Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Tuesday, 15 December 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

W3C Publishes Use Cases for Possible Future EMMA Features
WSO2 Offers Business Activity Monitoring and Gadget Server Portal
Final Call for Participation: XML Prague 2010 Conference
Updated IETF Draft: The QName URN Namespace
Sun Identity Management Portfolio: OpenSSO Express 9 and OpenDS 2.2
First Public Working Drafts from W3C XQuery and XSL Working Groups
Atlassian Updates JIRA Studio and Provides Cloud-Based Tools

W3C Publishes Use Cases for Possible Future EMMA Features
Deborah Dahl, Ingmar Kliche, Paolo Baggia (et al, eds.), W3C Note

Members of the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group have published a Group Note for Use Cases for Possible Future EMMA Features"

"The EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation specification defines an XML markup language for capturing and providing metadata on the interpretation of inputs to multimodal systems. Throughout the implementation report process and discussion since EMMA 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation, a number of new possible use cases for the EMMA language have emerged. These include the use of EMMA to represent multimodal output, biometrics, emotion, sensor data, multi-stage dialogs, and interactions with multiple users. In this document, we describe these use cases and illustrate how the EMMA language could be extended to support them... This document is one of a series produced by the Multimodal Interaction WorkingGroup, part of the W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity... These possible extensions to EMMA 1.0 have been identified through discussions with other standards organizations, implementers of EMMA, and internal discussions within the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group.

This 'Use Cases' document addresses the following: (1) Representing incremental results for streaming modalities such as haptics, ink, monologues, dictation, where it is desirable to have partial results available before the full input finishes; (2) Representing biometric results such as the results of speaker verification or speaker identification — briefly covered in EMMA 1.0; (3) Representing emotion, for example, as conveyed by intonation patterns, facial expression, or lexical choice; (4) Richer semantic representations, for example, integrating EMMA application semantics with ontologies; (5) Representing system output in addition to user input, including topics such as solating presentation logic from dialog/interaction management and coordination of outputs distributed over multiple different modalities; (6) Support for archival functions such as logging, human annotation of inputs, and data analysis; (7) Representing full dialogs and multi-sentence inputs in addition to single inputs; (8) Representing multi-participant interactions; (9) Representing sensor data such as GPS input; (10) Representing the results of database queries or search; (11) Support for forms of representation of application semantics other than XML, such as JSON..."

WSO2 Offers Business Activity Monitoring and Gadget Server Portal
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

"WSO2 has announced BAM (Business Activity Monitor) support, offering real-time visibility into SOA processes, transactions, and workflows. WSO2 BAM is designed to support heterogeneous SOA and provides a lightweight alternative to large, complex BAM solutions. The product offers near-real time access to performance metrics to manage and operate a SOA using polling and event based models to gather and collate information about enterprise service buses, services and systems. A business dashboard is featured, offering insight into business metrics.."

From the announcement: "WSO2 BAM is designed to enable informed decisions based on real-time and historical service-interaction and mediation data. The fully open source WSO2 Business Activity Monitor is based on the proven, enterprise-class SOA functionality of WSO2 Carbon. WSO2 BAM has built-in support for monitoring the WSO2 Web Services Application Server and WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB). Key features of WSO2 BAM are: (1) Data visualization through customizable dashboards enabled by gadgets, as well as reports, provide users with a complete picture of the situations they monitor. (2) Analytics help users identify patterns and trends with ease. (3) Extensibility goes beyond support for third-party products to also include user-defined data collected through custom data formats. (4) Key performance indicator (KPI) monitoring includes alerts whenever a deviation from a KPI occurs. (5) Support for relational databases in the initial release include Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and H2...

WSO2's ground-breaking Gadget Server portal platform brings an easy, intuitive experience to creating portals and personalized dashboards -- heralding a new way of building portals in record time. Using the same technologies employed by the highly popular iGoogle personalized homepage, WSO2 Gadget Server allows users to combine gadgets from their enterprise gadget repository, iGoogle and the Web, and even to write new gadgets using common Web standards. As a result, users can quickly customize their own dashboards to give them the information they need in real time. WSO2 Gadget Server represents a radical departure from traditional portals based on the JSR 168 Java portlet specification. Unlike the large, rigid and complex server-side portals typically used in enterprises, the lightweight, platform-independent WSO2 Gadget Server lets users quickly implement and modify a true Web-based portal that can be accessed anywhere via a browser. While IT professionals create and manage the enterprise gadget repository, authorized business users can mix and match the gadgets they want to get the updates they need. Additionally, these users can rate and comment on gadgets, sharing valuable knowledge about which gadgets best serve different requirements... It also is an excellent tool for building user interfaces on an existing or new service-oriented architecture (SOA), and it interoperates with both SOAP and REST services..."

See also: the WSO2 announcement

Final Call for Participation: XML Prague 2010 Conference
Jim Fuller, Conference Announcement

An updated announcement identifies December 21, 2009 as the deadline for extended paper abstracts in connection with the XML Prague 2010 Conference. XML Prague 2010 will be March 13-14, 2010 in the Lesser Town Campus of Charles University, Malostranske namesti 25, Prague, Czech Republic. XML Prague is a conference on XML for developers, markup geeks, information managers, and students. It is produced by XMLPrague.cz and the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science.

XML Prague 2010 will focus on core and emerging XML technologies. This year, special focus will be given to temporal aspects of XML, including: (1) XML Lifecycle — diffing, merging, change tracking, etc; (2) Efficiency and performance in XML — verbosity, processing, overuse; (3) Hypermedia in XML — SMIL, SVG animations; (4) Spatial data and XML — WGS84, microformats; (5) XML all the time — XRX, XQuery web applications...

All proposals will be submitted for review by a peer review panel made up of the XML Prague Organizing Committee. Submissions will be chosen based on interest, applicability, technical merit, and technical correctness. Accepted Papers will be included inside the published conference proceedings.

Updated IETF Draft: The QName URN Namespace
David Orchard, Rich Salz, Julian Reschke; IETF Internet Draft

IETF has published an updated -01 revision for The QName URN Namespace specification. This specification "defines a Uniform Resource Name namespace for XML namespace-qualified names, QNames. As long as the URN is encoded in the same character set as the document containing the original QName, the Qname URN provides enough information to maintain the semantics, and optionally the exact syntax, of the original name..."

Background: "There are a variety of situations when a QName may need to be mapped to a URI. For example, when exchanging (or referencing) an identifier for an XML element contained within a document, and the medium of exchange prefers URIs to QNames, such as an XML Schema anyURI data type. Another scenario is for comparing the identifiers, which can be simpler by comparing just a string without having to also compare the context setting XML namespace attribute that may be declared arbitrarily earlier in the document.

The XML Namespaces specification (W3C Recommendation 8-December-2009) does not provide a canonical mapping between QNames and URIs. Any XML specification that wants to enable identifier exchanges must define a language specific QName to URI mapping. There have emerged a variety of different algorithms and solutions for the mapping. To date, there have been no standardized algorithms available that they can re-use, which has increased their efforts. A standardized mapping, such as this, should provide increased productivity.

Almost all of the algorithms for Qname to URI mappings are based upon concatenation of the URI and the name with variations based upon prefix inclusion, namespace name and name separator, etc. These are typically problematic because it is difficult to recover the QName from the URI as the namespace name and name separator may have already been used in the namespace name. Having the namespace name at the end of the identifier string avoids these and other problems...

The QName URN is structured as four colon-separated fields. Note that colons within the fourth field, the URI part, are not significant; the entire fourth field is treated as a single opaque entity by this URN scheme. The first field identifies the naming scheme. The second contains the QName prefix, or an empty string if the QName comes from the default namespace, or an asterisk if the prefix is not significant..."

Sun Identity Management Portfolio: OpenSSO Express 9 and OpenDS 2.2
Staff, Sun Microsystems Announcement

"Sun Microsystems has announced the completion of its identity management portfolio update with the availability of a new, fine-grained entitlement enforcement engine, as part of OpenSSO Express 9, for both enterprise and extranet deployments and a next-generation directory proxy server, as part of Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 2.2, for rapid, horizontal and on-demand scaling...

The new fine-grained entitlement enforcement engine is a key component of OpenSSO Express 9, which allows customers to externalize authorization for any resource - web application, custom application, web service or client application. The entitlement enforcement engine was designed to not only support enterprise deployments, but also provide mass-scale extranet deployments with a complete off the shelf, standards-based solution that can externalize authorization for more than 100 million users.

With this new feature, OpenSSO Express 9 becomes the only access management solution to provide access management, federation, secure web services, multi-factor authentication and fine-grained entitlement enforcement in a single product. This enables administrators and developers to deploy, maintain and use a single application for authentication and authorization. In addition, OpenSSO Express 9 provides customers with a single end-point to handle policy for all resources, which helps to simplify the audit and certification of business applications via a central audit log for all access activity — internal applications, partner applications, cloud applications and web services...

The new directory proxy server is a key component of OpenDS Standard Edition 2.2, which can be used to extend Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition to rapidly and cost-effectively scale a customer's infrastructure horizontally, based on demand. It makes it even easier for customers to proactively maintain up-time as activity increases with a 'global index' to help easily distribute and balance loads — based on factors such as any identity attribute or based on a traffic distribution algorithms..."

See also: Sun Identity Management

First Public Working Drafts from W3C XQuery and XSL Working Groups
Normal Walsh, Anders Berglund, John Snelson (et al), W3C Technical Reports

W3C announced that as part of its work on XSLT 2.1 and XQuery 1.1, the XQuery and XSL Working Groups have published First Public Working Drafts for XQuery and XPath Data Model 1.1, XPath and XQuery Functions and Operators 1.1, XSLT and XQuery Serialization 1.1, and XPath 2.1. In addition, The XQuery Working Group has updated drafts for XQuery 1.1: An XML Query Language, XQueryX 1.1, and XQuery 1.1 Requirements.

The first public Working Draft of XQuery and XPath Data Model 1.1 (XDM) is intended to be fully 'upwards compatible' with XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model (XDM). The XQuery and XPath Data Model 1.1 serves two purposes. First, it defines the information contained in the input to an XSLT or XQuery processor. Second, it defines all permissible values of expressions in the XSLT, XQuery, and XPath languages. A language is closed with respect to a data model if the value of every expression in the language is guaranteed to be in the data model. XSLT 2.1, XQuery 1.1, and XPath 2.1 are all closed with respect to the data model. As with the Infoset, the XQuery and XPath Data Model 1.1 specifies what information in the documents is accessible, but it does not specify the programming-language interfaces or bindings used to represent or access the data. The data model can represent various values including not only the input and the output of a stylesheet or query, but all values of expressions used during the intermediate calculations. Examples include the input document or document repository (represented as a Document Node or a sequence of Document Nodes), the result of a path expression (represented as a sequence of nodes), the result of an arithmetic or a logical expression (represented as an atomic value), a sequence expression resulting in a sequence of items, etc..."

The specification XPath and XQuery Functions and Operators 1.1 catalogs the functions and operators required for XPath 2.0, XML Query 1.0 and XSLT 2.0. It defines constructor functions and functions that take typed values as arguments. Some of the functions define the semantics of operators discussed in 'XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language'..."

XSLT and XQuery Serialization 1.1, edited by Henry Zongaro, defines serialization of the W3C XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model (XDM), which is the data model of at least 'XML Path Language (XPath) 2.1', 'XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.1', and 'XQuery 1.1: An XML Query Language', and any other specifications that reference it. In this document, examples and material labeled as "Note" are provided for explanatory purposes and are not normative. Serialization is the process of converting an instance of the 'XQuery and XPath Data Model 1.1' into a sequence of octets, where serialization is well-defined for most data model instances...

Atlassian Updates JIRA Studio and Provides Cloud-Based Tools
Staff, DDJ

"Atlassian has released JIRA Studio 2.0, a hosted suite of tools for development teams. Studio 2.0 includes JIRA 4, the latest version of Atlassian's issue tracker, and Bamboo, a continuous integration (CI) server that allows builds to be run in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The introduction of OpenSocial dashboards lets users create customized dashboards containing information from any of the applications included in JIRA Studio, as well as external applications such as Gmail and Google Calendars. The new JIRA Query Language (JQL) enables team members to run complex queries using a simple SQL-like syntax enhanced with auto-completion, and then save and share their reports anywhere...

JIRA Studio includes the latest agile planning and tracking features of Greenhopper, a JIRA plugin. Teams can manage multiple product backlogs and then assign tasks to iterations using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Burndown charts can be displayed in any dashboard, and task-tracking is done by simply dragging tasks between customized states like 'To Do,' 'In Progress' and 'Done.' JIRA Studio supports the most popular agile methods including Scrum, Kanban, Lean and Extreme Programming, without forcing a team into a specific approach..."

According to Atlassian: "JIRA is used for issue tracking and project management by over 11,500 organisations in 107 countries around the globe — across Fortune 1000, public enterprise, science and technology sectors... JIRA Query Language (JQL) is a structured query language which let's you find issues using a simple SQL-like syntax. Using JQL is simple even for those who have no clue what 'DBA' means. Just start typing and the auto-complete feature starts to suggest fields, operators and values for you to build your search. Your query history is always there for you in case you need to jump back. JQL allows you to use standard boolean operators and wild cards to perform complex searches including fuzzy, proximity and empty field searches. It even supports extensible functions allowing you to define custom expressions, like 'CurrentUser' or 'LastSprint' for dynamic searches..."

Jesse Gibbs notes that with the 2.0 release, JIRA Studio now includes fully-integrated: (1) Subversion for source control; (2) JIRA 4 for issue tracking, project management, and dashboards; (3) Greenhopper for agile planning and management; (4) Confluence for intranet, project documentation and knowledge management; (5) Bamboo for continuous integration with elastic agents running in the Amazon EC2 cloud; (6) FishEye for source code search and insights; (7) Crucible for asynchronous, online peer code review performed pre or post-commit..."

See also: Jesse Gibbs' blog


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