Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Wednesday, 03 December 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:
Oracle Corporation http://www.oracle.com

Headlines

Microsoft Announces New Open XML Document Interoperability Solutions
What's a URI and Why Does It Matter?
CMIS: An Industry Effort to Define a Service-Based Interoperability Standard for Content Management
Mainsoft Jazzes Up Collaboration
Sun's JavaFX RIA Technology Now Available
Representation of Uncertainty and Confidence in PIDF-LO
New Draft of W3C TAG Finding on the Self-Describing Web

Microsoft Announces New Open XML Document Interoperability Solutions
Staff, Microsoft Announcement

From the annnouncement "Document Interoperability Initiative Demonstrates Momentum and Results: Industry collaboration leads to new interoperability solutions that deliver customer choice by improving how documents work across platforms. "—" Interoperability solutions announced today translate Open XML documents to a Web page (HTML) allowing readability on Web-friendly browsers such as Firefox, improve translations between different formats through optimized templates, and enable features that provide greater choice for customers and opportunities for independent software developers as they create and use business applications built on Java that manipulate business documents. (1) The Open XML Document Viewer provides direct interoperability from Open Extensible Markup Language (XML) to HTML formats, enabling access to the information from any platform with a Web browser, including many mobile devices. The project also includes a plug-in for Firefox. Today's customer technology preview is the first milestone following the launch of the community development effort earlier this year. As a result, users can now download a plug-in and begin viewing Open XML documents within the Firefox browser on Windows and Linux platforms without the need to install Microsoft Office or other productivity products... (2) Version 2.5 of the Open XML/ODF Translator is now available, and it provides practical interoperability between OpenDocument format (ODF) and Open XML by means of an add-in for Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and XP. As such, it is another step in the continual evolution of the translator project. Some of the improvements in version 2.5 include a set of ODF 1.1-compatible templates optimized for greater fidelity through the translation process, chart-related enhancements in spreadsheets, an enhanced installation experience and greater reliability. (3) A software development kit (SDK) for Java developers interested in working with Open XML documents is now available. This is another milestone following the launch of the Apache POI Project in June 2007. Apache POI is a project of the Apache Software Foundation, with contributions from Sourcesense and others, that provides pure Java libraries for reading and writing files in formats used by Microsoft Office and other productivity products...

See also: InfoWorld

What's a URI and Why Does It Matter?
Henry S. Thompson, University of Edinburgh LTG Technical Report

URIs are at the heart of the Web: we use them both intentionally and without realising it every time we take advantage of the myriad possibilities the Web offers us. Their use is evolving in a number of directions, not all obviously compatible with one another, or with their original conception and the basic technical framework which supported them when the Web was young. Understanding all this is a necessary and worthwhile challenge, both from the perspective of scientific enquiry (just what are these things?) and from the perspective of stewardship (how do we ensure that the Web will continue to work well for everyone?). Insights into these questions may come from surprisingly distant quarters, as well as from observation of everyday use and practice. The intention of this brief introduction is to introduce the terminology and issues surrounding URIs and their role on the Web, and as such cannot have done justice to the complexities involved in many areas. Insofar as there are definitive documents about all this, they all agree that URIs are, as the third initial says, identifiers, that is, names. They identify resources, and often (although not always) allow you to access representations of those resources. 'Resource' names a role in a story, not an intrinsically distinguishable subset of things, just as 'referent' does in ordinary language. Things are resources because someone created a URI to identify them, not because they have some particular properties in and of themselves. 'Representation' names a pair: a character sequence and a media type. The media type specifies how the character string should be interpreted. For example JPG or HTML or MP3 would be likely media types for representations of an image of an apple, a news report about an orchard or a recording of a Beatles song, respectively... What Web users experience in practice involves a further relationship, between a representation and what we might call a presentation Different representations may be available for the same resource, in at least four ways: (1) Different technologies, manifested as different media types, for example GIF or JPG or PNG for an image, PDF or HTML or XHTML or TXT for structured text; (2) Different intended presentation platforms, for example desktop screen versus portable device; (3) In the case of text, different natural languages, for example the weather report in English or Spanish; (4) Different versions, either as a document evolves, or, more interestingly, because a resource is time-varying by nature, for example today's weather report. Different presentations may be determined by the same representation, ranging from simple changes in size, scale or fonts to changes in modality (digital display, print, even audio or braille) or even non-physical presentation for non-human consumption, for example, by the web crawlers used by search engines...

See also: Thompson's home page

CMIS: An Industry Effort to Define a Service-Based Interoperability Standard for Content Management
David Choy and Patricia Anderson, EMC SOA World Presentation

Business challenges: (1) Enterprises needed to aggregate/reuse business content trapped in disparate repositories: Different systems deployed in different departments, Systems inherited through business acquisition and merger. (2) Companies needed to get up-to-date information from business partner's repository: E.g. Aircraft maintenance crew needed to access manufacturers' vast manual repository to get the latest spec and procedure to comply with FAA regulation. (3) ISVs wanted a single application code-base that can be deployed in different repository environments: Lower development and maintenance cost, Bigger addressable market... Content Management Interoperability Services is a Web-based, protocol-layer interface to enable application to interoperate with disparate content management systems. It is platform-and language-agnostic, message-based, with loose coupling. Its design goal is providing the ability to support more than one protocol. The CMIS specification was drafted by EMC, IBM, and Microsoft in a project started October 2006. Additional collaborators include: Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP. Interoperability has been validated by all seven vendors. Benefits of interoperability: (a) Improved user access to content Increases enterprise effectiveness: easier for users to get access to the right information at the right time from their application; (b) Reduces application development costs and grows ISV's addressable market: develop application once to access compliant repositories; (c) Protects customer's investment in applications and repositories: developed applications can run against multiple repositories; (d) Propels ECM industry to the next level of growth: defines a set of standards, technology and interface, that works across multiple vendor and technology providers. There are four kinds of objects: [i] Document: An asset that can have a Content Stream and can be versioned; [ii] Folder: A container for objects; [ii] Relationship: A binary relationship between two objects; [iv] Policy: An administrative policy which can be applied to objects... Run-time security: User authentication is handled by each protocol.

Mainsoft Jazzes Up Collaboration
John K. Waters, Application Development Trends

Mainsoft Corporation, a provider of .NET-to-Java translation tools, recently released a beta version of its new framework for extending Microsoft environments: the Document Collaboration for Rational Jazz, SharePoint Edition. Built on IBM's Jazz platform, the framework is designed to extend IBM Rational Team Concert to allow developers to search, access, modify and publish documents on SharePoint sites. The framework also integrates with business workflows based on the SharePoint document management infrastructure, which the Milpitas, Calif.-based company said will help extend collaboration across the enterprise and deliver more effective software project governance. IBM's two-and-a-half-year-old Jazz project is the result of a joint effort by Big Blue's Rational and Research divisions to build a scalable, extensible team-collaboration platform for integrating tasks across the software lifecycle. It's built on the Eclipse Framework, and the idea is to provide a framework that makes it possible to include everyone working on a project, from developers to stakeholders. With the launch of the Jazz.net community portal about a year ago, IBM hoped to foster an "open, transparent approach to community development" to improve team agility and collaboration -- not to mention products like the Mainsoft release. Team Concert was one of the first commercial products based on Jazz, and it provides a kind of hub for Jazz-based offerings. Essentially, it's a collaboration portal designed to keep distributed software teams connected through such Web 2.0-type social networking technologies as instant messaging and presence awareness. It focuses on collaboration, process instantiation and bringing the teams together. Philippe Cohen, Mainsoft's vice president of products and solutions, sees the emergence of products like the Document Collaboration framework as an inevitable part of the Web 2.0 evolution. Web 2.0-based collaboration infrastructures like SharePoint and Quickr are "transforming the way business teams collaborate and share documents," he said in a statement. Integrating the market-leading collaboration tools via the Jazz platform will enhance "developer-to-developer collaboration on product documents and enable development teams to solicit feedback and approvals from enterprise team members who do not use an IDE."

See also: the announcement

Sun's JavaFX RIA Technology Now Available
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

JavaFX, Sun's Java-based entrant into the hotly contested rich media application space, has made its formal debut. Also arriving is a general release of the JavaFX Script language, which had been available in a preview version. The language allows designers and developers to use APIs in the 1.0 platform to build applications. Acording to the announcement: "The JavaFX 1.0 release includes video support and three key components, the JavaFX Development Environment, the JavaFX Production Suite and the JavaFX Desktop. JavaFX Video Support is new, with JavaFX 1.0 software introducing comprehensive, cross-platform video capabilities, using On2 Technologies' video codecs. On2 Technologies, Inc., a leader in video compression solutions, is also announcing support for JavaFX video has been integrated into its On2 Flix encoder line of products. The JavaFX Development Environment includes the compiler and runtime tools, graphics, media, Web services, and rich text libraries, along with the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 6.5. It also includes JavaFX plug-ins for both NetBeans and Eclipse IDEs. In addition, the JavaFX Development Environment includes a mobile emulator for developers to preview building mobile applications for the JavaFX platform. The JavaFX Production Suite is a set of tools and plug-ins that allows Web designers to dramatically reduce production times. Single-click conversion for media formats, allows graphics assets from design programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, to be easily incorporated into JavaFX applications. Using the JavaFX Production Suite, developers can collaborate more efficiently with graphics designers through a simple exchange of media assets. In addition, the resulting applications will maintain a consistent look and feel across all browsers on multiple platforms. JavaFX Desktop leverages the major features of Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) 6 Update 10, such as the new implementation of the Java plug-in, which enables end users to drag applets that are running in their browser and drop them directly onto their desktop, providing users the most simple install experience for Internet applications and content..."

See also: the announcement

Representation of Uncertainty and Confidence in PIDF-LO
Martin Thomson and James Winterbottom (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Geographic Location/Privacy (GEOPRIV) Working Group have published a Internet Draft for "Representation of Uncertainty and Confidence in PIDF-LO." RFC 4119 defines "A Presence-based GEOPRIV Location Object Format" (PIDF-LO), where the Presence Information Data Format (PIDF) is an XML-based format designed for communicating privacy-sensitive presence information and which has similar properties. This "Representation of Uncertainty" I-D defines key concepts of uncertainty and confidence as they pertain to location information are defined. The draft also outlines methods for the manipulation of location estimates that include uncertainty information. It provides guidance on how to manage location information that includes uncertainty. Methods for expanding or reducing uncertainty to obtain a required level of confidence are described. Methods for determining the probability that a Target is within a specified region based on their location estimate are described. These methods are simplified by making certain assumptions about the location estimate and are designed to be applicable to location estimates in a relatively small area. Background: "Location information represents an estimation of the position of a Target. Under ideal circumstances, a location estimate precisely reflects the actual location of the Target. In reality, there are many factors that introduce errors into the measurements that are used to determine location estimates. The process by which measurements are combined to generate a location estimate is outside of the scope of work within the IETF. However, the results of such a process are carried in IETF data formats and protocols. This document outlines how uncertainty, and its associated datum, confidence, are expressed and interpreted..."

See also: Geolocation Policy

New Draft of W3C TAG Finding on the Self-Describing Web
Noah Mendelsohn (ed), Draft Tag Finding

The editor of "The Self-Describing Web" announced a redrafted version of the document which "describes how document formats, markup conventions, attribute values, and other data formats can be designed to facilitate the deployment of self-describing, Web-grounded Web content." The Web is designed to support flexible exploration of information by human users and by automated agents. For such exploration to be productive, information published by many different sources and for a variety of purposes must be comprehensible to a wide range of Web client software, and to users of that software. HTTP and other Web technologies can be used to deploy resource representations that are in an important sense self-describing: information about the encodings used for each representation is provided explicitly within the representation. Starting with a URI, there is a standard algorithm that a user agent can apply to retrieve and interpret such representations. Furthermore, representations can be grounded in the Web, by ensuring that specifications required to interpret them are determined unambiguously based on the URI, and that explicit references connect the pertinent specifications to each other. Web-grounding reduces ambiguity as to what has been published in the Web, and by whom. When such self-describing, Web-grounded resources are linked together, the Web as a whole can support reliable, ad hoc discovery of information. The document explains how the following techniques can be used to create, deploy and access self-describing Web resource representations that can be correctly interpreted using only widely available information: (1) Each representation should include standard machine-readable indications, such as HTTP Content-type headers, XML encoding declarations, etc., of the standards and conventions used to encode it. (2) Documents used as Web resource representations should, when practical, be encoded using widely deployed formats such as text/html and image/jpeg, and deployed using HTTP. (3) Machine-processable specifications for interpreting new formats should be provided on the Web, and linked from representations that use the formats. Examples of linkable specifications include OWL ontologies, RDDL documents, GRDDL transformations, etc. By following links to such specifications, user agents can dynamically obtain information needed to process new representation formats. (4) Web resource representations should be grounded in the Web: i.e., the specifications required for their interpretation should be discoverable by recursively following links starting with the specification for URIs. (5) For integration with the Semantic Web, self-describing representations should convey RDF triples, either directly in the representation, by linking to the triples (perhaps using <link> elements in HTML or the link: header in HTTP), or by linking to transformations using technologies such as GRDDL. (6) A standard HTTP-based algorithm is used to deploy, retrieve and interpret self-describing Web resource representations...

See also: the announcement


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