Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 27 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:
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

Headlines

KnowledgeTree Incorporates OASIS CMIS Interface for ECM
Speech Recognition May Speed Electronic Medical Records Adoption
Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0 Draft Published
Updated Candidate Recommendation: Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1
IETF Proposed Standard: Specification of the IPFIX File Format
Sun StorageTek T10000B Tape Drive Earns Federal FIPS Certification at Security Level 2
Metalink in HTTP Headers
Spring and Hessian for Fast, Easy Java Remoting
Git Changes the Game of Distributed Web Development

KnowledgeTree Incorporates OASIS CMIS Interface for ECM
Staff, KnowledgeTree Announcement

KnowledgeTree, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) provider focusing on affordable document management software that is easily installed and used by business professionals, has announced "the release of a developer snapshot of its product that includes an implementation of the draft OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. This snapshot is available for testing in the community. CMIS clients, such as CMIS Spaces, will work with the KnowledgeTree CMIS interface and allow users to access content as they would with any other CMIS interface implementation... In addition to the CMIS API, KnowledgeTree is also releasing a proof-of-concept CMIS client module to the Drupal web content management application community. This module demonstrates accessing content in the KnowledgeTree repository from the popular web content management server.

Philip Arkcoll, KnowledgeTree product manager: 'KnowledgeTree is being proactive in adopting and integrating CMIS into our product suite. This will allow users of ECM products to extend their software investments by gaining visibility into all enterprise document repositories that have a CMIS interface as well as realize benefits such as reduced vendor lock-in, improved interoperability between content management systems and a richer content management ecosystem'...

The KnowledgeTree CMIS Drupal project integrates the KnowledgeTree document management system with Drupal and requires the CMIS API module as a base. The module allows users or administrators to execute CMIS API calls against a KnowledgeTree CMIS-compliant repository, browse the CMIS repository by navigating its hierarchy and provide repository information.

See also: the CMIS KnowledgeTree Wiki

Speech Recognition May Speed Electronic Medical Records Adoption
Ericka Chickowski, Smarter Technology

Dr. John Halamka, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center believes speech recognition very well may be the critical enablement technology to help organizations meet the ambitious 2015 EMR deadline... The solution is the deployment of speech recognition and medical note automation software... The software takes disorganized speech and, based on keywords spoken by the doctors, automatically organizes it into specific templates. And it does all of this with about 97 percent to 98 percent accuracy...

Halamka: 'I underestimated how popular this would be...I had to progressively add phone capacity because the doctors love it so much. Earlier on, I was saturating the number of incoming telephone lines because they were adopting it so quickly'... The savings and satisfaction are complemented by a jump in hospital records management efficiency. The turnaround time between when the patient is seen and when the hospital is able to document their visit dropped by 90 percent, from an average of five days down to 12 hours. Radiology reports are now delivered within a half hour.

Beth Israel may have been a big early adopter, but other organizations are quickly learning that speech recognition is the key to successful EMR adoption. According to a report released last year by Datamonitor, the speech recognition market is expected to more than double by 2013, likely due to the benefits..."

Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0 Draft Published
Scott McGlashan, Daniel C. Burnett (et al, eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced that the Voice Browser Working Group has published a Working Draft of "Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0." VoiceXML 3.0 is a modular XML language for creating interactive media dialogs that feature synthesized speech, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, telephony, mixed initiative conversations, and recording and presentation of a variety of media formats including digitized audio, and digitized video. A list of changes from the previous draft is available online.

VoiceXML 3.0 Recognition Resources: "The recognition resource is defined in its created state grammars are added to the resource and subsequently prepared on the device, recognition with these grammars can be activated and suspended, and recognition results are returned. Two types of recognition resources are defined: DTMF recognition for recognition of DTMF input; and ASR recognition for recognition of speech input. Both recognition resources are associated with a device which implements their respective recognition services. Each device represents one or more actual recognizer instances. In case of a device implemented with multiple recognizers—for example two different speech recognition engines—it is the responsibility of the interpreter implementation to ensure that they adhere to the semantic model..."

Updated Candidate Recommendation: Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1
Daniel C. Burnett (ed), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group have published a new SSML 1.1 Implementation Report Plan and updated the Candidate Recommendation for the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1 specification.

Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) "is designed to provide a rich, XML-based markup language for assisting the generation of synthetic speech in Web and other applications. Although the Working Group has not formally identified any features as being at-risk, as a result of the previous publication, the Working Group now understands that some features may not receive adequate implementation experience. The new draft identifies these features in the status section and asks for feedback. A few editorial errors in the previous draft and the Implementation Report Plan document were also fixed. A list of changes from the previous draft is available.

SSML "is part of a larger set of markup specifications for voice browsers developed through the open processes of the W3C. It is designed to provide a rich, XML-based markup language for assisting the generation of synthetic speech in Web and other applications. The essential role of the markup language is to give authors of synthesizable content a standard way to control aspects of speech output such as pronunciation, volume, pitch, rate, etc. across different synthesis-capable platforms..."

IETF Proposed Standard: Specification of the IPFIX File Format
Brian Trammell, Elisa Boschi, etc al (eds), IETF Internet Draft

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) has announced the approval of the "Specification of the IPFIX File Format" as an IETF Proposed Standard. This document describes a file format for the storage of flow data based upon the IPFIX Protocol. It proposes a set of requirements for flat-file, binary flow data file formats, then specifies the IPFIX File format to meet these requirements based upon IPFIX Messages. This IPFIX File format is designed to facilitate interoperability and reusability among a wide variety of flow storage, processing, and analysis tools. The format makes use of the IPFIX Options mechanism for additional file metadata, in order to avoid requiring any protocol extensions, and to minimize the effort required to adapt IPFIX implementations to use the file format... An advantage of file-based storage is that files can be readily encapsulated within each other and other data storage and transmission formats. The IPFIX File Format leverages this to provide encryption and compression...

Work started on this document in 2006, and has gone through several revisions in response to mailing list discussion. Originally it included the material about 'exporting type information,' but the WG split it out into a seperate RFC to make it more easily accessible for other uses. The WG has reached a clear consensus on this draft.

Earlier this year the IESG Secretary announced the re-charter of the IETF IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) Working Group in the Operations and Management Area. The WG will develop an XML-based configuration data model that can be used for configuring IPFIX devices and for storing, modifying and managing IPFIX configurations parameter sets. This work will be performed in close collaboration with the IEF NETCONF Working Group.

Sun StorageTek T10000B Tape Drive Earns Federal FIPS Certification at Security Level 2
Staff, System News

"Sun StorageTek T10000B tape drive has received the FIPS 140-2 Certification at Security Level 2 — a federal data security standard published and maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). With this certification on Sun's eco-efficient tape drive, federal customers are ensured the Sun solution meets the FIPS-validated requirements for product purchase, while other end-users can rest assured that it meets stringent security standards. Sun reports that it is the first and only tape drive vendor to achieve Federal FIPS Certification at Security Level 2.

The Sun StorageTek 10000B tape drive comes with built-in encryption that works in conjunction with the Sun Crypto Key Management System, which centrally authorizes, secures and manages all encryption keys.

In addition, the Sun StorageTek T10000B tape drive also offers Sun StorageTek VolSafe secure media technology which provides write-once read-many (WORM) capability to help meet stringent electronic storage regulatory and legal requirements. Data can be stored securely on non-erasable, non-rewritable tape and recalled quickly when needed. Sun also announced that the KMS Agent API, published as an Open Source toolkit by the OpenSolaris community, has been adopted and is now supported by HP and IBM in their LTO tape drives, and by EMC in their RSA RKM enterprise key management system...

Metalink in HTTP Headers
Anthony Bryan (ed), IETF Internet Draft

"This document specifies Metalink in HTTP Headers, an alternative representation, instead of the usual XML-based download description format. Metalink describes alternate download locations (mirrors), Peer-to-Peer information, checksums, digital signatures, and other information. Clients can transparently use this information to reliably transfer files.

Identical copies of a file are frequently accessible in multiple locations on the Internet over a variety of protocols (FTP, HTTP, and Peer-to-Peer). In some cases, Users are shown a list of these multiple download locations (mirrors) and must manually select a single one on the basis of geographical location, priority, or bandwidth. This distributes the load across multiple servers. At times, individual servers can be slow, outdated, or unreachable, but this can not be determined until the download has been initiated. This can lead to the user canceling the download and needing to restart it. During downloads, errors in transmission can corrupt the file. There are no easy ways to repair these files. For large downloads this can be extremely troublesome. Any of the number of problems that can occur during a download lead to frustration on the part of users...

All the information about a download, including mirrors, checksums, digital signatures, and more can be transferred in coordinated HTTP Headers. This Metalink transfers the knowledge of the download server (and mirror database) to the client. Clients can fallback to alternate mirrors if the current one has an issue. With this knowledge, the client is enabled to work its way to a successful download even under adverse circumstances. All this is done transparently to the user and the download is much more reliable and efficient..."

Spring and Hessian for Fast, Easy Java Remoting
Jacek Furmankiewicz, DevX.com

"The world of enterprise Java has an overwhelming array of choices for remoting: RMI, XML/SOAP, REST/JSON, etc. Each comes with its own industry-acknowledged strengths and weaknesses, such as complex setup (RMI) or performance overhead (XML/SOAP). A lesser known but very powerful and easy-to-use option is the Hessian binary web service protocol. The binary aspect of Hessian delivers excellent performance, and its native integration within Java allows you to expose remote services purely via a regular Java interface.

Hessian's most rewarding feature, though, is the ability to pass full Java POJO object graphs from one process to another easily without the overhead of XML marshalling, an unfortunate side effect of SOAP web services. Also, Hessian is implemented in a variety of different languages, so you theoretically can execute efficient binary remoting between Java and Python or Java and C# as well.

This article walks through using the Hessian protocol as an alternative to the more widely accepted RMI, XML/SOAP, and REST/JSON approaches for remote communication. It also explains how to integrate Spring and Hessian and then create Hessian components as simple Java objects..."

Git Changes the Game of Distributed Web Development
William von Hagen, IBM developerWorks

"Version control systems are a core component of most development projects, regardless of whether you're developing an application, a Web site, or an operating system. Most projects involve multiple developers, often working at widely separated physical locations. Distributed version control systems are nothing new, but the Git version control system provides unique support for collaboration and interaction among developers. Git was designed to facilitate distributed development among thousands of developers working at many different locations with different degrees of Internet connectivity without introducing significant performance or access bottlenecks.

The most important aspects supporting these fundamental requirements in Git are: (1) Using a central repository but providing each developer on a project with a complete copy of the source code for that project. This guarantees that all developers can get work done regardless of their current connectivity. (2) Providing fast and reliable support for creating different working sets, known as branches, within a software project and sharing changes across them, known as merges. Branches make it easy to support different versions of a software package, regardless of whether those versions are permanent or were created for experimentation. Merges are a key aspect of a source code control system in general and are especially common in a branch-oriented VCS. (3) Making it easy to share in-progress branches and code changes between subsets of developers without requiring that those changes first be checked in to the central repository...

These design decisions and their implementation are key aspects of Git's success and usability. Of course, Git also satisfies standard VCS requirements such as immutability and accountability..."


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