Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Monday, 02 February 2009

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:
Microsoft Corporation http://www.microsoft.com

Headlines

OASIS WS-DD Technical Committee Publishes Public Review Specifications
Working Draft: W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1
Meeting Notes from the OASIS CMIS F2F
OASIS Forms Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services (ICOM) TC
W3C Call for Review: WebCGM Version 2.1
BPM: From Modeling to Implementation
Microsoft Licenses Web Sandbox Under Apache 2.0
DOD Lauches Open Source Development Site

OASIS WS-DD Technical Committee Publishes Public Review Specifications
Toby Nixon, Alain Regnier (et al., eds), OASIS Approved Committee Drafts

Members of the OASIS Web Services Discovery and Web Services Devices Profile (WS-DD) Technical Committee have released three approved Committee Draft specifications for public review, ending April 03, 2009. This OASIS TC was chartered to define: (1) a lightweight dynamic discovery protocol to locate web services that composes with other Web service specifications; (2) a binding of SOAP to UDP (User Datagram Protocol), including message patterns, addressing requirements, and security considerations; (3) a profile of Web Services protocols consisting of a minimal set of implementation constraints to enable secure Web service messaging, discovery, description, and eventing on resource-constrained endpoints. WS-DD TC members include representatives from CA, Canon, CheckMi, Fuji Xerox, IBM, Konica Minolta, Lexmark International, Microsoft, Novell, Odonata, Progress Software, Red Hat, Ricoh, Schneider Electric, Software AG, TU Dortmund, University of Rostock, and WSO2. The specifications for review include: [1] "Web Services Dynamic Discovery (WS-Discovery) Version 1.1", edited by Vipul Modi and Devon Kemp. "This specification defines a discovery protocol to locate services. In an ad hoc mode of operation, probes are sent to a multicast group, and target services that match return a response directly to the requester. To scale to a large number of endpoints and to extend the reach of the protocol, this protocol defines a managed mode of operation and a multicast suppression behavior if a discovery proxy is available on the network. To minimize the need for polling, target services that wish to be discovered send an announcement when they join and leave the network." [2] "Devices Profile for Web Services Version 1.1", edited by Dan Driscoll and Antoine Mensch. "[The spec] defines a minimal set of implementation constraints to enable secure Web service messaging, discovery, description, and eventing on resource-constrained endpoints... The Web services architecture includes a suite of specifications that define rich functions and that may be composed to meet varied service requirements. To promote both interoperability between resource-constrained Web service implementations and interoperability with more flexible client implementations, this profile identifies a core set of Web service specifications in the following areas: sending secure messages to and from a Web service; dynamically discovering a Web service; describing a Web service; subscribing to, and receiving events from, a Web service. In each of these areas of scope, this profile defines minimal implementation requirements for compliant Web service implementations." [3] "SOAP-over-UDP Version 1.1", edited by Toby Nixon and Alain Regnier. "Many application protocol patterns match the semantics of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) as defined in IETF RFC 768. Some do not require the delivery guarantees of TCP while others make use of multicast transmission. In order to allow Web services to support these patterns, we need a way to map SOAP envelopes to user datagrams. This support is essential for services using WS-Discovery, where the use of multicast and need for low connection overhead makes UDP a natural choice. It is anticipated that other protocols will have similar requirements. This specification defines a binding of SOAP to user datagrams, including message patterns, addressing requirements, and security considerations."

See also: the OASIS announcement

Working Draft: W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1
Sandy Gao, C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, Henry S. Thompson (eds); W3C Technical Reports

W3C announced that members of the XML Schema Working Group have published Working Drafts for "W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 1: Structures" and "Part 2: Datatypes." 'Part 1: Structures' the XML Schema Definition Language, which offers facilities for describing the structure and constraining the contents of XML documents, including those which exploit the XML Namespace facility. The schema language, which is itself represented in an XML vocabulary and uses namespaces, substantially reconstructs and considerably extends the capabilities found in XML document type definitions (DTDs). The latter defines facilities for defining datatypes to be used in XML Schemas as well as other XML specifications. The datatype language, which is itself represented in XML, provides a superset of the capabilities found in XML document type definitions (DTDs) for specifying datatypes on elements and attributes. The Last Call review period extends until 20-February-2009. Non-normative formats are also available for XML, XHTML with changes since version 1.0 marked, XHTML with changes since previous Working Draft marked, Independent copy of the schema for schema documents, Independent copy of the DTD for schema documents, Independent tabulation of components and microcomponents, and List of translations. The W3C Working Group has three main goals for this version of W3C XML Schema: (1) Significant improvements in simplicity of design and clarity of exposition without loss of backward or forward compatibility; (2) Provision of support for versioning of XML languages defined using this specification, including the XML vocabulary specified here for use in schema documents. (3) Provision of support for co-occurrence constraints, that is constraints which make the presence of an attribute or element, or the values allowable for it, depend on the value or presence of other attributes or elements...

Meeting Notes from the OASIS CMIS F2F
Florent Guillaume, Nuxeo Blog

Last week, January 26-29, 2009, was the occasion of the first face-to-face meeting of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC). "This first meeting was very productive, and allowed very constructive discussions. I'll try to retrace below the gist of the conversations around the topics I found most interesting, sometimes these were conversation I had with just one or two people, or topics related to that. The outlook from these discussions, and from the scope of the specification itself, is very positive. I believe that within a year CMIS will start to actively redefine the world of content management systems, which will be an opportunity both for big vendors who will see easier adoption of their solutions by customers concerned by lock-in or interoperability, and for smaller vendors whose products will be able to take advantage of a much broader spectrum of connectors to third-party systems... [This summmary covers: Schedule; Existing Capabilities; Retention and Hold; Tagging; Transactions; Events and Notifications; REST, Reference Implementation/Technology Compatibility Kit; ACLs; Search; Next steps]... ACLs: "Of all the points that really merit further work before a 1.0 version can be considered, ACLs ranked highest—practically everyone agrees that ACLs should be in the spec in some form. However, ACLs are also one of the features that vary most between repositories, so common ground will be hard to find..." Search: "The use cases of Federated Search (an engine that, when queried, delegates the search to many repositories and then aggregates the results) and Unified Search (an engine that somehow crawls many repositories to build a database of what's in them, and can then be directly queried) have been discussed a lot, especially unified search as it impacts a number of other features. One feature needed is something allowing the discovery of permissions, to be able to serve search results without having to check with the repository for each document if access can be granted; this will presumably involve some kind of ACLs..."

OASIS Forms Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services (ICOM) TC
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS members have formed a new technical committee to create an Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services (ICOM) Specification and associated UML 2.0 model." According to the ICOM TC's Statement of Purpose: "Organizations need to integrate their collaboration services with business applications in order to enable contextual collaboration within an end-to-end business process, such as customer relationship management, procurement, performance, and project management, to improve business efficiencies. Typically these organizations have incrementally deployed a mix of disjoint collaboration tools. As a result, these organizations face technical obstacles and high costs in their quests to integrate these disjoint tools and the data each tool produces. To solve this problem, various collaboration vendors have attempted to unify their platforms in order to build a single collaboration environment which provides full range of collaboration activities. However, these vendor specific platforms still lack a standard model, interface, and protocol to support contextual collaboration within business processes. Without a standard collaboration model that can provide a complete range of collaboration activities, customers, ISVs, and integrators face a difficult challenge to build contextual collaboration environments using service components from multiple vendors... A standard integrated and complete collaboration model is essential also for tools developers, business applications developers, and Web 2.0 applications developers to write to the industry standard model, API, and protocol to interoperate with integrated collaboration environments across different communities. The purpose of the Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services Technical Committee is to specify the normative standards for collaboration objects, along with their attributes, relationships, constraints, and behavior, in an integrated and interoperable collaboration environment. ICOM specification will include the non- normative guidelines (providing architectures or use-case scenarios) for a new workspace-oriented protocol for shared workspaces that supports a full range of collaboration activities, including unified messages, web conferences, forums, presence, calendars, tasks, wikis, blogs, social networks, etc. ICOM specification can be used as the basis for defining bindings to various languages (Java, C#, WSDL, RDF/OWL). ICOM specification can also provide a framework to render a suite of new and existing protocols, including WebDav, CalDav, IMAP, SMTP, XMPP, etc., protocols, to work as if they are parts of a contiguous protocol..."

See also: OASIS ICOM TC references

W3C Call for Review: WebCGM Version 2.1
Benoit Bezaire and Lofton Henderson (eds), W3C/OASIS Joint Specification

Members of the W3C WebCGM Working Group have published an updated Working Draft for the "WebCGM 2.1" specification. Comments from reviewers are welcome through March 01, 2009. Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) is an ISO standard, defined by ISO/IEC 8632:1999, for the interchange of 2D vector and mixed vector/raster graphics. WebCGM is a profile of CGM, which adds Web linking and is optimized for Web applications in technical illustration, electronic documentation, geophysical data visualization, and similar fields. First published (1.0) in 1999, WebCGM unifies potentially diverse approaches to CGM utilization in Web document applications. It therefore represents a significant interoperability agreement amongst major users and implementers of the ISO CGM standard. The design criteria for WebCGM aim to balance graphical expressive power on the one hand, versus simplicity and implementability on the other. A small but powerful set of standardized metadata elements supports the functionalities of hyperlinking and document navigation, picture structuring and layering, and enabling search and query of WebCGM picture content. The present version, WebCGM 2.1, refines and completes the features of the major WebCGM 2.0 release. WebCGM 2.0 added a DOM (API) specification for programmatic access to WebCGM objects, a specification of an XML Companion File (XCF) architecture, and extended the graphical and intelligent content of WebCGM 1.0...

BPM: From Modeling to Implementation
Judith Lamont, KM World

"Despite the troubled economy, business process management (BPM) software products seem to be headed for robust growth. Gartner estimates the 2008 market at $1.26 billion, growing to $5.1 billion by 2011. Other analysts also are converging on the $5 billion to $6 billion target although the definitions of the BPM market vary somewhat. More than half of the responding companies in a recent survey by AIIM reported that they have implemented BPM projects ranging from departmental to enterprise, and most of the remaining plan to do so in the future. One reason is that like many other KM solutions, BPM fosters efficiency that leads to cost savings and performance improvement. Modeling tools play a pivotal role in the development of BPM systems because they provide a high-level, visual representation of organizational processes... In the Air Force, the 643rd Electronic Systems Squadron (ELSS) uses a modeling tool from Metastorm called ProVision to support its enterprise architecture (EA) program. EA initiatives describe the structure and functional operations of an organization, often with a view toward improving performance by providing effective IT support... Banking is a process-intensive industry that has benefited from BPM modeling and implementations. Towerbank, based in Panama, used the Ultimus Process Designer in implementing its BPM system. It also participated in a Discovery Workshop facilitated by Ultimus, which helped the bank identify key processes... The AIIM study noted that 'the lack of interchange standards between modeling and execution tools remains an issue.' At present, the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) standard, which describes the process model, does not translate directly into the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which implements the model into a working system. A variety of approaches can be used to address the issue, but organizations that are exploring the use of BPM modeling software should take a careful look at how well it has been integrated with the software proposed for the runtime system..."

See also: BPMN references

Microsoft Licenses Web Sandbox Under Apache 2.0
David Worthington, SD Times

Microsoft's Live Labs team has released the source code of its Web Sandbox runtime under the Apache 2.0 open-source license in an effort to broaden its acceptance. Web Sandbox, which was initially released at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in October of last year, isolates Web content, such as advertisements, mashup components and gadgets, to help developers provide higher service quality and greater security. Aside from security, Web Sandbox normalizes the behavior of Web browsers to provide consistent W3C DOM support without requiring any browser add-ons or changes. Microsoft encourages developers to contribute to Web Sandbox, but it does not recommend using it for production sites. According to Peter Galli: "The Sandbox is a framework that works on most modern browsers that support the'ECMA-262, 3rd Edition' (JavaScript) standard, and provides the same features in all modern web browsers. No browser add-ons or changes are required to leverage this technology. Beyond security, the Web Sandbox normalizes the different browsers and provides consistent W3C DOM support. Since the initial release of Web Sandbox at PDC 2008, the team has received a lot of useful feedback from the web security community, and has also been collaborating with a number of customers, partners and the standards communities, all of whom want to adopt the technology when it is ready. The goal: an open and interoperable standard that will help foster interoperability with complementary technologies like script frameworks and drive widespread adoption of the Web Sandbox. This move is good news for Microsoft and the open source communities. But, it is important to note that while an Apache license is being used, the Web Sandbox project is not an Apache Software Foundation project and is not sponsored or endorsed by the ASF. Microsoft does, however, already have an active relationship with the ASF. In fact, last year the company announced it had become a sponsor of the ASF so as to help enable the Foundation pay administrators and other support staff so that its developers can focus on writing great software..."

See also: Peter Galli's blog

DOD Lauches Open Source Development Site
Doug Beizer, Application Development Trends

U.S. Defense Department officials have launched a new Web site where developers can work on open source software projects specifically for DOD, David Mihelcic, the chief technology officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), said. The new site, named Forge.mil, is based on the public site SourceForge.net which hosts thousands of open source projects, Mihelcic said at an AFCEA Washington chapter lunch in Arlington, VA. "It is really is SourceForge.net upgraded to meet DOD security requirements," Mihelcic said. Forge.mil users must use a common access card for authentication. Smart cards also help control access to sensitive information... Work on Forge.mil started in October 2008, and Mihelcic approved limited operation of the site on January 23, 2009. In its first week, Forge.mil is hosting three open source projects, Mihelcic said. One project, named DOD Bastille, was started by a DISA intern. DOD Bastille is based on publicly available software that automates the configuration of servers. DOD Bastille integrates the specific security, technical and implementation guidelines required by DOD..." [According to CNET News.Com, "All of the code is open for public view, though only those with the right Defense Department credentials can edit or contribute to the projects. As the public sees the code, however, it's almost certain to lead to individuals wanting to contribute to the code."]

See also: CNET News.Com


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