Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Monday, 02 June 2008

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:
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com

Headlines

WSRP 2.0 Advances to OASIS Standard
W3C Launches Mobile Web For Social Development (MW4D) Interest Group
DMTF Releases WS-CIM Mapping Specification as a Final Standard
LETSI Issues Call for SCORM 2.0 White Papers
OAI Announces Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) Beta Release
IETF Internet Draft: NETCONF Event Notifications
OASIS Announces Discussion List for New ODF Implementation, Interoperability, and Conformance (IIC) Technical Committee

WSRP 2.0 Advances to OASIS Standard
Staff, OASIS Announcement

Members of the OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Technical Committee have produced "Web Services for Remote Portlets Specification Version 2.0," now approved as an OASIS Standard. Integration of remote content and application logic into an End-User presentation has been a task requiring significant custom programming effort. Typically, vendors of aggregating applications, such as a portal, write special adapters for applications and content providers to accommodate the variety of different interfaces and protocols those providers use. The goal of this specification is to enable an application designer or administrator to pick from a rich choice of compliant remote content and application providers, and integrate them with just a few mouse clicks and no programming effort. This revision of the specification adds Consumer managed coordination, additional lifecycle management and a set of related aggregation enhancements. This standard layers on top of the existing web services stack, utilizing existing web services standards and will leverage emerging web service standards (such as policy) as they become available. The interfaces defined by this specification use the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Since its approval in 2003, version 1.0 of WSRP has been widely used for promulgating information services (in the form of elemental building blocks of displayed information), and consuming and assembling them heterogeneously in portals and other re-uses. Successful use of WSRP 2.0 was verified by OASIS Foundational Sponsor, IBM, and by Sponsors, Oracle and Vignette, in accordance with eligibility requirements for all OASIS Standards.

See also: the specification

W3C Launches Mobile Web For Social Development (MW4D) Interest Group
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C has launched a "Mobile Web For Social Development (MW4D) Interest Group" to study the issues that rural communities and underprivileged populations face in accessing information and communication technology. The MW4D Interest Group provides an multidisciplinary forum for discussing these issues, and in doing so, contributes to the W3C mission of making the Web available to all. According to the GSMA and ITU, at the end of 2007, more than 3 billion people had access to a mobile phone and 80% of the global population was covered by a GSM network. These figures make a strong case for using mobile phones as the platform for health, education, business, and government services in rural environments. However, there remain significant challenges to providing access to these communities and in leveraging local content and application development. The new MW4D Interest Group will study these challenges, identify the most promising ways to address them, and propose a road map for progress. In order to succeed, the MW4D Interest Group requires expertise in diverse fields, and thus invites participation from people and organizations who are experts in mobiles technologies, Web technologies, usability, sustainability and entrepreneurship. W3C seeks participation in particular from NGOs with field experience and expertise, and academics from developing regions in order to capture, in a bottom-up approach, the needs and requirements of the targeted population. W3C launches this new group under the auspices of the European Union's 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7), part of the Digital World Forum project. This work is part of W3C's Mobile Web Initiative, which aims to identify and resolve challenges and issues of accessing the Web when on the move.

See also: the press release

DMTF Releases WS-CIM Mapping Specification as a Final Standard
Staff, Distributed Management Task Force Announcement

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has announced the release of four specifications as Final Standards, including the "WS-CIM Mapping Specification" (DSP0230). The WS-CIM Mapping Specification (DSP0230) was prepared by the DMTF WBEM Infrastructure and Protocols Working Group. The goal of the specification is to produce a normative description of a protocol-independent mapping of CIM models to XML Schema, WSDL fragments, and metadata fragments. Another goal of the specification is to allow the most expedient use of current Web Services (WS) infrastructure as a foundation for implementing a WS-CIM compliant system. Management based on the Common Information Model in a Web Services environment requires that the CIM Schema (classes, properties, and methods) be rendered in XML Schema and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). To achieve this, CIM must be mapped to WSDL and XML Schema through an explicit algorithm that can be programmed for automatic translation. This specification provides the normative rules and recommendations that describe the structure of the XML Schema, WSDL fragments, and metadata fragments that correspond to the elements of CIM models, and the representation of CIM instances as XML instance documents. A conformant implementation of a CIM model to XML Schema, WSDL fragments, and metadata fragments transformation algorithm must yield an XML Schema, WSDL fragments, and metadata fragments as described in this specification. These CIM models may be expressed in CIM Managed Object Format (MOF) or in other equivalent ways. Throughout this specification, examples illustrate the mapping from CIM MOF.

See also: the newsletter article

LETSI Issues Call for SCORM 2.0 White Papers
Staff, Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability Announcement

LETSI (Learning Education Training Systems Interoperability), the international, nonprofit federation dedicated to improving individual and organizational learning, has taken on the task of developing the next generation of SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model. As part of this initiative, LETSI is soliciting White Papers from all stakeholders interested in shaping the future direction of SCORM and the implementation of learning systems technology. Stakeholders in all parts of the education and training world are invited to submit White Papers concerning the technical and pedagogical requirements for future learning systems interoperability. The deadline for submission is August 15, 2008. The open solicitation was announced May 28, 2008 at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting, hosted by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative in Alexandria, VA, USA. The development of the next SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, has been tasked to LETSI, a new international federation for Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability. LETSI's goal is to advance innovation and adoption of learning technology across all market sectors and to support the use of open software standards in learning technology... SCORM 2.0 will include specifications and standards created and managed using open, transparent processes that are not encumbered by patents, licenses or restrictions that would impinge on its availability to the global LET community. LETSI will create an open source software community to support SCORM adopters and product developers. LETSI itself does not develop the component standards that go into SCORM. SCORM 2.0 will have a modular, extensible architecture that will allow specific communities of practice to adapt and extend the model with functionality and innovations that are important for their particular situation (e.g., a new medical simulation standard or aviation-industry specific metadata). LETSI will play the leadership role in publicizing such extensions and will consider them for future inclusion in SCORM.

OAI Announces Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) Beta Release
Staff, Open Archives Initiative Announcement

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) recently announced the publication of nine (9) Specification Documents and User Guide Documents relating to the OAI ORE Model. The ORE Model makes it possible to associate identities with aggregations of web resources and to describe their structure and semantics. It does this by introducing the Resource Map (ReM), which is a network accessible resource that encapsulates a set of RDF statements. These statements describe an Aggregation as a resource with a URI, enumerate the constituents of the Aggregation, and the relationships among those constituents. Over the past eighteen months the OAI, in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, web, library, and eScience community to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of online information resources. These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. Although a motivating use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of 'web 2.0'. The new documents describe a data model to introduce aggregations as resources with URIs on the web. They also detail the machine-readable descriptions of aggregations expressed in the popular Atom syndication format, in RDF/XML, and RDFa... OAI-ORE and Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) are separate standards; OAI-ORE does neither extends nor replaces OAI-PMH. OAI-PMH is a protocol and an XML message format for the exchange of XML records (typically metadata). It supports selective or incremental harvesting which allows a client repository to maintain an up-to-date copy of records in all or part of a source repository.

IETF Internet Draft: NETCONF Event Notifications
Sharon Chisholm and Hector Trevino (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Network Configuration (NETCONF) Working Group have published at updated Internet Draft for the "NETCONF Event Notifications" specification. The NETCONF WG was chartered to produce a protocol suitable for network configuration, using XML for data encoding purposes. The "NETCONF Event Notifications" document defines mechanisms that provide an asynchronous message notification delivery service for the NETCONF protocol. Specifically, it defines a mechanism whereby the NETCONF client indicates interest in receiving event notifications from a NETCONF server by creating a subscription to receive event notifications. The NETCONF server replies to indicate whether the subscription request was successful and, if it was successful, begins sending the event notifications to the NETCONF client as the events occur within the system. These event notifications will continue to be sent until either the NETCONF session is terminated or the subscription terminates for some other reason. The event notification subscription allows a number of options to enable the NETCONF client to specify which events are of interest. These are specified when the subscription is created. Note that a subscription cannot be modified once created. Section 4 provides the XML Schema for Event Notifications.

OASIS Announces Discussion List for New ODF Implementation, Interoperability, and Conformance (IIC) Technical Committee
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS anounced that members have requested the creation of a new discussion list to support a possible new OASIS Technical Committee: "ODF Implementation, Interoperability and Conformance (IIC)." Proposers include representatives from Ars Aperta, IBM, and Novell; Rob Weir of IBM is designated as the discussion leader. According to the text of the proposal, the new TC would provide a means for software implementors and service providers to create applications which adhere to the ODF specification and are able to interoperate. As such, the purpose of the IIC TC includes: (1) Publication of test suites of ODF for applications of ODF to check their conformance with the Standard and to confirm their interoperability; (2) Providing feedback, where necessary, to the ODF TC on ways in which the standard could improve interoperability; (3) Production of a set of implementation guidelines; (4) Defining interoperability with related standards by the creation of profiles or technical reports; (5) Coordination of OASIS Interoperability demos related to ODF, in conjunction with the ODF Adoption TC. The ODF IIC TC may also liaise with other standard bodies whose work is leveraged in present or future ODF specifications. These include, but are not limited to, the W3C and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34. The discussion list is governed by Section 2.1 of the OASIS TC Process, and may last up to 90 days. Typically, participants in the list will determine whether there is sufficient interest to form an OASIS TC, and then collaborate on a draft TC charter for submission.


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