Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Friday, 24 July 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

A Uniform Resource Name (URN) for Early Warning Emergency Services and Location-to-Service Translation (LoST) Protocol Usage
Integrate Salesforce: The New Role of XML in Cloud Data Integration
W3C Call for Implementations: Widgets 1.0 Packaging and Configuration
Microsoft Contributes Linux Drivers to Linux Community
W3C Recognizes XSPARQL Member Submission
Combining CIDOC/CRM and Dublin Core Collections Application Profile
Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) Makes Push for HD Specification

A Uniform Resource Name (URN) for Early Warning Emergency Services and Location-to-Service Translation (LoST) Protocol Usage
Henning Schulzrinne and Hannes Tschofenig (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Emergency Context Resolution with Internet Technologies (ECRIT) Working Group have released a revised -01 specification for A Uniform Resource Name (URN) for Early Warning Emergency Services and Location-to-Service Translation (LoST) Protocol Usage.

From the specification Introduction: "The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is an XML document format for exchanging emergency alerts and public warnings. Different organizations issue alerts for specific geographical regions. The Location-to-Service Translation (LoST) protocol provides a way to discover servers that distribute these alerts for a geographical region. The document makes use of LoST ("LoST: A Location-to-Service Translation Protocol", RFC 5222); LoST describes an XML-based protocol for mapping service identifiers and geodetic or civic location information to service contact URIs. In particular, it can be used to determine the location-appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) for emergency services. However, instead of performing a translation from location information and a Service URN to a PSAP URI (plus supplementary information), as used with "Best Current Practice for Communications Services in support of Emergency Calling" for the citizen-to-authority emergency services use case, the LoST client asks the LoST server for a URI to receive further information on how to obtain warning alerts. In a response the URIs in the 'uri' element must be from the following format: SIP, XMPP or HTTP... In a LoST response the optional 'serviceNumber' element is not used by this specification. In mapping citizen-to-authority services, receiving multiple mappings is an exception. However, since many organizations may provide warnings for the same area, this is likely to be more common for alerts. As such, the extensions defined in "Location-to-Service Translation Protocol (LoST) Extensions" (e.g., the ability to limit the number of returned mappings) are useful in this context.

This document defines the Service Uniform Resource Names (URN)s for warnings in the same way as they have been defined with RFC 5031 for citizen-to-authority emergency services ("A Uniform Resource Name (URN) for Emergency and Other Well-Known Services"). Additionally, this document suggests to use LoST for the discovery of servers distributing alerts..."

See also: OASIS CAP references

Integrate Salesforce: The New Role of XML in Cloud Data Integration
Ryan Knight, IBM developerWorks

"Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings are hosted in a multi-tenant environment, where the hardware and software infrastructure is shared. Salesforce is one example of a PaaS provider. The company started out by providing a hosted customer relationship management (CRM) solution, and this offering provided a turnkey solution for common business applications such as sales, partner relationship management, and marketing... Salesforce allows you to interact with the server using SOAP, which has the advantage of being language and platform independent. You use Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to describe which operations are available on the server. A WSDL document describes a series of network endpoints called ports, then defines the XML format for the messages or data being exchanged with the server. The samples in this article use the Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS)...

By leveraging the power of XML, you can easily integrate cloud data into existing enterprise applications. XML provides a common data format that can be exchanged between a variety of services and languages. The sample application in this article demonstrated how you can interact with Salesforce through XML Web services using SOAP specifically. This technique of using Web services to integrate on-site applications with cloud data can also be used with a wide variety of other applications, ranging from Google Apps to Basecamp. By integrating with cloud services, organizations can quickly build a variety of new applications in the cloud and still leverage their existing investment in software..."

W3C Call for Implementations: Widgets 1.0 Packaging and Configuration
Marcos Cáceres (ed), W3C Technical Report

W3C has issued a Call for Implementations in connection with the Candidate Recommendation specification for Widgets 1.0: Packaging and Configuration. members of the W3C Web Applications (WebApps) Working Group expect to advance this document to Proposed Recommendation once the Working Group has developed a comprehensive "Widgets 1.0: Packaging and Configuration Test Suite," and demonstrated at least two interoperable implementations, viz., interoperable meaning at least two implementations that pass each test in the test suite. The WebApps WG expects to show these implementations by October 2009.

This specification is part of the W3C Widgets 1.0 family of specifications, which together standardize widgets as a whole. The specification standardizes a packaging format for software known as widgets, where 'widgets' are client-side applications that are authored using Web standards, but whose content can also be embedded into Web documents. The specification relies on PKWare's Zip specification as the archive format, XML as a configuration document format, and a series of steps that runtimes follow when processing and verifying various aspects of a package. The packaging format acts as a container for files used by a widget. The configuration document is an XML vocabulary that declares metadata and configuration parameters for a widget. The steps for processing a widget package describe the expected behavior and means of error handling for runtimes while processing the packaging format, configuration document, and other relevant files. This document also defines expected behavior for conformance checkers, which are tools that aid authors in verifying that Zip archives and configuration documents conform to this specification.

Microsoft Contributes Linux Drivers to Linux Community
Sam Ramji and Tom Hanrahan, Microsoft PressPass

Microsoft recently announced the release of "20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V...

Ramji: "We are focused on building sustainable business strategies for open source at Microsoft. Stemming from that we see open source playing into three key areas, one of which is the use of 'inbound' open source and the open source development model to make our software development processes more efficient. Good examples of this include what we did recently with jQuery in Visual Studio 2008, the implementation of OpenPegasus connectors and adaptors into System Center Operations Manager, and work that the Microsoft High Performance Computing team did with the Argonne National Lab (ANL) to source its MPICH2 implementation... Another area is product evangelism: Open source is the next level in our effort to create broad platform adoption. An example of that is the AJAX Control Toolkit... The third area is using open source to reduce marketing and sales costs or to try out new features that highlight parts of the platform customers haven't seen before. The open source educational tools recently released for Microsoft Office are a great example. Specifically, the add-ins for mathematical and chemical notation are enabling teachers and students to see that they can use Office for a range of new things they weren't aware of. In addition to using LaTeX, a powerful but complex documentation preparation system, to lay out mathematical problems, teachers are seeing the new value they can get out of Microsoft Word..."

See also: the Hank Janssen blog

W3C Recognizes XSPARQL Member Submission
Asemantics, DERI Galway (et al.), W3C Member Submission

A member submission made to W3C early in 2009 has been acknowledged by W3C with a team comment that the specification work "is not only innovative, but very well documented and demonstrated by the on-line XSPARQL demo XSPARQL is a fusion language, blending aspects of XQuery and SPARQL to enable users familiar with both XQuery and SPARQL to write queries which bridge the two systems." This submission was made jointly by several institutions, complete with ten signatories to Intellectual Property Statements supporting W3C's royalty-free IPR.

From the Abstract: "Recently, two new languages have entered the stage for processing XML and RDF data: XQuery is a W3C Recommendation since early last year and SPARQL has finally received W3C's Recommendation stamp in January 2008. While both languages operate in their own worlds (SPARQL in the RDF- and XQuery in the XML-world), we show in this specification that the merge of both in the novel language XSPARQL has the potential to finally bring XML and RDF closer together. XSPARQL provides concise and intuitive solutions for mapping between XML and RDF in either direction, addressing both the use cases of GRDDL and SAWSDL. As a side effect, XSPARQL may also be used for RDF to RDF transformations beyond the capabilities of "pure" SPARQL. We also describe an implementation of XSPARQL, available for user evaluation..."

"XSPARQL essentially combines the FROM and WHERE clauses from SPARQL with the XQuery FLOWR grammar, allowing direct manipulation of the XML Results of SPARQL queries. This allows XSPARQL to manipulate SPARQL results into e.g., XHTML, and integrate queries over RDF and XML sources. XSPARQL can generate RDF, either as RDF/XML or as Turtle, enabling (1) transformation from XML to RDF, and (2) additional functionality, e.g., aggregates, for SPARQL queries..."

Combining CIDOC/CRM and Dublin Core Collections Application Profile
Irene Lourdi, Christos Papatheodorou, and Martin Doerr, D-Lib Magazine

The need for integration of collection-level information is motivated by the existence of a profusion of metadata schemas. Various organizations have engaged in collection-level description efforts, and these efforts have led to the development of a variety of metadata models, which consequently created a complex environment overall.

The ICOM/CIDOC Documentation Standards Group and the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) Special Interest Group have developed a reference model (CIDOC/CRM) that would enable the explicit definition of cultural event and object attributes, as well as of their relationships, and therefore could be considered as a mediation schema for the needed integration. In this context, the crosswalk between Dublin Core Collections Application Profile (DCCAP) and the CIDOC/CRM reference model is presented, opting for the semantic integration of collection-level descriptions as an efficient mechanism for sharing information between various digital repositories and applications. DCCAP has been chosen from a plethora of collection-level metadata schemas, since DCCAP is a widely known and used metadata schema...

XML data integration approach is presented based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The proposed architecture maps XML structures (such as elements and attributes) to OWL structural components (such as classes, properties, etc.), and thus they convert the XML data to an OWL global ontology. [Elsewhere] the authors map the XML data of every local source to an RDF schema (RDFS) local ontology. They transform the XML elements and attributes to RDFS classes and properties, while in addition the local RDFS ontologies are merged to a global ontology for unified access and semantic integration of local data sources... In general, the approaches that deal with semantic integration are strongly oriented to integrate XML data to RDFS and OWL ontologies by focusing on structural mappings or model mappings between them (i.e., elements to classes, attributes to properties, etc.)..."

Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) Makes Push for HD Specification
James Figueroa, IEEE Computing Now

The Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), an organization formed in May 2009 to develop an industry specification for high-definition wireless data sent over the 60-GHz band, is on a mission to create "wireless homes" and eliminate the need for HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) cables. The technology is progressing quickly and a specification is targeted for late this year, making WiGig's vision only a few months away from reality...

WiGig, however, is a late entry among several groups working toward an uncompressed wireless solution for high-definition content. The Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) is in development as the next step for high-definition television and other displays, although it will operate in the more constricted 5-GHz band. Operating in the same 60-GHz space as WiGig is Wireless HD, a specification that came out in January 2008 and has already been implemented in some devices... Both WiGig and Wireless HD offer high-speed transfer rates at greater than 1 Gbyte per second, connecting a multitude of devices, including game consoles, cameras, and mobile phones, in a single room..."


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