Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Thursday, 24 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:
Microsoft Corporation http://www.microsoft.com

Headlines

ETSI Forms New Specification Group on Identity and Access Management
OASIS Blue Member Section for Smart Energy Grids, Intelligent Buildings
NIST Publishes Draft Smart Grid Cyber Security Strategy and Requirements
Call for Implementations: Timed Text Authoring Format 1.0 DFX Profile
CAM: A New Semantic and Structural XML Validation Technology

ETSI Forms New Specification Group on Identity and Access Management
Staff, ETSI Announcement

"ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) is pleased to announce the creation of a new Industry Specification Group to develop a common industry view on Identity Management protocols and architectures, relating mainly to networks and services for the Internet of the future... The Industry Specification Group (ISG) plans to create a series of commonly-agreed Europe-wide specifications, which can further developed by standardization groups such as ETSI and 3GPP as formally adopted standards for European or global use...

The ISG INS held its first meeting in Aveiro, Portugal, on 16 September 2009, and approved its initial activities which include development of specifications for: (1) mechanisms, interfaces and protocols allowing service providers to perform authentication and retrieval of identity attributes through the network operator; (2) requirements on the use and application of distributed policy management such that, for example, authentication of the user by the communications network can enable their authentication for the various services they wish to access; (3) distributed user profile management where the network operator acts as an identity broker—taking responsibility for managing the user's identity; (4) mechanisms, protocols and procedures allowing user access to their selected services based on dynamic service level agreement (SLA) negotiations...

ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, aeronautical, broadcast and internet technologies and is officially recognized by the European Union as a European Standards Organization. ETSI is an independent, not-for-profit association whose 766 member companies and organizations, drawn from 63 countries across five continents worldwide, participate directly in its work..."

See also: the ETSI web site

OASIS Blue Member Section for Smart Energy Grids, Intelligent Buildings
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS has announced the formation of a new OASIS Blue Member Section. "This group within OASIS will work to advance open standards for smart energy grids, intelligent buildings, and other areas related to sustainability.

OASIS Blue Technical Committees will capitalize on, profile, and extend existing electronic commerce and data exchange standards. They will also advance needed taxonomies for natural resources and networked devices and articulate best practices for facilitation of smart economic development and smart energy.

Technical Committees that are expected to affiliate with OASIS Blue include the existing Energy Interoperation TC, the Energy Market Information Exchange (eMIX) TC, and the OASIS Open Building Information Exchange (oBIX) TC.

Member Section leadership invites participation from people representing: energy providers; developers of Grid-related applications or services; providers of eCommerce applications or services; experts in energy, building management, or eCommerce; government agencies involved in energy legislation and use; industry organizations working on standardization around sustainability; research institutes studying traditional and alternative energy sources..."

NIST Publishes Draft Smart Grid Cyber Security Strategy and Requirements
Annabelle Lee and Tanya Brewer (eds), NIST Publication

Members of the NIST Cyber Security Coordination Task Group, Advanced Security Acceleration Project (Smart Grid) have released a review DRAFT NISTIR 7628 Report on Smart Grid Cyber Security Strategy and Requirements. The first draft of the document contains the overall security strategy for the Smart Grid and the products developed from this strategy, for example, development of vulnerability classes, identification of well-understood security problems that need to be addressed, selection and development of security-relevant use cases, identification and analysis of interfaces identified in the six functional priority areas and selection of a suite of security documents that will be used as the base for the selection and tailoring of security requirements. NIST requests comments on Draft NIST IR 7628 by November 25, 2009.

With the Smart Grid's transformation of the electric system to a two-way flow of electricity and information, the information technology (IT) and telecommunications infrastructures have become critical to the energy sector infrastructure. Therefore, the management and protection of systems and components of these infrastructures must also be addressed by an increasingly diverse energy sector. To achieve this requires that security be designed in at the architectural level.

NIST has established a Smart Grid Cyber Security Coordination Task Group (CSCTG), which now has more than 200 volunteer members from the public and private sectors, academia, regulatory organizations, and federal agencies. Cyber security is being addressed in a complementary and integral process that will result in a comprehensive set of cyber security requirements... This document was developed by members of CSCTG, lead by NIST. Another group also instrumental in the development of this document is the Advanced Security Acceleration Project—Smart Grid (ASAP-SG), which developed the security profile for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) for the CSCTG and The UtiliSec Working Group (UCAIug)...

See also: NIST Interagency Reports

Call for Implementations: Timed Text Authoring Format 1.0 DFX Profile
Mike Dolan, Geoff Freed, Sean Hayes (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C's Timed Text Working Group now invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation "Timed Text (TT) Authoring Format 1.0 -- Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP)." This document specifies the distribution format exchange profile (DFXP) of the timed text authoring format (TT AF) in terms of a vocabulary and its semantics.

The timed text authoring format is a content type that represents timed text media for the purpose of interchange among authoring systems. Timed text is textual information that is intrinsically or extrinsically associated with timing information. The Distribution Format Exchange Profile is intended to be used for the purpose of transcoding or exchanging timed text information among legacy distribution content formats presently in use for subtitling and captioning functions...

In addition to being used for interchange among legacy distribution content formats, DFXP content may be used directly as a distribution format, for example, providing a standard content format to reference from a 'text' or 'textstream' media object element in a SMIL 2.1 document...

A test suite is available, along with its coverage report and a preliminary implementation report. The entrance criteria to the Proposed Recommendation phase require at least two independently developed interoperable implementations of each required and optional feature.."

CAM: A New Semantic and Structural XML Validation Technology
Brian M. Carey, IBM developerWorks

"XML documents are frequently validated against either a DTD or an XML schema. Recently, a new technology called Content Assembly Mechanism (CAM) has emerged. It is endorsed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). CAM represents a step up from XML schema because it provides even more flexibility in defining both the semantics of an XML document and the business rules associated with the actual data content...

One advantage of CAM over XSD is that localization needs are more easily enforced with CAM. With XSD, enumerations are static and, therefore, cannot be made context-aware. However, with CAM, you can apply particular enumerations based on context values. In the emerging global marketplace, the need for such streamlined validation should be self-explanatory... CAM templates also provide next-generation Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) support. CAM supports business processing technologies such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS), and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) modeling tools..."

See also: the OASIS CAM Wiki


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