Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 07 August 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:
Primeton http://www.primeton.com

Headlines

W3C First Public Working Draft: VoiceXML 3.0 Requirements
WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance as an Exposed Constraints Engine
NIEM Year in Review: Looking Back and Looking Forward
Is AMQP on the Way to Providing Real Business Interoperability?
X3D: The Real-Time 3D Solution for the Web
Text Retrieval for XML-Encoded Corpora: A Lexical Approach
OGF Secure Addressing Profile 1.0 Published in the Recommendation Track
OGSA Basic Security Profile 2.0

W3C First Public Working Draft: VoiceXML 3.0 Requirements
Jeff Hoepfinger and Emily Candell (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced publication of the First Public Working Draft for "The Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0 Requirements." The W3C Voice Browser working group aims to develop specifications to enable access to the Web using spoken interaction. VoiceXML 2.0 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. VoiceXML 3.0 is the next major release of VoiceXML. Its purpose is to provide even more powerful dialog capabilities that can be used to build advanced speech applications and to provide these capabilities in a form that can be easily and cleanly integrated with other W3C languages. The main goal of the activity presented in this WD is to establish the current status of the Voice Browser Working Group Activities relative to the requirements defined in Previous Requirements Document and define additional requirements to drive future Voice Browser Working Group activities based on Voice Community experience with existing standards. (1) Modality requirements concern the types of modalities (media in combination with an input/output mechanism) supported by the markup language for user input and system output. (For the Voice Browser Working Group, the modalities supported are speech, video and DTMF. Requirements regarding other modalities will be handled by the Multimodal Interaction Working Group.) (2) Functional requirements concern the behavior (or operational semantics) which results from interpreting a voice markup language. (3) Format requirements constrain the format (or syntax) of the voice markup language itself. The environment and capabilities of the voice browser interpreting the markup language affects these requirements. There may be differences in the modality and functional requirements for desktop versus telephony-based environments (and in the latter case, between fixed, mobile and Internet telephony environments). The capabilities of the voice browser device also impacts on requirements. Requirements affected by the environment or capabilities of the voice browser device are explicitly marked as such.

WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance as an Exposed Constraints Engine
D. Colonnese, A. Klevitsky, and U. Manohar; IBM developerWorks

IBM WebSphere DataPower Appliance has a powerful set of extension functions that you can use within a policy rule action. This article shows you to integrate DataPower extension functions into ISO Schematron rules, and how to repurpose Schematron-based rules for different representations and contexts. Part 1 of this article series described a sample policy rule with a Transform action using a Schematron validation stylesheet to validate the incoming data and a Filter action that filtered out the invalid requests. You can also integrate DataPower extension functions with the Schematron basic stylesheet to generate a validation stylesheet with the DataPower extension functions built into it. DataPower Extension elements and Extension Functions are a potent supplement to XSLT and Schematron. They let you control requests and responses as well as intermediate processing data on DataPower. Additionally DataPower has cryptography extension functions that you can use in various ways to enforce enterprise security at the edge. This article shows you how to integrate DataPower extension functions into ISO Schematron rules, and how to repurpose Schematron-based rules for different representations and contexts, in order to validate data at the enterprise edge. You should have some familiarity with DataPower, ISO Schematron, and XSLT.

See also: ISO Schematron

NIEM Year in Review: Looking Back and Looking Forward
Staff, NIEM Newsletter

The National Information Exchange Model (www.niem.gov) Program was launched on February 28, 2005, as a partnership between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). For the next two and one-half years, NIEM experienced a rapid development phase with several releases and homeland security and justice pilot projects conducted at the federal, state, and local levels... The NIEM leverages both the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) reference model and the GJXDM XML-based framework and support infrastructure. The NIEM model incorporates reference schemas (Core, code lists, domains, wrappers for external standards, as well as the schemas for those standards, or profiles or adaptations); it also contains a cumulative change log and the spreadsheet. NIEM provides practitioners and developers with a baseline set of XML Schema components for building Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPDs). Among the NIEM 2.0 XML Schemas is a 'NIEM Domain Schema' for Emergency Management... NIEM Information Exchange Packages (IEPs) are the foundation of NIEM's business value as an enabler for nationwide information interoperability and sharing. Broad adoption with collaborative sharing of adoption and use experience, best practices, lessons learned, IEP Documentation (IEPD) reuse, and cooperative development IEPDs for nationwide information exchange are critical for achieving the full potential of NIEM. Since the release of NIEM 2.0, there has been a groundswell of IEP development. There are now more than 70 NIEM IEPs registered in the GJXDM/NIEM IEP Documentation (IEPD) Clearinghouse. In addition, the DHS has more than 50 IEPDs, most of which are in development or operational... The NIEM Program expects to see continuing growth in IEPD development in the coming year and will continue to expand support to the IEPD developer community. As more and more NIEM IEPs are deployed in operational systems, the program will also expand support to the IEP implementer community. With the rapid pace of NIEM adoption and use, the NIEM program anticipates more industry products and services providing support for NIEM, which will further increase the NIEM value proposition. It is expected that new domains will join the NIEM Program, and there will be expanded collaboration across federal agencies and with international partners... Within the next few months, the NIEM PMO will be publishing several document revisions and new documents to support NIEM domain managers and developers and IEPD developers, including a revision to the NIEM Naming and Design Rules [September 2008], a new NIEM User Guide, and other documents on NIEM quality assurance, NIEM domain governance and versioning, and other topics of interest to NIEM stakeholders." Note: XML schemas developed by the OASIS Emergency Management TC have been incorporated into NIEM: Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL), Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), EDXL Distribution Element, EDXL Hospital AVailability Exchange (HAVE).

Is AMQP on the Way to Providing Real Business Interoperability?
Steven Robbins, InfoQueue

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) came from inside of JPMorgan, thanks to John O'Hara. But his vision was bigger than just a new way to do things internally. The standard and open source technologies around it have been gaining momentum. Jeff Gould and others shed some light on where AMQP came from, who is driving it, and where it might be going. In a three part series, Jeff Gould talked about the history of AMQP and John O'Hara's decision to go open source with it. After hiring iMatix to implement an AMQP project for JPMorganChase in 2003, the beta went live in 2006 and processed around 300 million messages per day. "O'Hara's plan for AMQP was far more ambitious. From the start he wanted the new protocol to match the functionality of the high-end proprietary MOMs. It had to handle all the major use cases, including queue-style store-and-forward messaging, Tibco-style publish and subscribe, and reliable file transfer. The protocol had to be capable of carrying any kind of message, but the focus was on more efficient binary formats rather than text, because in app-to-app messaging human readability is not a paramount concern." Gould went on to point out that it was O'Hara's quest to have an open standard that really pushed AMQP out of the bank and into the wild. The open standard was what brought players like Red Hat, Apache, WSO2, IONA, and Cisco to the table. Red Hat's MRG Messaging inside of its MRG initiative is an implementation of, and the core contributor to, the Apache Qpid project. LShift and CohesiveFT are jointly developing RabbitMQ, a "complete and highly reliable Enterprise Messaging system" that can be used to build an AMQP network or to enhance an established network. OpenAMQ from iMatix is another AMQP implementation product available. OpenAMQ was described as a product that "provides you with a framework on which to build distributed business applications which communicate using messages."

See also: AMQP references

X3D: The Real-Time 3D Solution for the Web
Staff, Web3D Consortium Announcement

"SIGGRAPH 2008 the biggest graphics industry gathering is just weeks away, and Web3D Consortium is geared up to showcase innovative X3D content and applications and wow the 3D graphics community. This year, the consortium celebrates its 10th anniversary with a bigger presence in the 3D graphics industry. We will have our best ever tech talk with over 10 presenters showcasing their innovations. The Web3D Consortium is a member-funded industry consortium committed to the creation and deployment of open, royalty-free standards that enable the communication of real-time 3D across applications, networks, and XML web services. The Consortium works closely with the ISO, MPEG and W3C standardization bodies to maximize market opportunities for its membership... Ecosystems of tools and techniques are evolving for standards-driven technologies. Web 3D technologies leverage the latest informatics tools such as XML-based solutions, web services applications, and graphics hardware innovations to deliver solutions across many domains. Topics include languages, tools, rendering techniques, human-computer interaction, networked and mobile devices and innovative applications. Thirteenth in the series, the Web3D 2008 International Symposium co-located with SIGGRAPH 2008 [Los Angeles, California, USA - Aug 9 and 10, 2008] will address this wide range of topics covering 3D Hypermedia on the Web. The annual Web3D Symposium is a major event, which unites researchers, developers, experimenters, and content creators in a dynamic learning environment. Attendees share and explore methods of using, enhancing, or creating new 3D Web and Multimedia technologies, such as (but not limited to) X3D, VRML, COLLADA, Croquet, MPEG4, MPEG7, Java3D, and Canvas3D. The symposium will also focus on recent trends such as interactive 3D graphics and applications on mobile devices... X3D is a royalty-free open standards file format and run-time architecture to represent and communicate 3D scenes and objects using XML. It is an ISO ratified standard that provides a system for the storage, retrieval and playback of real time graphics content embedded in applications, all within an open architecture to support a wide array of domains and user scenarios. X3D has a rich set of componentized features that can tailored for use in engineering and scientific visualization, CAD and architecture, medical visualization, training and simulation, multimedia, entertainment, education, and more. The development of real-time communication of 3D data across all applications and network applications has evolved from its beginnings as the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) to the considerably more mature and refined X3D standard.

See also: the X3D FAQ document

Text Retrieval for XML-Encoded Corpora: A Lexical Approach
Liam R. E. Quin, Paper Prepared for Balisage 2008

The W3C XML Query Working Group has published a specification for performing full-text queries over instances of the XPath and XQuery Data Model using an extension of the XQuery syntax. This is a text retrieval facility that operates on an abstract representation of XML trees, rather than on text files that happen to contain markup. Elements and their attributes are reified into hierarchies of nodes, text leaps into the lacunf and swims between them, and not a pointy bracket in sight. This paper compares the XQuery Full Text Facility with a more traditional open source text retrieval system, lq-text, and also explores the work done to make lq-text become more suitable to the processing needs of people who work with XML... Informally, a full text search is a search to find all documents in a collection, or all elements of some specific type (for example) containing one or more specific words. For example, one might want to find all occurrences of the phrase 'warm socks' in a multi-gigabyte corpus of text. The underlying assumption of full text is that the implementation uses an index that has been constructed separately in advance, although this is not necessarily true. XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Full-Text 1.0 extends XPath 2.0 (and XQuery 1.0 in turn, which itself extends XPath 2.0) to add support for explicit syntax for full text searches. XPath 2.0 is node-based, matching text nodes which are contained by element nodes in a collection of XML document trees. The result is a Boolean value (when used in an XPath predicate) together with an optional numerical score or ranking. The Full-Text facility includes a large number of possible modifiers, many of which are optional features and may or may or be available in any given implementation. These include (for example) both query expansion through a thesaurus and also query narrowing using a different sort of thesaurus. One can search for two tokens (words, for English) within a certain number of tokens, sentences or even paragraphs. The optional features are marked as being 'at risk' in W3C parlance, meaning that unimplemented (or unimplementable) features will be dropped from the draft specification before it is published as a W3C Recommendation... Lq-text is an open source text retrieval package that was first released in 1989. It has had sporadic development since then. Its main claims to fame are high precision, good performance (particularly when the data does not fit into available virtual memory), flexible concordance generation and an open, extensible, multi-process architecture... The author's original goal in adding XML support to lq-text was to use lq-text to help optimise an XQuery implementation. After experimenting with an XQuery implementation that supported Full-Text, the author decided instead to focus on enhancing lq-text to see if the results would be useful. It turns out that they are indeed useful, and development is continuing. It must be admitted, however, that any advantage of lq-text over sophisticated XQuery implementations is likely to diminish over time. [See "Balisage 2008 Conference in Montreal Continues Extreme Markup Tradition."]

OGF Secure Addressing Profile 1.0 Published in the Recommendation Track
Greg Newby, OGF Editorial Announcement

The OGF Recommendation "Secure Addressing Profile 1.0" was produced by members of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) Working Group, and edited by Duane Merrill. This document provides a recommendation to the Grid community on how to bind WS-SecurityPolicy policy documents within WS-Addressing endpoint references, and how such endpoint references can be made to be tamper-evident. This profile describes precisely the requirements placed on the structure and handling of such endpoint references to ensure interoperability. From the Introduction: "This profile refines the WS-Addressing 1.0 - Core specification in order to provide a means for advertising and discovering secure communication requirements using WS-Addressing endpoint references (EPRs). The EPR data structure is a useful construct because it provides an 'invocation context': the necessary information required by a client to establish meaningful communication with a resource exposed by a Web service endpoint. The EPR is an important data-structure that is incorporated into many Web service interfaces, particularly those adopted into and developed by the OGF. In many cases, these service interfaces follow a 'factory' design pattern in which one Web service endpoint is used to dynamically create and service many stateful resources, such as job activities or logical data files. Unfortunately the core EPR definition is not sufficient to describe a complete invocation context for a Web service resource that has been configured to require particular secure communication requirements (i.e., authentication, integrity, and confidentiality). As specifidesigned to advertise secure communication requirements, this document also profiles the XML digital signature of the EPR document to ensure trust of the minter and to deter tampering."

OGSA Basic Security Profile 2.0
David Snelling, Duane Merrill, Andreas Savva; OGF Recommendation

Members of the Open Grid Services Architecture Working Group published "OGSA Basic Security Profile 2.0" (GFD-R-P.138) as a a recommendation to the Grid community on securing OGSA services. In this specification, existing security profiles are combined to define a basic level of security for OGSA based services. An OGSA basic profile is a profile in the style of WS-Interoperability (WS-I) that defines recommended usage of infrastructure-level standards for Grid scenarios. OGSA services are expected to use one such profile for each infrastructure capability needed. This document defines such a basic profile for security by bringing together two general, non-OGSA specific, profiles on secure addressing and secure communication. This profile can be composed with other basic profiles. In particular this profile satisfies the security requirements of the WSRF Basic Profile 1.0 and can be composed with it. The OGSA Basic Security Profile 2.0 described in this document is an OGSA Recommended Profile as Proposed Recommendation, as defined in the OGSA Profile Definition. The Profile links two other profiles to define an OGSA Basic Security Profile. Specifically the Profile requires implementations to conform to the two following profiles: (1) Secure Addressing Profile 1.0 (GFD.131), and (2) Secure Communication Profile 1.0 (GFD.132). The Profile fulfills the requirements of the OGSA WSRF Basic Profile 1.0 [GFD.72], Section 8, and can be used in combination with it. The Profile can also be used with other OGSA Basic Profiles.


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