Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Friday, 05 March 2010

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

New Working Draft for Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0
ISIS Papyrus Becomes OASIS Foundational Sponsor and Supports CMIS
Versioning Strategies for RESTful Services
W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) Status Report
Implementation Spotlight: cara3 from Generis
Interior Location in the Presence Information Data Format Location Object
Microsoft HealthVault Extends Access to Hospital Data

New Working Draft for Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0
Scott McGlashan, Daniel Burnett, Rahul Akolkar (et al, eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group have published a Working Draft of the Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0 specification. The thirteen main differences since the last Working Draft are described in Appendix F, and are presented in the color diff-marked version. This document is very much a work in progress: to complete the specification, the group expects to introduce additional functionality (for example speaker identification and verification, external eventing) and describe the existing functionality at the level of detail given for the Prompt and Field modules. Feedback on the framework, particularly any concerns about its implementability or suitability for expected applications is requested. By late 2010 the group expects all key capabilities to be present in the specification, with details worked out by early 2011.

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. Its major goal is to bring the advantages of Web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response applications.

This Working Draft document explains the core of VoiceXML 3.0, an extensible framework that describes how semantics are defined, how syntax is defined and how the two are connected together. In this document, 'semantics' means both SCXML and/or textis means behavior represented as English text, SCXML syntax and/or state charts diagram. definitions of core functionality, such as might be used by an implementer of VoiceXML 3.0. The term 'syntax' refers to XML elements and attributes that are an application author's programming interface to the functionality defined by the 'semantics'.

Within this document, all the functionality of VoiceXML 3.0 is grouped into modules of related capabilities. Modules can be combined together to create complete profiles (languages). The document describes how to define both modules and profiles. Modules can be combined together to create complete profiles (languages). This document describes how to define both modules and profiles. In addition to describing the general framework, this document explicitly defines a broad range of functionality, several modules and two profiles..."

ISIS Papyrus Becomes OASIS Foundational Sponsor and Supports CMIS
Max J. Pucher, Blog

"We are proud to announce that ISIS Papyrus has become a Foundational Sponsor of OASIS... With this move ISIS Papyrus joins only a few but some of the most notable organizations in the global IT world. As a worldwide leader in its own right when it comes to consolidating inbound and outbound business communications and related processes in a single platform, ISIS Papyrus is certainly poised to contribute substantially to the efforts of the non-profit body.

The technological edge developed by ISIS over the years and its ongoing commitment to promote benefits for business users match perfectly with the user-oriented approach and transparent governance advocated by OASIS. It will be of great interest how this cooperation brings about synergies for the broader IT community and for users and businesses around the world. Another focus will be on how open standards can provide for more flexibility in application development as the latter has been the major concern behind the unique Papyrus technology...

I have been fairly outspoken when discussing the benefits of standards and made it clear that only those standards are relevant to us when they produce a substantial benefit to the business user. Otherwise they just cost money and hold back innovation. One of the reason to join was the creation of the OASIS CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) to standardize a Web services interface specification that will enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems.

CMIS uses Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable rich information to be shared across Internet protocols in vendor-neutral formats, among document systems, publishers and archives, within one enterprise and between companies. We have announced the participation in the CMIS standards already over a year ago and have well advanced its implementation and testing. In this process we found that we should take a stronger shaping role in the [standard's] creation..."

Versioning Strategies for RESTful Services
Dilip Krishnan, InfoQueue

In the article 'Versioning RESTful Web Resources: A Survey', Stu Charlton summarizes the various options available for versioning RESTful services which he prefaces by saying 'These can be tricky concepts to describe, and I don't really want to write a small book on this topic'. He categorizes the versioning problem into two types; Data Versioning, which aims to version the resource itself so tracking changes to state of any given resource becomes possible; and Language Versioning which refers to the protocol itself; in other words the representation.

[...] A resource is: a time varying membership function, where the members are instances of a representation at various points in time. The resource can return different values at different times. BUT resources can be narrowed down into very specific semantics, if resource owner wishes. A resource might be 'the most recent version' of a record, whose state might change often, or it might be a 'specific version' of a record, and thus unchanging in state. These are two different resources, even though they may have the same representation for a period of time. A resource may even contain format metadata and constrain the language emitted, though content negotiation may be preferred. Regardless of how often the values change, the semantics of the resource should not change. 'Revision 3 of purchase order 123' should retain that meaning. If they do change the meaning, it hurts consumers that relied on the old meaning...

Stu recommends reading Chapter 13 of the book 'RESTful Web Services Cookbook' (Subbu Allamaraju) to learn more on the subject and concludes his article with the following summary: (1) Prefer extensible, forwards and backwards compatible languages and the replacement approach to compatibility, and note the W3C TAG's position on version identifiers; (2) Be judicious when you use version identifiers in URIs, as cool URIs don't change; (3) For side-by-side deployments, always include a section in your media, or link relation(s), to point to new/old versions, and update references lazily as the consumer refreshes its cached value; use permanent redirects to retire URIs bound to old language versions; (4) Version URIs if the semantics of the resource changed, but be courteous to consumers by ensuring links are available to denote the old vs. new..."

W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) Status Report
Noah Mendelsohn (ed), W3C TAG Report

A report is now available from the W3C TAG (Technical Architecture Group) covering TAG activities from August, 2009 through February, 2010. The W3C TAG currently has nine members. TAG was created to "document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary, to resolve issues involving general Web architecture brought to the TAG, and to help coordinate cross-technology architecture developments inside and outside W3C...

Excerpts from the latest report: "In our previous status report we announced that the TAG had decided to focus primarily on three major areas of current interest: HTML, Web Application Architecture, and Metadata Access and Formats. We have continued to use them as the organizing framework for the majority of our work: sections below discuss each of these, as well as TAG work in some other areas. We continue to put particular emphasis on working with the HTML WG to resolve issues relating to HTML5; we consider HTML5 to be a top priority for the success of the W3C and for the Web community in general, and we wish to support the HTML WG in their efforts to resolve issues promptly.

Publications: As the TAG has shifted its focus toward working closely with groups like the HTML WG, we have somewhat de-emphasized work on Recommendation-track documents and findings. In part for that reason, the TAG did not produce any formal working drafts or findings during the period covered by this report. We did, during the previous period, produce First Public Working Draft "Usage Patterns For Client-Side URI Parameters." The TAG may or may not decide to take this forward on the Recommendation track.

During the period covered by this report, several less formal drafts and planning documents were prepared and discussed, and these include: (1) "From Web Content to Applications", by Ashok Malhotra, Larry Masinter, T.V. Raman; (2) "Draft Table of Contents for TAG work on Web Architecture for Web Applications" (3) "Default Prefix Declaration", by Henry Thompson; (4) "Best Practice for Referring to Specifications Which May Update", by Henry Thompson; (5) "Resource Protection", by Jonathan Rees; (6) "Guidelines for Web-based Naming", by Henry S. Thompson and Jonathan Rees. In general, these have no official status except as part of the record of the TAG's discussions, but it is possible that we will in the future decide to evolve some of these into TAG Findings or Recommendations..."

See also: the TAG Findings

Implementation Spotlight: cara3 from Generis
Darrell Meyer, Ext Blog

"cara3 is Generis's brand new and unique concept building on the CARA tradition — an ergonomically designed, fast, single web application to connect individually or simultaneously to any CMIS system. Currently released for Documentum, SharePoint and Alfresco, other CMIS repositories will follow during Spring 2010. It is designed to facilitate the creation, review, approval and management of documents. It leverages core repository functionality (using the new CMIS functions where available) while also providing performance enhancements and ergonomic improvements.

In addition, cara3 provides new functionality to better manage controlled documents such as SOPs or complex documents such as reports or submissions through cara3 Structures and through reporting tools like the Task Manager and Status Manager. cara3 is underpinned by the Generis DocConfigurator product which allows rapid setup and configuration of the docbase to requirements...

Consider the users who must access documents in several different repositories. That might mean being familiar with different user interfaces, different commands, different procedures for document workflow, etc. a potential nightmare for users whose only aim is to work on their documents. And what to do if you need to work on several documents simultaneously and your desktop cannot open the different repositories because of system demands? cara3 provides the solution to all these problems in one interface. Additionally, the interface is easily customized by the user via view management, widgets and dimensions built into the interface which are intuitive, easy to manipulate and stored as part of the users preferences to reappear at any computer they log in on. Reducing the end user's experience to a familiar interface based on personal preferences as to what is important for a particular user's experience focuses the user on the job at hand not the mechanics of the document management system.

Ext also uniquely allowed us to build cara3 using the new CMIS functionality, which has only just been released by the major content management vendors. To build a complete application on a new framework in just a few weeks was something that would have been impossible without Ext. While cara3 meets the needs of end users, systems administrators also benefit from its functionalities. Created by thoughtful and knowledgeable architects cara3 meets all requirements of the most stringent validated systems. Leveraging areas where CMIS exists and providing functional placeholders for areas of future CMIS functionality administrators can tailor systems via configurable properties screens, automatic folders, languages, data dictionaries, dynamic no-maintenance security, audit and eSignature, Trash Can, search..."

See also: the Cara description

Interior Location in the Presence Information Data Format Location Object
Brian Rosen (ed), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Geographic Location/Privacy (GEOPRIV) Working Group have published an Internet Draft for Interior Location in the Presence Information Data Format - Location Object. This memo provides a mechanism (alternative to RFC 5139) that provides an extensible and flexible way to name spaces in any kind of addressable location.

RFC 5139 (Revised Civic Location Format for Presence Information Data Format Location Object — PIDF-LO) defines an XML format for the representation of civic location. This format is designed for use with Presence Information Data Format Location Object (PIDF-LO) documents and replaces the civic location format in RFC 4119. The format is based on the civic address definition in PIDF-LO, but adds several new elements based on the civic types defined for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and adds a hierarchy to address complex road identity schemes. RFC 5139 defines explicit tags for interior building location such as 'BLD' (building), 'UNIT', 'ROOM'. There is wide variation in how interior spaces are named, and the rigid element names provided do not allow accurate representation of interior spaces that don't use the element tags defined...

An example of where the BLD/FLR/UNIT/ROOM doesn't work is an airport. Interior location may be given as Terminal 2, Concourse A, Gate 27. Additionally, since interior location may vary within a structure (Terminal 2, Food Court, Store 13), and every building could have different conventions, it is essential that a way to parse a sign, drawing, or other representation of interior space to the elements needed to specify that space in a PIDF, or the reverse: creating a human readable string from a PIDF matching signage or drawings, it must be possible to specify how the conversion from human readable to PIDF and vice versa can be accomplished...

This memo introduces a new CAtype for PIDF-LO called 'INT' (for interior) which has two new attributes: (1) 'N' - The locally significant name of a 'level' of interior space. Examples include 'Floor', 'Concourse' and 'Suite'. (2) 'R' - An enumeration of how the name and value are represented in a human readable form. A PIDF-LO may have multiple INT elements. If there are more than one, the order in which they appear in the PIDF can be significant... The XML for this schema can be found as the entirety of document Section 5..."

Microsoft HealthVault Extends Access to Hospital Data
Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek

Microsoft has unveiled HealthVault Community Connect, software aimed at helping the coordination of care between hospitals and referring-doctors while engaging patients. HealthVault Community Connect gives patients and their doctors Web access to patients' hospitalization data upon discharge.

HealthVault Community Connect allows hospitals of any size to to give post-discharge access to patient data to patients and their referring doctors. The application, unveiled at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Atlanta, is the latest in Microsoft's line of HealthVault products. Because the data is formatted in XML, it can be integrated into the physician's electronic medical records, according to David Cerino, general manager of Microsoft health solutions group...

According to the announcement: "Using HealthVault Community Connect, a hospital can give patients the option to access electronic medical information generated during hospital visits through the hospital's Web site. In addition, patients can store this information in Microsoft HealthVault, a security-enhanced online service that is designed to put consumers in control of their health by providing a central place for them to gather, store and manage their health records, as well as share that information with family and a trusted network of caregivers.

For example, patients can log on to the hospital's patient Web site from any computer with Internet access to view their hospital visit records — including discharge instructions, clinician notes, medications, and laboratory and radiology results. In addition, HealthVault Community Connect allows the patient to send a copy of the hospital visit records to the patient's personal HealthVault account to store the data and share it with family, caregivers or health applications as desired..."

See also: the Microsoft announcement


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