Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Wednesday, 30 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

ISO Approves Health Level Seven Version 2.5
E-Medical Data Valuable to Health Industry
W3C Invites Implementation of Six Rule Interchange Format (RIF) CRs
Full Disk Encryption Evolves: Opal Standard Paves the Way for FDE
IRTF Charters New Public Key Next-Generation Research Group (PKNG)
Hierarchical Approach for Key Management in Mobile Ad hoc Networks
SAP, Salesforce.com catch the Google Wave

ISO Approves Health Level Seven Version 2.5
Staff, HL7 Announcement

"Health Level Seven (HL7), the global authority for interoperability and standards in healthcare information technology with members in 57 countries, announced that its Version 2.5 messaging standard has been approved as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

HL7 Version 2.5 allows interoperability between electronic health record systems, practice management systems, laboratory IT systems, dietary, pharmacy and billing systems. It serves as a vehicle for disparate healthcare IT systems, applications and data architectures operating in diverse-system environments to communicate with each other. It is designed to support a central patient care system, as well as a more distributed environment where data resides in departmental systems...

HL7 standards are accepted and approved through the ISO Technical Committee 215—Health Informatics. HL7 can share its products with the international standards community, thus reducing the need for duplicative work. HL7 standards are widely used by healthcare software vendors that sell their health information technology products internationally. HL7's Version 2.5 received ANSI approval as an American National Standard on June 26, 2003..."

E-Medical Data Valuable to Health Industry
W. David Gardner, InformationWeek

"More than three-quarters of healthcare executives believe their industry's most valuable asset is going to be information contained in electronic medical records, according a report issued by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The report, based on a survey of more than 700 healthcare executives, noted that the hundreds of billions of gigabytes of health and medical information being compiled will have a secondary use... the value, however, must be unlocked by finding ways to overcome a lack of standards, privacy concerns, and technology limitations that could hinder use of the data...

PWC identified medical and healthcare records and data ripe for exploitation as ranging from electronic health records and insurance claims to lab results and employer benefits data. Many executives felt analysis of the massive stock of data can help reduce medical errors, demonstrate the value or danger of drugs and treatments, detect fraud, and identify patterns for improving health outcomes..."

See also: XML in Healthcare Standards

W3C Invites Implementation of Six Rule Interchange Format (RIF) CRs
Staff, W3C Announcement

Members of the W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group have published six Candidate Recommendations, together with a call for implementations. The Working Group asks all developers to send implementation reports and other comments to the comment list by 29-October-2009.

The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group was chartered by W3C in 2005 to create a standard for exchanging rules among rule systems, in particular among Web rule engines. RIF focused on exchange rather than trying to develop a single one-fits-all rule language because, in contrast to other Semantic Web standards, such as RDF, OWL, and SPARQL... The family of RIF dialects is intended to be uniform and extensible. RIF uniformity means that dialects are expected to share as much as possible of the existing syntactic and semantic apparatus... Ultimately, the medium of exchange between different rule systems is XML, a format for data exchange. Central to the idea behind rule exchange through RIF is that different systems will provide syntactic mappings from their native languages to RIF dialects and back. These mappings are required to be semantics-preserving, and thus rule sets can be communicated from one system to another provided that the systems can talk through a suitable dialect, which they both support...

Three of the drafts define XML formats with formal semantics for storing and transmitting rules: (1) The "RIF Production Rule Dialect (PRD)" is designed for the kinds of rules used in modern Business Rule Management systems; (2) The "RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD)" is a foundation for Logic Programming, classical logic, and related formalisms; (3) The "RIF Core Dialect" is the common subset of PRD and BLD, useful when having a ubiquitous platform is paramount...

The RIF Working Group group has also published a new version of RIF Test Cases, and three new First Public Working Drafts: RIF Overview, RIF Combination with XML Data, and OWL 2 RL in RIF..."

Full Disk Encryption Evolves: Opal Standard Paves the Way for FDE
Greg Shipley, InformationWeek

"Earlier this month the Naval Hospital in Pensacola, Florida, began notifying thousands of individuals that personally identifiable information about them had been lost when a laptop disappeared. In August 2009, the National Guard announced that a laptop containing personal information on 131,000 members had been stolen... rarely does a month go by without an organization revealing the loss or theft of a laptop brimming with sensitive data. Full disk encryption, or FDE, is the preferred mechanism to address this threat because, as the name implies, the technology lets IT encrypt the entire hard drive so that sensitive data is protected, no matter where it resides...

In January 2009, the Trusted Computing Group released the final specification of the Opal Security Subsystem Class, a standard for applying hardware-based encryption. Moving hard-drive encryption into hardware has a number of advantages. For starters, it works with any OS... On the manufacturing side, vendor support for hardware-based FDEs is good. In the last six months, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Samsung have debuted Opal-compliant drives, and system vendors Dell and Lenovo are shipping laptops with Opal-based drives..."

IRTF Charters New Public Key Next-Generation Research Group (PKNG)
Aaron Falk, Internet Research Task Force Announcement

Formation of a new Internet Research Task Force (PKNG) has been announced by Aaron Falk, Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) Chair. The new group, chaired by Paul Hoffman, will "investigate certificate formats, semantics, and public-key services that could eventually replace Public-Key Infrastructure (X.509), if deployed. The PKNG design work will be from the perspective of maximizing utility for the relying party and the identified party; issues of what would be best for a certificate authorities will be given much less priority, and the features list will be developed before format and protocol specifics are discussed.

Current best practice for most Internet protocols is to base their use of public key cryptography on PKIX. This RG is not questioning that position, but rather is looking ahead to a next generation of support for the use of public key cryptography in Internet protocols... PKIX was designed and initially deployed before there were many users on the Internet. Some of the underlying concepts from which PKIX was developed assume a single universal database (a global X.500 directory that never came to pass) as well as a strong role for public certificate-issuing authorities. While those concepts, and the PKIX certificate semantics, have translated into current deployment, they have often limited applications that rely on the PKIX standards in what kinds of certificates and infrastructure those applications can use..."

The mission of the Internet Research Task Force is "to promote research of importance to the evolution of the future Internet by creating focused, long-term and small Research Groups working on topics related to Internet protocols, applications, architecture and technology. Research Groups are expected to have the stable long term (with respect to the lifetime of the Research Group) membership needed to promote the development of research collaboration and teamwork in exploring research issues. Participation is by individual contributors, rather than by representatives of organizations."

See also: the IETF Journal summary

Hierarchical Approach for Key Management in Mobile Ad hoc Networks
Renuka A. and K.C.Shet, IJCSIS

This article appears in the International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS) 5/1, 2009. "Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes or terminals which communicate with each other by forming a multi-hop radio network and maintaining connectivity in a decentralized manner. The conventional security solutions to provide key management through accessing trusted authorities or centralized servers are infeasible for this new environment since mobile ad hoc networks are characterized by the absence of any infrastructure, frequent mobility, and wireless links.

We proposed a hierarchical scheme scheme for group key management that does not rely on a centralized authority for regenerating a new group key. Any node can initiate the process of rekeying and so the energy depletion of any one particular node is eliminated unlike the centralized schemes. Our approach satisfies most of the security attributes of a key management system. The communication and computational overhead is small in our scheme compared with other distributed schemes. The energy saving is approximately 41% for 8 nodes and 15% for 200 nodes when the message size is reduced from 1024 to 16 bits. This indicates that small message size and small cluster size is most suitable for energy limited mobile ad hoc networks... As a future work, instead of unicasting the rekeying messages, broadcasting may be done that will reduce the number of messages sent through the network..."

IJCSIS is a peer reviewed international journal with a key objective to provide the academic and industrial community a medium for presenting original research and applications related to Computer Science and Information Security... The core vision of IJCSIS is to disseminate new knowledge and technology for the benefit of everyone ranging from the academic and professional research communities to industry practitioners in a range of topics in computer science & engineering in general and information & communication security, mobile & wireless networking, and wireless communication systems...

See also: the IJCSIS web site

SAP, Salesforce.com catch the Google Wave
Chris Kanaracus, InfoWorld

"Google's Wave communication and collaboration platform is getting early interest from enterprise application vendors like Salesforce.com and SAP. Both companies have built prototype applications using Wave, which has been released in preview mode for about 100,000 users after being available only to developers. Wave combines a range of technologies, such as document sharing and instant messaging, into a system for real-time collaboration...

SAP Research and the vendor's NetWeaver development team created an application called Gravity using Wave. In a demonstration video, Gravity is used to develop process models for a hypothetical merger between an insurance company and a bank... Meanwhile, Salesforce.com created an extension that employs Wave for customer service. A demonstration video shows how a customer in need of support can use Wave to start a dialogue with an automated support robot. The system also creates a case record in Salesforce.com. If the robot can't answer the user's questions, the user can request a live representative, who joins the conversation... Google is mulling the prospect of a 'monetizable Wave extension store'..."

See also: the Google article


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