Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 20 August 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

EAC-CPF Schema and Tag Library for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families
Using RDFa with DITA and DocBook
CalDAV Scheduling Extensions to WebDAV
Chaos to Order: SKOS Recommendation Helps Organize Knowledge
Oracle's Sun Acquisition Passes US Anti-Trust Test

EAC-CPF Schema and Tag Library for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families
Staff, EAC Working Group Announcement

Members of the Encoded Archival Context (EAC) Working Group announced the release of a new EAC-CPF schema and tag library on August 21, 2009. EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families) primarily addresses the description of individuals, families and corporate bodies that create, preserve, use and are responsible for and/or associated with records in a variety of ways. Over time, other types of contextual entities may evolve under the larger EAC umbrella, but currently its primary purpose is to standardize the encoding of descriptions about agents to enable the sharing, discovery and display of this information in an electronic environment. It supports the linking of information about one agent to other agents to show/discover the relationships amongst record-creating entities, and the linking to descriptions of records and other contextual entities. EAC-CPF supports the exchange of ISAAR (CPF) compliant authority records.

The EAC-CPF Schema is an standard using Extensible Markup Language (XML). The standard is maintained by the Society of American Archivists in partnership with the Berlin State Library and the German Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives). The latest draft versions are available in W3C Schema format, Relax NG Schema, and Relax NG Schema Compact.

During the final draft review period, through 30-October-2009, the EACWG requests comments, suggestions, error reports, and questions from the archival community concerning the Tag Library. The underlying encoding of the Tag Library is based on TEI P5 and is designed to facilitate incorporating documentation into the schema to provide guidance in XML editors. While the initial release of the Tag Library is in English, the unerlying encoding is designed to facilitate providing the Tag Library in additional languages at later dates.

The Encoded Archival Context (EAC) Initiative is introduced in a general document Markup Languages for Names and Addresses.

See also: earlier EAC references

Using RDFa with DITA and DocBook
Bob DuCharme, DevX.com

This article explains how to add RDFa metadata to DITA and DocBook documents, how to keep those documents valid, and what advantages this technique can bring to a DITA- or DocBook-based publishing system. The RDF data model gives you a way to add attribute name/value pairs to any resource that you can reference with a URI. This makes it easy to create metadata about nearly anything. The W3C's RDFa standard is an increasingly popular syntax for storing RDF statements inside HTML documents, but according to the "RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing W3C Recommendation", RDFa is a specification for attributes to express structured data in ANY markup language...

The RDF data model stores information in a simple data structure known as a triple, so named because it has three parts: a subject, a predicate, and an object. In more database-oriented terms, think of these three parts as a resource ID, an attribute name, and an attribute value... One reason the DocBook and DITA standards have been popular for storing XML documents is their adaptability. If you want to add new information that the original DTDs don't provide for, the DocBook and DITA architectures let you define additional elements or attributes in an orderly, structured way that will survive upgrades to the standards with minimal fuss. Both DTDs offer slots for arbitrary metadata but nothing with the flexibility and structure of RDFa, because adding specialized elements or attributes to the DocBook and DITA DTDs requires you to write specialized code to extract their values. When you've added a brief module to either standard's DTD to allow RDFa attributes, the RDF data model's flexibility means that storing new kinds of information in the future may not require additional DTD modifications...

Various syntaxes such as RDF/XML, n3, Turtle, and RDFa enable you to represent RDF triples so that programs can read this data and then store them in databases, query them, and do inferencing with them. The "a" in RDFa refers to attributes, because RDFa lets you embed triples into non-RDF XML by simply adding a few attribute values... Adding RDFa to your DocBook or DITA documents has a nice payoff: easier addition of metadata that can be extracted by existing tools that follow an open standard. And it comes at a minimal cost...

See also: the RDFa Primer

CalDAV Scheduling Extensions to WebDAV
Cyrus Daboo and Bernard Desruisseaux (eds), IETF Internet Draft

A revised version of the IETF Standards Track Internet Draft CalDAV Scheduling Extensions to WebDAV has been published for review. In version -08, XML conventions changed to match those used in the CardDAV specification.

This document specifies extensions to the CalDAV "calendar-access" feature (defined in RFC 4791) to enable scheduling of iCalendar-based calendar components between Calendar Users. This extension leverages the scheduling methods defined in the iCalendar Transport-independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP) to permit Calendar Users to perform scheduling transactions such as schedule, reschedule, respond to scheduling request or cancel scheduled calendar components, as well as search for busy time information.

The iTIP specification outlines a model where Calendar Users exchange scheduling messages with one another. Often times, Calendar User Agents are made responsible for generating and sending scheduling messages as well as processing incoming scheduling messages. This approach yields a number of problems, including: (1) For most updates to a scheduled calendar component, Calendar User Agents need to address a separate scheduling messages to the Organizer or the Attendees. (2) The handling of incoming scheduling messages and the updates to calendars impacted by those messages only occurs when Calendar User Agents are active. (3) Due to the update latency, it is possible for calendars of different Calendar Users to reflect different, inaccurate states.

This CalDAV Scheduling Extensions specification therefore uses an alternative approach where the server is made responsible for sending scheduling messages and processing incoming scheduling messages. This approach frees the Calendar User Agents from the submission and processing of scheduling messages and ensures better consistency of calendar data across users' calendars. The operation of creating, modifying or deleting a scheduled calendar component in a calendar is enough to trigger the server to deliver the necessary scheduling messages to the appropriate Calendar Users.

See also: Wikipedia CalDAV references

Chaos to Order: SKOS Recommendation Helps Organize Knowledge
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C has announced publication of a new standard that builds a bridge between the world of knowledge organization systems — including thesauri, classifications, subject headings, taxonomies, and folksonomies — and the linked data community, bringing benefits to both. Libraries, museums, newspapers, government portals, enterprises, social networking applications, and other communities that manage large collections of books, historical artifacts, news reports, business glossaries, blog entries, and other items can now use Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) to leverage the power of linked data.

The W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has also published two Group Notes along with the Recommendation, updating the SKOS Primer and SKOS Use Cases and Requirements.

"A useful starting point for understanding the role of SKOS is the set of subject headings published by the US Library of Congress (LOC) for categorizing books, videos, and other library resources. These headings can be used to broaden or narrow queries for discovering resources... LOC subject headings have evolved within a community of practice over a period of decades. By now publishing these subject headings in SKOS, the Library of Congress has made them available to the linked data community, which benefits from a time-tested set of concepts to re-use in their own data. This re-use adds value ("the network effect") to the collection. When people all over the Web re-use the same LOC concept for "Chinese drama," or a concept from some other vocabulary linked to it, this creates many new routes to the discovery of information, and increases the chances that relevant items will be found. As an example of mapping one vocabulary to another, a combined effort from the STITCH, TELplus and MACS Projects provides links between LOC concepts and RAMEAU, a collection of French subject headings used by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and other institutions..."

See also: the W3C press release

Oracle's Sun Acquisition Passes US Anti-Trust Test
Timothy Prickett Morgan, The Register

The $5.6bn takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle moved another step toward closing as the US Department of Justice has given the acquisition its nod. Specifically, the DoJ terminated the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, according to a terse statement from Oracle: "Sun's stockholders approved the transaction on July 16, 2009. Closing of the transaction is subject to certain conditions, including clearance by the European Commission."

"Oracle had hoped to have closed the Sun acquisition by now, but it has been delayed by antitrust authorities in the US and Europe who were apparently concerned with Oracle's steerage of Java, the licensing of Java technology, and the prices it would charge. The DoJ never publicly discussed what its concerns were, but as previously reported in El Reg, the word on the street was that the DoJ stalled the deal to find out more about how Oracle would handle licensing of Java software technologies. Two weeks ago, the antitrust authorities at the European Commission launched their own investigation into the Sun takeover..."

See also: eWEEK


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