Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Monday, 03 November 2008

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

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Headlines

Preliminary Schedule for CAP Implementers Workshop in Geneva
Considerations for Civic Addresses in PIDF-LO
W3C Releases Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 as PR
Apache Tomcat Development Team Releases Apache Tomcat Connectors V1.2.27
Inaugural SCORM 2.0 Workshop Jump-Starts LETSI
SOA Growth Projections Shrinking

Preliminary Schedule for CAP Implementers Workshop in Geneva
Staff, OASISAnnouncement

A preliminary schedule has been published for the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Implementers Workshop, to be held December 9-10, 2008, in Geneva. The Workshop is jointly organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and OASIS. It will showcase the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) OASIS Standard and ITU Recommendation X.1303. Designed as an all-hazards alert format, CAP is envisioned to be implemented worldwide for earthquakes, public health, and many other emergencies. This Workshop is primarily a forum for discussions among CAP implementers and ICT or emergency management organizations on topics requiring coordination. All interested parties are invited to participate in this high-level, open event.

See also: the earlier CAP news story

Considerations for Civic Addresses in PIDF-LO
Karl Heinz Wolf and Alexander Mayrhofer (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Geographic Location/Privacy (GEOPRIV) Working Group have published an initial -00 Internet Draft specification "Considerations for Civic Addresses in PIDF-LO." The document provides a guideline for creating civic address consideration documents for individual countries, as required by RFC 4776. Since civic addresses may have a different format in individual countries, such address considerations are necessary in order to map the civic address fields to the PIDF Location Object (PIDF-LO) elements. The "Presence Information Data Format Location Object" (PIDF-LO) defined in RFC 4119 is an an object format for carrying geographical information on the Internet. PIDF-LO extends the XML-based Presence Information Data Format (PIDF) to allow the encapsulation of location information within a presence document. PIDF-LO can be used to carry civic address information, and supports a range of "civic address types" (CATypes) to describe individual attributes of an civic address. In many use cases, PIDF-LOs are populated with data from long- established sources, like postal or governmental building registers, line information databases and yellow / white pages of infrastructure providers, or official residents registers. The structure and format of data from these sources is almost always different from PIDF-LO's CAtypes definition -- additionally, structure and format of those sources differs from country to country. To make use of such existing data sources, instructions for transposing such data into PIDF-LO format (element mapping) is required. Preferrably, those mapping operations are reversable, so that location receipients like public safety answering points (PSAPs) can reconcile such PIDF-LOs with the original data source. Additionally, for any data source just a single mapping should exist in order to reduce the risk of ambiguous interpretation. Therefore, civic address considerations are necessary for individual countries to ensure uniform usage of PIDF-LO elements. RFC 4776 explicitly asks for such documents. This guideline aims to support the creation of such civic address considerations.

W3C Releases Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 as PR
Ben Caldwell, Michael Cooper (et al., eds), W3C Proposed Recommendation

Members of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group have published the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0" specification as a Proposed Recommendation. "Proposed Recommendation" means that the technical material of WCAG 2.0 is complete and it has been implemented in real sites. Also available: an interactive diff-color-marked version showing revisions since 30-April-2008 (the XHTML + CSS supports toggle for viewing/hiding edits, issue numbers, markers, deletions). Companion documents include updated Working Drafts for "Understanding WCAG 2.0," "Techniques for WCAG 2.0," and "How to Meet WCAG 2.0." Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general. WCAG 2.0 success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific. Guidance about satisfying the success criteria in specific technologies, as well as general information about interpreting the success criteria, are provided in separate documents. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is developed through the W3C process in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world, with a goal of proving a single shared standard for Web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally. WCAG 2.0 is being developed to apply to more advanced Web technologies, and be more precisely testable with a combination of automated testing and human evaluation. WAI develops additional material for people with different levels of accessibility knowledge.

Apache Tomcat Development Team Releases Apache Tomcat Connectors V1.2.27
Staff, Apache Announcement

Apache developers have announced the release of a new stable version of Apache Tomcat Connectors with several new features. Apache Tomcat is an implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. It is being developed in an open and participatory environment and released under the Apache Software License, intended to be a collaboration of the best-of-breed developers from around the world. Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations. The Apache Tomcat Connectors allow a web server such as Apache HTTPD, Microsoft IIS, and Sun Web Server to act as a front end to the Tomcat web application server. Enhancements include: Watchdog Thread, Improved Connection Probing, Mount Extensions, Better IIS Support, and Enhanced Status Worker. Watchdog Thread for Periodic Tasks: Starting with this release you can configure a separate watchdog thread inside the web server to run all those tasks independantly of request processing. This new feature is avaliable for the connector when used with Apache HTTPD 2.x or with Microsoft IIS. Connection Probing: In previous releases connection probing (checking whether connections still work) could only be done immediately after a new connection was established and directly before sending each request. Since we now have the watchdog thread available, we also added a periodic probing option, which you can activate with the worker attribute 'ping_mode'... Mount Extensions: Starting with this release, you can add so-called rule extensions to your uriworkermap file to influence worker parameters per mount. This will work for all Apache versions and for IIS. Improved IIS support: We improved IIS support im various ways. It is now possible to use multiple IIS 6 application pools with the ISAPI redirector. Furthermore, some improvements were added as compile time features. You can download binaries with and without chunked encoding support; in future versions, chunked encoding will likely be availabe in all builds. Another new feature is an elegant way of configuring error page redirects. All new features are documented on the documentation page about configuring IIS...

Inaugural SCORM 2.0 Workshop Jump-Starts LETSI
Staff, LETSI Announcement

LETSI, the International Federation for Learning, Education, and Training Systems Interoperability, jumped into high gear with its first-ever SCORM 2.0 Workshop October 15-17, 2008 in Pensacola, Florida, USA. Sixty-four learning standards experts from around the world actively engaged in full forum and breakout sessions to establish new priorities, define features, and create road maps that will extend the comprehensive suite of interoperable e-learning capabilities. "We were thrilled to support the vocal response from the global LET Community to collectively gather functional requirements and use cases for SCORM 2.0," said Jeff Bradshaw, Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) who hosted the workshop at their facility, "the world wide web and new technologies will offer a rich feature set for SCORM 2.0." The workshop spanned two and a half days and was attended by representatives of government, industry, military, academia, K-12 schools, and the medical community from the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Korea, Singapore and Japan. Following a half-day opening plenary session, the attendees divided into four working groups to address major themes collected from over 100 white papers LETSI received in August from a white paper solicitation. The four working group tracks featured: (1) Use cases for future learning, education, and training applications; (2) Content sequencing; (3) Modernization of SCORM's software architecture; (4) Business requirements and market demands. Adaptable learning experiences supported by open standards emerged as the driving theme from the working groups. Use cases covering high level requirements, initial timelines, problem statements and business needs generated by the working groups are available online... LETSI's open process for defining SCORM 2.0 will continue. The requirements gathering phase of LETSI's SCORM 2.0 initiative began in May 2008 with a white paper solicitation seeking problems, requirements, use cases and solutions in the SCORM-based e-learning space. This first step fully engaged the learning, education and training community in solving the challenges that lay ahead for learning adaptability. Government, academic, and industry experts from around the world, including many from recognized leaders in the e-learning and learning technology fields, submitted thought-provoking ideas to improve and extend the interoperability, accessibility and reusability of web-based content.

See also: the LETSI FAQ document

SOA Growth Projections Shrinking
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

SOA adoption has hit a bump in the road, according to survey detailed by Gartner. The number of organizations planning to adopt SOA for the first time decreased to 25 percent; it had been 53 percent in last year's survey. Also, the number of organizations with no plans to adopt SOA doubled from 7 percent in 2007 to 16 percent in 2008. This dramatic falloff has been happening since the beginning of 2008, Gartner said. Gartner has been doing the survey for five years, and this is the first time the numbers dropped, said analyst Dan Sholler, research vice president at Gartner. "What we're seeing is that there are a bunch of organizations [that] for a variety of reasons don't expect to be doing anything specific about SOA next year," Sholler said. Use of modern programming environments is closely associated with SOA, Gartner said. This suggests that more organizations are focusing on SOA in the context of new developments that use Java, Microsoft .Net, and dynamic languages like Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Organizations must ponder options when applying SOA in legacy programming environments because skills in blending the two likely will be scarce, Gartner said. Gartner also said the number of organizations already pursuing SOA shows a massive change in the future perception of SOA, from something that is essentially inevitable for all organizations in a short time to a situation where many organizations evaluated SOA and have chosen not to spend time and effort on it. The two major reasons organizations choose for not pursuing SOA are lack of skills and expertise and no viable business case...


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