Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 10 September 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

Call for Participation: Energy Market Information Exchange (eMIX) TC
Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts
Encryption Made Easier With New Key Management Tools
iCalendar Message-Based Interoperability Protocol (iMIP)
W3C Call for Review: XForms 1.1 Proposed Recommendation
IBM Adds Widgets to Symphony Office Suite
A Uniform Resource Identifier for Geographic Locations ('geo' URI)

Call for Participation: Energy Market Information Exchange (eMIX) TC
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS members have created a new Energy Market Information Exchange (eMIX) Technical Committee to define information models for exchanging prices and product definitions in energy markets. The TC will develop a data model and XML vocabulary to exchange prices and product definitions for transactive energy markets. Web services definitions, service definitions consistent with the OASIS SOA Reference Model, and XML vocabularies supporting the information model will be developed as needed for interoperable and standard exchange of: (1) Price information; (2) Bid information; (3) Time for use or availability; (4) Units and quantity to be traded; (5) Characteristics of what is to be traded; (6) Deal/Bid/Acceptance confirmations.

From the eMIX TC Call for Participation: "As we all know, price is more than just a number. The characteristics of energy, such as quantity and units, generation source, carbon trading or tracing, power quality and reliability, and the schedule on which energy is available are information that is needed to make decisions in a market.

The committee will define neither market operations nor market structures; rather it will define how to exchange energy characteristics, availability, and schedules to support free and effective exchange of information in any energy market. In financial markets, this type of description is called a product definition. Although today's energy markets are almost exclusively wholesale, the product definitions will be usable in other scenarios including retail markets and 'prices to devices' scenarios.

Distributed energy generation challenges the traditional hierarchical relationship of supplier and consumer. Alternative and renewable energy sources may be placed closer to the end nodes of the grid. Wind and solar generation, as well as industrial co-generation, allow end nodes to sometimes be energy suppliers. Energy storage, including that in plug-in electric vehicles, means that the same device may be sometimes a supplier, sometime a consumer. As these sources are all intermittent, they increase the challenge of coordinating supply and demand to maintain the reliability of the electric grid..."

Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts
Richard Ishida (ed), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced the publication of a Working Group Note on Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts" The document was produced by members of the Internationalization Core Working Group, part of the W3C Internationalization Activity.

The document provides advice for the use of HTML markup and CSS style sheets to create pages for languages that use right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Thaana, Urdu, etc. It explains how to create content in right-to-left scripts that builds on but goes beyond the Unicode bidirectional algorithm, as well as how to prepare content for localization into right-to-left scripts.

The specification is intended for all content authors working with HTML and CSS who are working with text in a language that uses a right-to-left script, or whose content will be localized to a language that uses a right-to-left script. The term 'author' is used in the sense of a person that creates content either directly or via a script or program that generates HTML documents.

It provides guidance for developers of HTML that enables support for international deployment. Enabling international deployment is the responsibility of all content authors, not just localization groups or vendors, and is relevant from the very start of development. Ignoring the advice in this document, or relegating it to a later phase in the development process, will only add unnecessary costs and resource issues at a later date. It is assumed that readers of this document are proficient in developing HTML and XHTML pages..."

See also: Markup and Multilingualism

Encryption Made Easier With New Key Management Tools
Logan G. Harbaugh, Network World.

In response to dramatic and widely publicized losses of data over the last few years, IT execs are moving to deploy encryption in every corner of the enterprise. While encryption does reduce the chances of data loss, it can also create a management nightmare, with dozens of different encryption applications using hundreds or thousands of keys.

To address that problem, vendors have developed enterprise encryption key management tools. Of the dozen vendors that we identified, three accepted our invitation—Thales, Venafi and Vormetric. Vendors who declined were Entrust, NetApp (Decru), PGP, Protegrity, RSA (EMC), SafeNet (Ingarian) and WinMagic. The still-developing state of the market is reflected in the different types of products we received -- an appliance from Thales that supports a variety of key exchange standards, software from Venafi that supports a broad range of applications, and an appliance from Vormetric that replaces existing encryption on a variety of platforms, enabling one appliance to manage encryption across a broad range of applications...

There are a wide range of tasks associated with key management: issuing, renewing and revoking keys; monitoring applications; reporting and logging; setting and auditing policies; management; and in some cases, discovery of applications using keys that can be managed through the system..."

iCalendar Message-Based Interoperability Protocol (iMIP)
Alexey Melnikov (ed), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Calendaring and Scheduling Standards Simplification (CALSIFY) Working Group have published an updated Internet Draft for the iCalendar Message-Based Interoperability Protocol (iMIP) specification. This specification defines a binding from the iCalendar Transport-independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP) to Internet email-based transports. Calendaring entries defined by the iCalendar Object Model (iCAL) are composed using constructs from "Internet Message Format" (RFC 5322), "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies" (RFC 2045), "MIME Part Two: Media Types" (RFC 2046), "MIME Part Three: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text" (RFC 2047), and "MIME Part Five: Conformance Criteria and Examples" (RFC 2049).

Implementers will need to be familiar with several other memos that, along with this memo, form a framework for Internet calendaring and scheduling standards. This document (iMIP) specifies an Internet email binding for iTIP. iCAL — "Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar)" — defines a MIME content type for exchanging electronic calendaring and scheduling information; it specifies a core specification of objects, data types, properties and property parameters. The iCalendar format is suitable as an exchange format between applications or systems. The format is defined in terms of a MIME content type. This will enable the object to be exchanged using several transports, including but not limited to SMTP, HTTP, a file system, desktop interactive protocols such as the use of a memory-based clipboard or drag/drop interactions, point-to-point asynchronous communication, wired-network transport, or some form of unwired transport such as infrared might also be used...

iTIP ("iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability Protocol") specifies how calendaring systems use iCalendar objects to interoperate with other calendar systems. It does so in a general way so as to allow multiple methods of communication between systems. Subsequent documents specify interoperable methods of communications between systems that use this protocol. The document outlines a model for calendar exchange that defines both static and dynamic event, to-do, journal and free/busy objects. Static objects are used to transmit information from one entity to another without the expectation of continuity or referential integrity with the original item.

W3C Call for Review: XForms 1.1 Proposed Recommendation
John M. Boyer (ed), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C Forms Working Group have published a Proposed Recommendation specification for XForms 1.1. XForms is an XML application that represents the next generation of forms for the Web. XForms is not a free-standing document type, but is intended to be integrated into other markup languages, such as XHTML, ODF or SVG. An XForms-based web form gathers and processes XML data using an architecture that separates presentation, purpose and content. The underlying data of a form is organized into instances of data schema—though formal schema definitions are not required.

An XForm allows processing of data to occur using three mechanisms: (1) a declarative model composed of formulae for data calculations and constraints, data type and other property declarations, and data submission parameters; (2) a view layer composed of intent-based user interface controls; (3) an imperative controller for orchestrating data manipulations, interactions between the model and view layers, and data submissions.

Thus, XForms accommodates form component reuse, fosters strong data type validation, eliminates unnecessary round-trips to the server, offers device independence and reduces the need for scripting.

XForms 1.1 refines the XML processing platform introduced by XForms 1.0 by adding several new submission capabilities, action handlers, utility functions, user interface improvements, and helpful datatypes as well as a more powerful action processing facility, including conditional, iterated and background execution, the ability to manipulate data arbitrarily and to access event context information..."

See also: the W3C Forms Activity

IBM Adds Widgets to Symphony Office Suite
Larry Barrett, InternetNews.com

IBM said on Thursday that the latest version of Lotus Symphony now includes support for a variety of popular widgets that let users access Google Gadgets, Lotus Sametime, a wide range of wikis and Microsoft's Sharepoint and MSN from within Symphony. When IBM released Lotus Symphony 1.3 in June 2009, it included support for Microsoft Office file formats as well as enhanced DataPilot Table for data mining and organization. Since the first release of Symphony in 2007, IBM has positioned the free software suite as an alternative to Microsoft Office without the pricey annual licensing fees...

Google Apps and OpenOffice.org are two of the more prominent competitors to both IBM and Microsoft in the so-called productivity software space. This latest iteration lets users drag and drop widgets into Lotus Symphony... Lotus Symphony 1.3, based on the OpenDocument format (ODF), includes support for Microsoft Office 2007 file formats such as .docx, xlsx and .pptx, allowing most Office users to access and transfer data into Symphony..."

See also: the Symphony download site

A Uniform Resource Identifier for Geographic Locations ('geo' URI)
Alexander Mayrhofer and Christian Spanring (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Geographic Location/Privacy (GEOPRIV) Working Group have released an updated version of the 'geo' URI specification. The document specifies an Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for geographic locations using the 'geo' scheme name. A 'geo' URI identifies a physical location in a two- or three-dimensional coordinate reference system in a compact, simple, human-readable, and protocol independent way. The default coordinate reference system used is WGS-84.

This version incorporates several changes based on Expert Review, including marking of GML mappings as non-normative, restructred ABNF slightly, additional section describing uncertainty, new section on internationalization considerations, etc.

From the Introduction: "An increasing number of Internet protocols and data formats are extended by specifications for adding spatial (geographic) location. In most cases, latitude as well as longitude of simple points are added as new attributes to existing data structures. However, all those methods are very specific to a certain data format or protocol, and don't provide a protocol independent, compact and generic way to refer to a physical geographic location. Over the past few years, fast emerging location aware applications and location based services were observable on the Internet. Most web search engines use geographic information, and a vivid open source mapping community brought an enormous momentum into location aware technology. A wide range of tools and data sets which formerly were accessible to professional only became available for a wider audience. The 'geo' URI scheme is another step into that direction and aims to facilitate, support and standardize the problem of location identification in geospatial services and applications..."


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