Cover Pages Newsletter September 10, 2005


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                     Cover Pages Newsletter
                       September 10, 2005
               Website: http://xml.coverpages.org
                        Hosted by: OASIS
Sponsored by: BEA Systems, Innodata Isogen, SAP, and Sun Microsystems
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CONTENTS
 Featured News Stories
 Selected Articles and Papers
 Events
 Cover Pages Sponsors
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Featured News Stories
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Recently featured news stories from the Cover Pages news at:
http://xml.coverpages.org/news.html  [Full abstract]
http://xml.coverpages.org/covernews.xml [RSS]
OASIS Advances CAP and Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL)
Specifications
The OASIS Emergency Management TC has advanced two specifications
toward standardization, and commences work on a third XML-related
standard for messaging within the Emergency Data Exchange Language
(EDXL) suite. CAP v1.1 defines a simple/general format for exchanging
all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings over any network. EDXL
Distribution Element standardizes a message distribution framework for
data sharing across emergency information systems.
http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-09-08-a.html
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Selected Articles and Papers
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NLETS: Standards-Based Web Services
Martin Gillespie, RedNova
National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System (NLETS) is taking on
a leading role in the nation's chief public safety challenge:
delivering secure, reliable, standards-based information-sharing
services for the justice and public safety community. The array of
information conveyed over NLETS now extends from driver license and
vehicle information to criminal histories, "hit" confirmations and
immigration records, from AMBER alerts to locate and protect
endangered children, to drug investigations, aircraft registrations,
hazardous material warnings, weather bulletins and terrorism alerts.
ATS installed its Pyramid XML Message Router (XMR) at NLETS to achieve
the full value of XML and Web Services. The ATS product uses Microsoft
Windows Server 2003 along with Microsoft's.NET framework,, helping
NLETS lead the first-responder community in the use of Internet
technologies for mission-critical information exchange compliant with
the Department of Justice's Global XML Data Model.
http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=236778
http://www.nlets.org/

Grid in Action: Monitor and Discover Grid Services in an SOA/Web
Services Environment
Jeff Mausolf, IBM developerWorks
This article talks about using the open source information service in
Globus Toolkit 4. It introduces the Globus Monitoring and Discovery
Service (MDS), discusses the components that make up MDS, and
describes how other services typically interact with MDS in a grid
environment. The Globus Monitoring and Discovery System (MDS) is a
collection of Web services to monitor and discover the resources and
services available in a grid. People typically think that the resource
discovery process is related to discovering new resources as the name
may imply. However, in grid context, resource discovery is the
systematic process of determining which grid resource is the best
candidate to complete a job in the shortest amount of time with the
most efficient use of resources.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/grid/library/gr-gt4mds/
http://www.globus.org/toolkit/
Reference Model for Service Oriented Architectures.
OASIS SOA Reference Model TC, Working Draft 08
This Service Oriented Architecture Reference Model is an abstract
framework for understanding significant entities and relationships
amongst them within a service-oriented environment, and for the
development of consistent standards or specifications supporting that
environment. It is based on unifying concepts of SOA and may be used
by architects developing specific services oriented architectures or
for education and explaining SOA. A reference model is not directly
tied to any standards, technologies or other concrete implementation
details, but it does seek to provide a common semantics that can be
used unambiguously across and between different implementations.
http://xml.coverpages.org/soa.html#SOA-RM-WD08
http://xml.coverpages.org/SOA-RM-WD08.pdf
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/soa-rm/

FERA-based SOA Information Model, Run-Time SOA, and SOA Collaboration
Semantics
Semantion, Inc., Technical Contribution
Semantion Inc. contributed its FERA-based SOA specification documents
to the OASIS Electronic Business Service Oriented Architecture (ebSOA)
TC. SOA IM can be stored in a standard registry like OASIS ebXML
Registry or OASIS UDDI and used to provide informational support for
both context and content related to any business process. The SOA IM
is presented in a form of an open standard-based XML document referred
to as the Collaborative Process Information Document (CPID) that can
be either created manually or generated from a business process
definition using a visual modeling tool. The main components of the
FERA reference architecture are: federates, interfaces, and SOA
Federation. Each participant involved in the collaboration is called a
federate (systems or people).
http://xml.coverpages.org/soa.html#Semantion
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ebsoa/

Adobe Upgrade Steps Up BPM Competition
Doug Henschen, Intelligent Enterprise
Adobe today released significant enhancements to its Adobe LiveCycle
server platform. Key improvements include a new component-based
workflow and embedded business activity monitoring capabilities aimed
at "closed-loop" process improvement. The upgrades push Adobe deeper
into process automation and backend server-based technology and will
stiffen competition with giants including Microsoft and IBM. What sets
Adobe's approach apart is the combination of process notation and
coding through modular Quick Process Action Components (QPACs).
LiveCycle will ship with 50 out-of-the-box QPACs, including common
process tasks such as "send an e-mail," "integrate with database,"
"route to person" and "kick off Web service."
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/channels/process/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170700684
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/livecycle/devcenter.html

Iona Joins Eclipse, Proposes SOA Effort
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Melding the contemporary concepts of SOA and open source, Iona
Technologies is announcing its participation in the Eclipse Foundation
and will propose an Eclipse SOA Tools Platform project [within 30-60
days]. The company is joining as an Eclipse Strategic Developer and
will serve on the open source tools organization's board of directors,
which votes on Eclipse policies. Iona's SOA tools proposal would
constitute the ninth top-level project at Eclipse, among other
projects such as the Web tools and data tools projects.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/09/HNionaeclipse_1.html
http://eclipse.org/

Enterprise-Wide Network Management with OpenNMS
Tarus Balog, O'Reilly SysAdmin
OpenNMS is a platform that allows users to add network management
features over time. Anyone with a useful piece of management code is
welcome to submit it to the project; the application design itself
allows for expansion.Currently OpenNMS focuses on three areas: service
polling, data collection, and event management. The current
development version of OpenNMS adds support for SNMP version 3, as
well a new JMX data collector for gathering information from sources
such as JBoss and Tomcat. It also introduces a new "alarms" subsystem,
which improves event management by reducing duplicate events and
adding some automated event manipulation (such as increasing severity
over time).
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/sysadmin/2005/09/08/opennms.html

Learn XQuery in 10 Minutes
Michael Kay, Stylus Studio White Paper
This article is for all those people who really want to know what
XQuery is, but don't have the time to find out. XQuery was devised
primarily as a query language for data stored in XML form. So its main
role is to get information out of XML databases -- this includes
relational databases that store XML data, or that present an XML view
of the data they hold. Some people are also using XQuery for
manipulating free-standing XML documents, for example, for
transforming messages passing between applications. In that role
XQuery competes directly with XSLT, and which language you choose is
largely a matter of personal preference. In fact, some people like
XQuery so much that they are even using it for rendering XML into HTML
for presentation.
http://www.stylusstudio.com/xquery_primer.html
http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlQuery.html

XML Indexes in SQL Server 2005
Bob Beauchemin, Microsoft MSDN Library
One of the main reasons for the success of the relational database has
been the inclusion of the SQL language. SQL is a set-based declarative
language. This article explains how to use the relational query engine
in SQL Server 2005 to make a single query plan for the SQL and XQuery
parts of your queries, and how to make the implementation of XML
queries fast and easy to predict and tune. XML indexes should be
managed like other indexes with respect to dropping and recreating the
indexes in conjunction with bulk loading, index defragmenting, and
other database administration techniques.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnsql90/html/xmlindexes.asp
http://www.w3.org/XML/Query
Atom Link No Follow
James M. Snell, IETF Network Working Group Internet-Draft
An initial individual IETF Internet Draft has been published for "Atom
Link No Follow," presenting a mechanism that allows Atom feed
publishers to express preferences for how an Atom consumer should
processe Atom links and Content-By-Reference. It thus conveys
information to applications consuming Atom documents how they should
handle links and referenced content contained within the feed. For
example, a publisher may include an enclosure link within a feed but
may not wish for applications to automatically download the enclosed
file when it processes the feed; or, the publisher may not wish to
allow applications to archive or index the enclosure in any way.
http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-snell-atompub-feed-nofollow-00.txt
http://xml.coverpages.org/atom.html

September 10: Software Freedom Day 2005
Boni David, Software Freedom International News
Celebrated worldwide on September 10, 2005, Software Freedom Day "is a
global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the virtues and
availability of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Over 200 teams
registered, with plans to celebrate Free Software at schools,
universities, parks, and many other public places. Software Freedom
Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of (FOSS) desicated to the
education of the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high
quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business. An
official motion in the Scottish Parliament congratulates the
organisers of Software Freedom Day for working to highlight the Free
and Open Source Software movement.
http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/
http://www.theopencd.org/

Health IT Standards Body in the Offing
Mary Mosquera, Government Computer News
[U.S.] Health and Human Services secretary Michael Leavitt named the
members of the public/private organization that will set
standards to enable the exchange of health care data; he will select
seventeen (17) members from federal and state government and from
industry, including health care providers, insurers and IT vendors, to
form the American Health Information Community. AHIC also will choose
the use cases for which standards will be implemented. Leavitt
suggested electronic prescribing and bio-surveillance as early use
cases. The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina has heightened the
need for bio- and pandemic surveillance and interoperability standards
to allow sharing of data, for example, from emergency rooms.
Interoperability will jump-start a market and spur adoption of such
health IT systems as electronic health records. Katrina destroyed the
paper medical records of thousands of New Orleans evacuees, many of
whom are ill and no longer have medications.
http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/36905-1.html
http://xml.coverpages.org/healthcare.html

CA, IBM Join in Open Patent Pledge
Clint Boulton, InternetNews.com
Rivals Computer Associates International and IBM have agreed to
exchange software license rights and releases in a bid to bring
technologies to the public for open source development. The cross-
license patent agreement means that CA is joining IBM in encouraging
other companies to create a "patent commons." CA said it will open up
access to software covered by 14 of its U.S. patents, along with
counterparts of these patents issued in other countries. Access would
be for individuals and groups working on open source software.
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3546891
http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-08-10-a.html

GPL 3 May Contain Patent Retaliation Clause
Ingrid Marson, ZDNet UK
The next version of the GPL may contain a clause to penalise companies
that use software patents against free software. GPL version 3, a
draft of which will be released in January 2006, may contain a patent
retaliation clause, Georg Greve, the president of the Free Software
Foundation (FSF) Europe, said on Tuesday. Such a clause would mean
that if a company accused a free software product of infringing its
software patents, that company would lose the right to distribute that
product. Joachim Jakobs from FSF Europe said such a clause would only
affect companies that used their software patents against free
software.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39216717,00.htm
http://xml.coverpages.org/patents.html

Why Google Hired Vint Cerf
Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com
What will Internet visionary Vint Cerf do for Google? Whether he meant
to or not, Cerf hinted at one area he was interested in six weeks
before he joined the search giant, and it deals with a wireless device
near you. Cerf is the man who co-developed the basic communications
protocol of the Internet. In a broad-ranging interview with CNET
News.com, Cerf said databases filled with geographically indexed
material will soon help people easily retrieve lists of local
hospitals, ATMs or cafes on mobile devices. Advertisements could also
be part of the mix. Cerf mused: "This ability to turn geographically
indexed data into useful, possibly life-saving, and potentially
(money-making) data is extremely exciting."
http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5855650.html

Plumtree Portals To Aid Web Services Devs
Vance McCarthy, Integration Developer News
Plumtree's EDK (Enterprise developer Kit) is designed to blend portal
and web services technologies to more easily enable enterprise devs to
design, build and deploy composite applications that bring together
mid-tier Java and .NET assets with legacy code residing in backend ERP
systems such as SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft. For extra control of
source code, EDK also lets devs modify that code using a Model-View-
Controller (MVC) approach, which allows devs to embed more than 30
core functions into applications using simple XML tags instead of
complex code.
http://idevnews.com/CaseStudies.asp?ID=172
http://www.plumtree.com/developers/edk/

Securing Service-Oriented Applications
Anthony Nadalin, et al., IBM developerWorks
This article is Part 7 in the series 'SOA Programming Model for
Implementing Web Services.' An SOA programming model must ensure that
each service invocation adheres to security policies that are valid
for both the requester and service endpoint. The security
infrastructure -- including the ability to authenticate requesters and
authorize their access to services, propagate security context across
Web service requests based on an underlying trust model, audit
significant events, and effectively protect data and content -- forms
a fabric of the SOA environment that helps secure components and
services. At the core of all SOA security is a policy-based
infrastructure and management of the policies.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-soa-progmodel7/
http://xml.coverpages.org/ws-security.html
XHTML Microformats for the Atom Publishing Protocol
Robert Sayre, (Individual) Internet Draft
Atom Publishing Protocol client implementations require a fair amount
of ancillary server-provided data in order to provide a smooth user
experience. Rather than invent a plethora of new XML formats, this
specification chooses to present a number of XHTML profiles,
colloquially known as 'microformats'. hCat is an XHTML profile for
encoding the three standard attributes of Atom category elements. By
providing a definition list containing encoded category information,
servers can present clients with a list of known categories in an
XHTML definition list. hCat also allows description of endpoints for
category editing through a simple HTTP-based protocol.
http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-sayre-atompub-xhtml-micro-00.txt
http://xml.coverpages.org/atom.html#internetDrafts

OpenOffice.org Releases Second Beta Version of its 2.0 Suite
Gene J. Koprowski and Sean Gallagher, eWEEK
After a review of about 600 software bugs, the second beta version of
OpenOffice.org 2.0, featuring the OASIS-approved XML file format, has
been released for testing. A new version of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is
being released for beta in advance testing this week, the second beta
release of the free software available for computer users.
OpenOffice.org is available as a free download for Windows, GNU/Linux,
FreeBSD and Sun's Solaris platform. Versions for additional operating
systems and computing platforms are in the works. The suite features a
number of improvements over the first release of OpenOffice.org,
including a new database module that makes the database features of
the suite more accessible. It also introduces support for the OASIS
OpenDocument XML file format.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1854812,00.asp
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1855892,00.asp

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Events
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Selected references from the events calendar:
http://xml.coverpages.org/conferences2005.html
http://xml.coverpages.org/conf.html

Enterprise Management World 2005.  September 12 - 14, 2005. Bethesda
North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, North Bethesda, Maryland,
USA.
Covers management standards initiatives such as CIM (Common
Information Model), WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Management), SMASH
(Systems Management Architecture for Service Hardware) Server
Management, and Utility Computing.
http://www.emwusa.com/index.html
http://xml.coverpages.org/computingResourceManagement.html

National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR) Inaugural Event.
October 27, 2005. Buffalo, NY, USA.
NCOR is coordinating collaborative research in several broad areas of
ontological theory, ontology design, implementation, and application.
It has a special focus on the establishment of tools and measures for
quality assurance of ontologies.
http://ncor.buffalo.edu/inaugural/
http://ncor.us/

RuleML-2005: International Conference on Rules and Rule Markup
Languages for the Semantic Web.  November 10 - 12, 2005, Galway,
Ireland.
Theme: rule languages for reactive and proactive rules, complex event
processing, and event-driven rules, for applications on the Semantic
Web. Covers: syntax and semantics of rule languages, translations and
interoperability between rule languages, associated theory, execution
engines and processing models, implemented systems, use cases, and
deployed applications.
http://2005.ruleml.org
http://xml.coverpages.org/ruleML.html

OWLED-2005. OWL: Experiences and Directions. November 11 - 12, 2005,
Galway, Ireland.
The W3C OWL Web Ontology Language has now been a W3C recommendation
for more than one year. OWL is playing an important role in an
increasing number and range of applications, and is the focus of
research into tools, reasoning techniques, formal foundations,
language extensions etc. The aim of the workshop is to establish a
forum for practitioners in industry and academia, tool developers and
others to set an agenda for research and deployment in order to
incorporate OWL-based technologies into new applications.
http://www.mindswap.org/2005/OWLWorkshop/
http://www.mindswap.org/2005/OWLWorkshop/committees.shtml

SOBPI 2005: First International Workshop on Service-Oriented Business
Processes Integration. December 12, 2005. Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
The workshop brings together researchers, practitioners, and experts
in business models and management and to promote cross-fertilization
among their competencies, focusing on the usage of service oriented
technologies to support the Business Processes Integration (BPI).
http://elab.njit.edu/sobpi
http://elab.njit.edu/sobpi/cfp.pdf

ICSOC 2005: Third International Conference on Service Oriented
Computing. December 12 - 15, 2005. Mercure Hotel Amsterdam aan de
Amstel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Aims to be the main reference conference for service oriented
computing and web services, by covering the entire spectrum from
theoretical and foundational results to empirical evaluations as well
as practical and industrial experiences. The conference has several
associated workshops (DWP-workshop, WDSOA 2005, WESC 2005, Mediate
2005, SOBPI).
http://www.icsoc.org/
http://www.deri.at/events/workshops/mediate2005/
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Cover Pages Sponsors
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Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive.