Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 21 April 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:
Oracle Corporation http://www.oracle.com

Headlines

Equifax Launches 'Identity 2.0': I-Card and eIDverifier
Publication Milestone: IS29500 is an American National Standard
iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP)
rdf:text: A Datatype for Internationalized Text
Google Tries Jump-Starting 3D Web With O3D

Equifax Launches 'Identity 2.0': I-Card and eIDverifier
Staff, Equifax Announcement

At the RSA Conference 2009, Equifax announced a suite of products and industry initiatives to protect consumers' identity online and enhance security for personally identifiable information. Led by Ron Carpinella, vice president of identity management and identity marketing, Equifax's "Identity 2.0" program builds a pipeline of products that make online transactions easier and more secure for consumers and businesses. The Equifax I-Card and its enhanced authentication offering, eIDverifier, are two of the company's initiatives... This week, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) conducted the first public government demonstrations of the Equifax online identity card, or I-Card, at the RSA Conference. Using a test site, the GSA showcased the benefits of using information card technology as the verified credential for clicking into a site. Launched last fall, the Equifax I-Card is a digital identity management solution that lives in a consumer's digital wallet, containing information that consumers need to securely conduct online transactions or verify identity. For websites that accept I-Cards, consumers can click-in without typing in a user name, password or other personal information. The Equifax I-Card is designed to verify that a consumer's identity is true, which can reduce fraud for online merchants, services and destinations. The I-Card can also reduce the need for companies to retain customers' personally identifiable information (PII), which helps reduce the risk posed by data breaches. In addition, because the I-Card only works with trusted Websites, it diminishes the danger of phishing...

Powering the Equifax I-Card is the latest release of eIDverifier, one of the strongest identity verification tools available. eIDverifier is a Web-based service designed to authenticate a consumer's identity through a waterfall series of steps, all backed by Equifax's industry-leading information database. The eIDverifier service presents multiple-choice questions known only to the consumer, and validates the information against multiple sources. eIDverifier screens for details such as irregular patterns in user log-ins and data that has been reported as belonging to a deceased consumer. The software then uses a patented process of assessment and reason-codes to detect potential fraud and confirm identity... The Equifax I-Card is among the first commercial I-card-based products to launch from members of ICF, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing a simpler and more secure digital identity on the Internet. Led by Deutsche Telecom, Equifax, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle PayPal and Parity, the ICF promotes the rapid build-out and adoption of Internet-enabled digital identities using information cards.

See also: the earlier announcement

Publication Milestone: IS29500 is an American National Standard
Doug Mahugh, Blog

"The INCITS Executive Board has approved the adoption of ISO/IEC IS29500 (Office Open XML) as an American National Standard this week (on April 15, 2009), and the document will be published soon by ANSI. This action taken by INCITS is a relatively routine occurence, as the US typically adopts ISO/IEC standards as national standards. As an INCITS V1 member, I was very excited to see this news. It's a positive step in the validation and global adoption of IS29500. [Note: Information technology — Document description and processing languages — Office Open XML File Formats (Part 1 - Part 4 ZIP files) are available from the online collection of ISO Freely Available Standards.]

See also: ISO/IEC 29500

iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP)
Cyrus Daboo (ed), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Calendaring and Scheduling Standards Simplification (CALSIFY) Working Group have published a revised version of the "iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP)" specification. The IETF Calsify Working Group was chartered to: (1) Revise the Calendaring and Scheduling Standards to advance the state of interoperable calendaring and scheduling by addressing the known interoperability issues, errata, and problems found based on implementation experience. (2) Clarify the registration process for iCalendar extensions—i.e., the current core object specification only provides a template to register new properties. (3) Provide a means to ease transition from, and to co-exist with, the earlier iCalendar standards to the new ones. The version -09 Internet Draft for iTIP "specifies a protocol using the iCalendar object specification to provide scheduling interoperability between different calendaring systems. In particular, it specifies how to schedule events, to-dos, or daily journal entries. It further specifies how to search for available busy time information. This is done without reference to a specific transport protocol so as to allow multiple methods of communication between systems. Subsequent documents will define profiles of this protocol using specific interoperable methods of communications between systems. iTIP complements the iCalendar object specification by adding semantics for group scheduling methods commonly available in current calendaring systems. These scheduling methods permit two or more calendaring systems to perform transactions such as publish, schedule, reschedule, respond to scheduling requests, negotiation of changes or cancel... This protocol is based on messages sent from an originator to one or more recipients. For certain types of messages, a recipient may reply, in order to update their status and may also return transaction/request status information. The protocol supports the ability for the message originator to modify or cancel the original message. The protocol also supports the ability for recipients to suggest changes to the originator of a message. The elements of the protocol also define the user roles for its transactions.

rdf:text: A Datatype for Internationalized Text
Jie Bao, Axel Polleres, Boris Motik (eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C OWL Working Group and the the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group are seeking public feedback on a revised Working Draft for rdf:text: A Datatype for Internationalized Text. Many RDF applications need a mechanism for representing text in various different languages, retrieving the text written in a specific language, and other kinds of language-specific processing. To facilitate this, RDF provides plain literals with a language tag, which form the basis for processing text in different languages in RDF. Apart from such literals, however, RDF also provides for plain literals without a language tag and typed literals. RDF thus provides three distinct types of literals each of which is treated in a separate way, which increases complexity for specifications based on RDF such as RIF and OWL. Furthermore, RDF does not provide a name for the set of all plain literals, which, for example, prevents one from stating that the range of some OWL property must be a plain literal with a language tag. To address these deficiencies, this specification defines a datatype called 'rdf:text'. This datatype provides a name for the set of all data values assigned to plain literals, which is why the datatype uses the 'rdf:' prefix. Furthermore, typed 'rdf:text' literals are semantically equivalent to plain literals, which allows specifications built on top of RDF to consider only typed literals. Since the 'rdf:text' datatype just provides additional forms for writing plain literals, its addition does not change the semantics of RDF. Furthermore, when exchanging RDF graphs between RDF tools, typed 'rdf:text' literals must be replaced with plain literals, thus maximizing interoperability between RDF tools that support 'rdf:text' and those that do not. RDF tools may use other mechanisms for representing text in different languages, such as using the 'xml:lang' attribute on the data values of the 'rdf:XMLLiteral' datatype. The 'rdf:text' datatype does not provide a replacement for such mechanisms.

This Last Call Working Draft provides some significant changes since the previous version of December 02, 2008, including: (1) The definition of the value space has been changed such that it is not necessary any more to reinterpret the value space of 'xsd:string' to make it a subset of the value space of 'rdf:text'; (2) The inference rules for the RDF Semantics were added; (3) The requirement was added that abbreviated forms must be used in all RDF-based serialization.

Google Tries Jump-Starting 3D Web With O3D
Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com

Google has released software called O3D to bring accelerated 3D graphics to browsers, a significant effort but not the only one to try to endow Web applications with some of the computing muscle that PC programs can use... O3D is a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, but Google hopes that eventually, the technology will be built directly into browsers. It provides an interface that lets developers' Web-based JavaScript programs tap directly into a computer's graphics chip, which could mean better games and other applications... Firefox backer Mozilla and the Khronos Group, which oversees the widely used OpenGL 3D interface standard, announced their own effort to build a 3D Web interface. The two efforts, while tackling the same basic idea, use different approach...

From the Google Code blog: "Most content on the web today is in 2D, but a lot of information is more fun and useful in 3D. Projects like Google Earth and SketchUp demonstrate our passion and commitment to enabling users to create and interact with 3D content. We'd like to see the web offering the same type of 3D experiences that can be found on the desktop. That's why, a few weeks ago, we announced our plans to contribute our technology and web development expertise to the discussions about 3D for the web within Khronos and the broader developer community. Today, we're making our first contribution to this effort by sharing the plugin implementation of O3D: a new, shader-based, low-level graphics API for creating interactive 3D applications in a web browser. When we started working on O3D, we focused on creating a modern 3D API that's optimized for the web. We wanted to build an API that runs on multiple operating systems and browsers, performs well in JavaScript, and offers the capabilities developers need to create a diverse set of rich applications. O3D is still in an early stage, but we're making it available now to help inform the public discussion about 3D graphics in the browser. We've also created a forum to enable developers to submit suggestions on features and functionality they desire from a 3D API for the web..."

See also: the blog article


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