accessible for web developers. Folksonomies have generally proven quite successful, and they open up the possibility that the slightly more fine-grained tweaking that RDFa exposes may have a similar adoption cycle and prove to be as useful in the long run... RDFa and Atom make for a surprisingly potent combination. One provides a useful way for annotating XHTML content with metadata easily and unobtrusively. The other provides a way of transporting both the metadata and its corresponding links such that generalized feed processors can display at least a minimal set of information about the given resource, and specialized feed processors can take the same Atom feed and use the object properties to generate considerably more sophisticated effects.

See also: the RDFa Primer


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