Cover Pages: XML Daily Newslink: Monday, 25 October 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

W3C Working Draft: XML Processor Profiles
ITU-R IMT-Advanced 4G Standards for Mobile Broadband Communications
SCA Revisited: Helios and Eclipse SCA Tools: Red Wine in Tuscany 2.0
Last Call Review: Atom Activity Extensions 1.0
Energy Department Report: Make Smart Grid Data Sharing Opt-In
Open Source Cloud Collaboration: Microsoft, Cloud.com, and OpenStack

W3C Working Draft: XML Processor Profiles
Henry S. Thompson and Norman Walsh (eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C XML Processing Model Working Group have published a Working Draft specification for XML Processor Profiles. This revision "adds two further profiles, and sets out invariants in terms of document properties which will or will not be guaranteed to be the same for the same document when processed by processors conform to the same or different profiles. Comments on the utility of these additions are particularly welcome.

The "XML Processor Profiles" document defines several XML processor profiles, each of which fully determines a data model for any given XML document. It is intended as a resource for other specifications, which can by a single normative reference establish precisely what input processing they require.

Background: "The XML specification (Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 Fifth Edition) defines an XML processor as 'a software module ...used to read XML documents and provide access to their content and structure ...on behalf of another module, called the application'. XML applications are often defined by building on top of the XML Information Set or other similar XML data models such as XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0 XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model (XDM), understood as the output of an XML processor.

Such definitions have suffered to some extent from an uncertainty inherent in using that kind of foundation, in that the mapping XML processors perform from XML documents to data model is not rigid. Some of this stems from the XML specification itself, which leaves open the possiblity of reading and interpreting external entities, or not. Some stems from the growth of the XML family of specifications: if the input document includes uses of XInclude, for instance..."

See also: the W3C Working Group

ITU-R IMT-Advanced 4G Standards for Mobile Broadband Communications
Staff, ITU-R Announcement

"ITU's Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) has completed the assessment of six candidate submissions for the global 4G mobile wireless broadband technology, otherwise known as IMT-Advanced. Harmonization among these proposals has resulted in two technologies, 'LTE-Advanced' and 'WirelessMAN-Advanced' being accorded the official designation of IMT-Advanced, qualifying them as true 4G technologies.

In its recent meeting in Chongqing, China, ITU-R Working Party 5D, which is charged with defining the IMT-Advanced global 4G technologies, reached a milestone in its work by deciding on these technologies for the first release of IMT-Advanced. In the ITU-R Report, which will be published shortly, the LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced technologies were each determined to have successfully met all of the criteria established by ITU-R for the first release of IMT-Advanced. The Report is expected to be approved by ITU Member States at the ITU-R Study Group 5 meeting in Geneva in late November 2010...

In an on-going partnership with the industry, the six proposals received by ITU in October 2009 were individually subjected to a rigorous assessment, supported by the work of independent external evaluation groups that had been established around the world. Industry consensus and harmonization fostered by ITU-R among these six proposals have resulted in the consolidation of the proposals into the two agreed IMT-Advanced technologies. These technologies will now move into the final stage of the IMT-Advanced process, which provides for the development in early 2012 of an ITU-R Recommendation specifying the in-depth technical standards for these radio technologies...

MT-Advanced (4G) provides a global platform on which to build the next-generations of interactive mobile services that will provide faster data access, enhanced roaming capabilities, unified messaging and broadband multimedia. The close partnership between ITU-R members and the global wireless industry in the work on IMT-Advanced clearly establishes these technologies as the pre-eminent ITU-sanctioned 4G mobile wireless broadband solution for information, communications and entertainment..."

SCA Revisited: Helios and Eclipse SCA Tools: Red Wine in Tuscany 2.0
Ken McNeill, IBM developerWorks

"The Eclipse Service Component Architecture (SCA) is one of the pillars supporting the SOA strategies of companies like IBM and Oracle. In its simplest form, SCA is all about modeling distributed composite applications using components and wires. SCA has been called 'a good way to do SOA' for several reasons, many of them related to the aspect-oriented programming notion of separation of concerns.

For example, SCA decouples individual service components from the overall application orchestration (called an assembly in SCA). This means that you can model an application as a collection of components and assemble it later at deployment time (and subsequently reassemble it as needed). In addition, SCA explicitly decouples network protocols such as HTTP and IIOP from component implementations, leaving you free to focus on the business of code. Moreover, SCA has facilities for working with such things as dependency injection, policies, and run time configuration properties...

Apache Tuscany implements the SCA run time specifications (versions 1.0 and 1.1) in the project's two release branches, 1.x, and 2.x, respectively. Historically, Tuscany has been the reference SCA implementation, although other run times exist, such as Fabric3 and FraSCati. Each Tuscany release is available for download in an archive containing around 160 JARs. However, most of the core SCA functionality is contained in just six JARs; the other 154 are for specific protocols, bindings, and extensions.

This article reviews SCA concepts and constructs. We import and dissect a simplified composite application and test code and then configure a minimal Tuscany 1.0 environment in which to test the composite. Finally, we adapt the environment to Tuscany 2.0 (SCA 1.1), separating the run time CLASSPATHs and creating a separate test class with different constructs..."

Last Call Review: Atom Activity Extensions 1.0
Will Norris, Martin Atkins (et al. eds), Activity Streams WG Document

Members of the Activity Streams Working Group announced a Last Call review for the specification Atom Activity Extensions 1.0. Please submit any final comments to the mailing list before October 31, 2010. This document presents an XML format that allows activities on social objects to be expressed within the Atom Syndication Format. In its simplest form, an 'activity' consists of an actor, a verb, and an object. It tells the story of a person performing an action on or with an object...

"The Atom Syndication Format, as defined in RFC 4287, is widely used to transmit various types of web content such as weblog posts, news headlines, as well as user activities within social sites. In the case of user activities, Atom lacks the ability to express much of the activity-specific metadata in a machine-parseable format. Activity Streams is an XML format designed to allow this additional activity metadata to be expressed within existing Atom entries and feeds.

It is a goal of this specification to provide sufficient metadata about an activity such that a consumer of the data can present it to a user in a rich human-friendly format. This may include constructing readable sentences about the activity that occurred, visual representations of the activity, or combining similar activities for display...

In this specification, the Activity Construct has attributes: Time, Actor, Verb, Object, Target, Title, and Summary The Object Construct has: ID, Name, Summary, Representative Image, Permalink URL, and Object Type... Activities can be represented in an Atom document using a combination of conventions and custom extension elements..."

See also: Atom references

Energy Department Report: Make Smart Grid Data Sharing Opt-In
Elinor Mills, CNET News.com

"Consumers should have the right to control access to the data on their energy usage collected by smart meters and be able to decide whether to share it with third parties, a U.S. Department of Energy report is recommending. Smart meters being deployed today use digital technology and two-way communications to control appliances in homes and keep track of energy usage. The usage data, tied to specific homes, has enormous potential to enable utilities or other third-party service providers to help consumers significantly reduce energy consumption, avoid costly breakdowns and repairs, and reduce the overall complexity of running a modern household full of increasingly complex and interactive devices and appliances, but the ability to link the data to individuals or households makes it particularly sensitive..."

From the text of the report 'Data Access and Privacy Issues Related to Smart Grid Technologies': "It should be noted that among the many Smart Grid technologies, advanced meters or 'smart meters' figure heavily in discussions about consumer data and privacy. Many other components of a Smart Grid are potentially relevant to consumer privacy, but the advanced meter's ability to measure, record and transmit granular individual consumption, and its presence at the traditional boundary between the utility and the consumer, make it a focal point of this report. A Smart Grid, of course consists of hundreds of technologies and thousands of components, most of which do not generate data relevant to consumer privacy...

'Customer-specific usage data (CEUD)' includes all data specific to an individual customer's energy use, including at a minimum individual energy use by time interval. A number of commenters indicated that the central issue, rather than data ownership, was the right to control data access. Other commenters offered three distinct viewpoints on the issue of data ownership. Some argue that the consumer owns the data. Others argue that the utility owns the data. Still others argue that the consumer and the utility co-own the data. Nevertheless, all of the commenters noted the importance of access to energy consumption data, and these differing perspectives seemed to reflect the application of a single underlying principle: the rights of access flow from ownership.

Because [smart meter] data can disclose fairly detailed information about the behavior and activities of a particular household, however, there was also broad consensus that the collection of CEUD raises privacy implications that should be acknowledged and respected during the development of intelligent electrical-metering-and-usage-monitoring technologies. It is the energy usage data itself and the ability to tie that data to an individual or household that makes the data particularly sensitive..."

See also: the Report online

Open Source Cloud Collaboration: Microsoft, Cloud.com, and OpenStack
Peter Galli and Ted MacLean, Blog

"Microsoft has announced a partnership with Cloud.com to provide support for our Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization stack to the OpenStack project, an open source cloud computing platform.

Ted MacLean, the general manager for Microsoft's Open Solutions Group reports: 'We understand how customers today are multi-sourcing solutions within their IT infrastructure. Support for Windows Server Hyper-V on OpenStack reinforces Microsoft's commitment to delivering choice and flexibility to customers in the cloud. Giving customers the option to use Microsoft's enterprise-ready virtualization platform, Windows Server R2 Hyper-V, when they deploy OpenStack as their cloud solution is win for all. Microsoft is committed to meet the interoperability needs for our customers running mixed source environments on Windows Azure and on partner clouds... As part of the collaboration, Microsoft will provide architectural and technical guidance to Cloud.com. In turn, Cloud.com will develop the code to support OpenStack on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V; once completed, the project code will be checked into the public code repository...'

From the announcement: 'Microsoft Corp. announced that it has partnered with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to the OpenStack project, an open source cloud computing platform. The addition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V provides organizations and service providers running a mix of Microsoft and non-Microsoft infrastructure with greater flexibility when using OpenStack... OpenStack uses open source software on standard hardware. Simply put, the software can run on an individual server in an existing datacenter or run on hardware configured as a modular datacenter. It uses virtualization technology to create and manage large groups of virtual machines...

The addition of Microsoft's virtualization product puts customers in an excellent position to reach economies of scale to run Windows- and Linux-based infrastructure. Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V can efficiently run multiple different operating systems in parallel... OpenStack was launched with code contributions from Rackspace US Inc. and the NASA Nebula cloud platform. Today, OpenStack is supported by 35 software and hardware providers from across the IT industry..."


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