Related XML Reference Collections

• Current XML Articles and Papers
• XML Articles and Papers 1998
• XML Articles and Papers 1996 - 1997
• Introductory and Tutorial Articles on XML
• XML News from the Press

Note: This document is superseded by: xmlPapers1999.html. This document is retained provisionally.

April 1999

• [April 20, 1999] "The State of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative April 1999." By Stuart Weibel (OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.). In D-Lib Magazine Volume 5 Number 4 (April 1999). "One hundred and one experts in resource description convened in Washington, D.C., November 2 through November 4, 1998, for the sixth Dublin Core Metadata Workshop. The registrants represented 16 countries on 4 continents, and many disciplines. As with previous workshops, many new issues were opened, and vigorous debate was a hallmark of the event. Unlike previous workshops, the focus of DC-6 was not to resolve questions in plenary meetings, but rather to identify unresolved issues and assign them to formal working groups for resolution. The result of this process was an ambitious workplan for 1999. This report summarizes that workplan, highlights the progress that has made been on the workplan, and identifies a few significant projects that exemplify this progress. . . The second proposed change is simply to format the Dublin Core specification according to a standard description template for metadata elements known as ISO 11179. ISO 11179 is an international standard for formally expressing the semantics of data elements in a consistent manner. . . A given set of metadata elements can be registered as an RDF schema on the Web, thereby specifying the semantics and structure of the metadata set. XML provides the encoding syntax, and the XML-namespace facility makes it straightforward to mix element sets in a given metadata description without the danger of element names colliding. That is, an element established as a component of one namespace, such as the Dublin Core, is in no danger of being confused with an element of the same name from another namespace. Element sets are thus modular in the Warwick Framework sense. . . There are currently several means for representing Dublin Core metadata, including embedded HTML, raw XML, and XML-encoded RDF. The current consensus on DC elements can be seen as a semantic view that can be represented in a variety of ways. Those interested in exploring the implications of this are urged to read the DC-Schema Discussion Paper discussing views of Dublin Core and their relationship to an underlying data model (DC-SCHEMA 1999) and to participate in the ongoing discussions on these issues.'

• [April 20, 1999] "XML at Your Service." By Mark Merkow. In Webreference (April 15, 1999). "This week at Webreference we serve up a gaggle of XML industry standard DTD initiatives and the new breed of XML-specialization servers. Learn how e-commerce is bringing XML at Your Service."

• [April 20, 1999] "Sybase makes e-commerce pitch. Sybase wants its slice of the e-commerce pie." By Wylie Wong. In CNET News (April 19, 19990. "Sybase has begun shipping its updated application server and PowerJ and PowerBuilder development tools, touting them as the software needed to create Web sites for e-commerce, employees within a company, and business partners. The tools are tightly integrated with the application server, allowing developers to seamlessly code and make changes to applications, Sybase executives said. The Enterprise Application Server 3.0 supports XML, Corba, and some level of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), said Michael Merritt, Sybase's senior director for the Enterprise Application Server."

• [April 20, 1999] "DataChannel, Isogen Merge." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld (April 20, 1999). "DataChannel on Tuesday announced that it has merged with Isogen International to deliver Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based solutions focused on the enterprise. DataChannel will provide the products for the solution, with Isogen working on the systems integration and consulting. DataChannel said Isogen brings a lot of XML knowledge to the table, as it has been working on data-centric solutions in the Standard Generalized Markup Language world since 1994. As part of the merger, Isogen will retain its Dallas location and will be branded as 'A DataChannel Inc. Company.' Each company will continue to play to its separate product and solutions strengths, with Isogen also helping on DataChannel's enterprise portal products." See the announcement: "DataChannel Inc. and ISOGEN International Corp. Merge to Become the Largest XML Enterprise Solutions Provider."

• [April 20, 1999] "DataChannel merges with Isogen for XML services." By Lee Pender. In PC Week [Online] (April 20, 1999). "In an effort to bulk up its services component, DataChannel Inc., provider of enterprise portal and eXtensible Markup Language technology, announced today it has merged with XML services provider Isogen International Corp. Isogen, based in Dallas, will become a subsidiary of DataChannel, of Bellevue, Wash. The privately held companies did not release financial terms of the deal, but DataChannel officials said the combined company will continue to hire employees rather than pare jobs.

• [April 19, 1999] "XML DTDs for B2B, ASAP." By Eric Binary Anderson. In ent Magazine [Online] Volume 4, Number 7 (April 7, 1999), pages 21, 23. "OAGI's achievement is the first step to a world of connected businesses. For the past decade, the computing world steered toward synchronous distributed protocols such as CORBA and DCOM to link the world. While these technologies will have their place, the future lies with asynchronous messaging, such as MQSeries and MSMQ. The reason for the change is that the Internet raised our definition of a high-volume distributed system from thousands of users to millions of users. Message queuing can provide this super-scalability, which is something that no synchronous solution can do. XML messages, using a public DTD, provide the perfect package to send through the message queue's pipeline. DTDs can improve the business-to-consumer relationship, as well. How many of you enjoy filling out forms? I know I recently decided on a loan broker because she promised to handle all the paperwork for me. I simply can't stand repeating the same task I've done since I opened my first savings account as a tike. Enter DTDs. Once a majority of commercial Web sites agree on a DTD for customer information, you'll be able to fill out an entire loan application -- on any loan site -- with a single cut-and-paste operation. . . We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. XML DTDs should do for electronic communication what high-level languages did for assembly language programmers: open up whole new worlds."

• [April 19, 1999] "The Business Case for XML." By Marty Nemzow. In Web Server Online Magazine (April 1999). "You may have read about XML in other publications, which usually place an emphasis on how to create XML-based Web pages. This column will instead focus on how XML provides a strategic imperative for businesses applying electronic commerce and integrating with back-office operations and/or strategic partners."

• [April 19, 1999] "XML Applications Stand Up To EDI." By Ellis Booker. In Information Week (April 16, 1999), page 8. "XML is starting to prove itself as a practical alternative to EDI for e-business trading. E-commerce pioneer Dell this week revealed it will use an application based on XML as the interface between its customers' ERP or procurement systems and its own online order-management systems. Separately this week, RosettaNet, a consortium creating XML-based supply chain processes for the $700 billion IT industry, said it had completed a successful test of its first Partner Interface Process (PIP), an XML derivative that defines various electronic interactions between trading partners. Dell's procurement system, due this summer, will rely heavily on Microsoft products, particularly its XML-based BizTalk schema and server products coming out in the second half of the year. . . Interestingly, Dell is not a member of RosettaNet, which counts American Express, Cisco, CompUSA, Compaq, EDS, Federal Express, Intel, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and Netscape as members."

• [April 19, 1999] "MarketSite.net. The First Open Business-to-Business Trading Web" By [Staff]. Featured company profile and 'Site of the week', from Ontology.org. "CommerceOne launches MarketSite.net based on breakthrough XML technology from Veo Systems, a company they acquired in January." See the MarketSite.net Web site for full details.

• [April 19, 1999] "The MetaXSL Engine." By Olivier Brand. From Intraware, Intranet library. [Conclusions:] "With admittedly limited testing, our prototype MetaXSL Engine performs quite well. We tried it with several combinations of XML Parsers and XSL Processors currently available for download and they all worked, although performance varied. These tools are constantly being updated so it is important to build a solution with an open architecture. XML and related technologies and the tools to support them will continue to evolve and mature as all new technologies do. We found that the current state of affairs is suitable to begin prototyping with and we encourage others to begin planning their own prototypes. XML will generate multiple and robust benefits for users and web developers. The smart developers will begin learning how it works now. As for our prototype and goals, we were able to successfully implement a combination of XML/XSL and Java code to achieve our goals. Our prototype has an open architecture, the presentation logic (XSL) is separated from application logic and our performance is better than we expected. In addition we can support localization with a minimum of effort. We also learned a lot about how XML/XSL work and about the current crop of Java tools that support it. It has been time well spent and we plan to continue developing XML ideas in Java. What we've done is just a prototype and none of this has been incorporated into our web site yet, but it provides a solid basis for us to develop upon for eventual production."

• [April 19, 1999] "[Component Front] OMG Announces XMI Specification." By John K. Waters. In Component Strategies (April 1999), page 9-10. Brief description of recent announcements from OMG. See also "OMG Members Unite in Support of XMI Technology," page S-8. For details on XMI, see "Object Management Group (OMG) and XML Metadata Interchange Format (XMI)."

• [April 19, 1999] "[Component Front] GM Driving XML Into the Mainstream." By John K. Waters. In Component Strategies (April 1999), page 11. Cf. "Putting The Pedal To The XM-etaL." By Mel Duvall. In Inter@ctive Week [Online] (March 29, 1999).

• [April 16, 1999] "Whither ICE?" By Bill Trippe. In The Gilbane Report on Open Information & Document Systems Volume 7, Number 2 (February 1999), pages 5-8. In the special issue 'Metadata, ICE & New Horizons'. "The Information and Content Exchange (ICE) protocol was first conceived a year ago, so it's a good time to visit the initiative and see whether it still has the impressive momentum it seemed to develop right from the start. . . Bill Trippe, joins [the Gilbane Report editorial staff] this month with an update on one of the most well known XML metadata applications, ICE (Information & Content Exchange) protocol. This is one of the (many) areas Bill knows a lot about. How important is ICE to you? The answer depends partly on what the final scope of the protocol is, and that is still an open question. In any case, the issues it addresses will be relevant to any web application that involves sharing content with business partners. You should be aware of it." Note: "GCARI is New Host for ICE." By Dianne Kennedy. In XML Files: The XML Magazine Issue 13 (March 31, 1999). "During the recent XTech Conference in San Jose, Graphic Communications Association Research Institute, Inc. (GCARI) and the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) Authoring Group jointly announced a letter of understanding between the two organizations in which GCARI is named as the official Host organization for the ICE Authoring Group. . . " See more on ICE: "Information and Content Exchange (ICE) Protocol."

• [April 16, 1999] "XML in IE5: A Semi-Guided Tour." By Craig Cline and Tim Bray. In ZDNet DevHead (April 13, 1999). "Craig Cline and Tim Bray take a look at IE 5.0's XML support. Though the new IE delivers the best native support for XML to date, it's still not ready for prime-time. . . Still, the recent release of Internet Explorer 5 is noteworthy for two reasons. First, IE5 delivers the best native support for XML we've seen to date. And second, that Microsoft has invested some serious work in this area is an indication of just how important the company believes XML to be in its Internet strategy. Indeed, at a recent developer meeting, Adam Bosworth, a very senior Microsoft engineer indeed, said that it is the company's intention to support XML throughout its operating systems, back office product line, and office applications going forward. And the fact that XML is an official W3C standard doesn't hurt either, since it provides Microsoft with the opportunity to display its born again good-net-citizen behavior in supporting and contributing to the development of open standards. Consequently, we thought it would be helpful to take a look at how well IE5 supports XML in its current iteration."

• [April 16, 1999] "BlueGill Enhances Internet Billing." By Gregory Dalton. In TechWeb News   (April 14, 1999). BlueGill Technologies refined its technology Monday for companies seeking to present their bills and statements on the Internet. For transferring billing information from legacy systems, BlueGill utilizes XML. . ." See also the press release, "BlueGill Technologies Harnesses XML to Bridge Information Gap and Bolster Customer Relationships. The BlueGill i-Series improves customer loyalty and increases customer retention by transforming legacy data into interactive Web applications."

• [April 16, 1999] "XML Marks the Spot. The new Web language is ready to redefine information management." By Jon Udell. In Computerworld (April 12, 1999). "Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy is right: The network is the computer. The Web has become that computer's operating system. And the lingua franca of that computer will be Extensible Markup Language, better known as XML. It's much more than just a way to present Web pages: In XML, the document becomes the database. . ."

• [April 16, 1999] "Perspecta matures its perspective. XML in and out, automated tagging and a canned user interface help build Web-based self-service applications." By Mark Walter. In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 3, Number 8 (April, 1999), page 36. "[Recently] Perspecta announced the third release of its conceptual navigation system, adding back-end tools that assist in structuring information; a server that builds multiple-perspective indexes; and a software developers' kit for building customized solutions. The net result is a platform for building Web-based self-service applications. The XML import/export promised last year has been completed, with direct support for the Resource Description Format (RDF) recently adopted by the W3C. ODBC support was added to make it easier to tie Perspecta to other databases. . ." ['Structuring System is composed of four principal sub-components: the Concept Database (CDB), Tagging Assistant, Structuring Assistant, and Data Import Platform. . . The XML-compliant Data Import Platform enables users to import information (for instance, additional controlled vocabularies) into the CDB in a manner consistent with the way they work with information throughout the rest of Perspecta 3.0 - namely, in terms of concepts, their attributes, and their semantic relationships. It comprises a data import program, a data conversion language, and a Perspecta-specific data type definition (DTD).']

• [April 16, 1999] "Quark's Troika of Web Products." By Mark Walter. In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 3, Number 8 (April, 1999), pages 8-11. "In a sweeping corporate effort to diversify its product line and branch out into new vertical markets, Quark has embarked on several major development efforts, including one for catalogs, one for packaging and one aimed squarely at Web publishing. In contrast with the others, the Web initiative is general-purpose technology that could be utilized by Quark customers in a variety of markets. Code-named Troika because it has three prongs, the project is expected to result in products next year. In a visit to Quark's headquarters in Denver and follow-up meetings at Seybold Seminars in Boston, Quark shared a glimpse of Troika with us, which we place in the context of competitive offerings already on the market. . . The first tool, and the one that appeared to be farthest along in development, is an XTension (code-named Troika XT) that extracts text from XPress pages and applies XML-tagging. In implementing such a tool, the first step, of course, is to develop a document type definition (DTD) that establishes the tags and their place in the structure of the archtypical document. Quark is not sure yet if some sort of visual DTD design tool will be supplied. Given how few magazine publishers have XML DTDs, we'd like to see Quark take a stab at automatically generating a first cut at the DTD from the style structure already present in the document. An alternative aid, one that would be easier to develop, would be to include sample DTDs with the product, such as the one already developed by the news agencies for newswires."

• [April 16, 1999] "Web Publishing Systems." By Victor Votsch and Mark Walter. In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 3, Number 8 (April, 1999), pages 11-16. "The market for Web publishing systems is growing into a complicated market space, with overlapping products running the gamut from add-ons to authoring tools all the way up to enterprise-level systems. Several leading vendors showed their latest offerings in Boston, and two new PDF-related systems made their debut. . . [GoLive, FutureTense, HexMacDigiDox, Glyphica] Also "'Inso upgrades DynaBase': Inso introduced an upgrade to its Web-publishing system DynaBase that provides a Java client for Mac and Unix users; adds support for multiple repositories; and promises improved performance. Collectively, the changes help DynaBase scale to meet the demands of very large sites. . . Performance improvements seem to be a recurrent theme with InsoAlso added in this release is a unique XML template system, along with sample templates, to make it possible for designers to create dynamic HTML pages without programming."

• [April 16, 1999] "Microsoft, Netscape, vendor consortia announce XML e-commerce strategies. Microsoft muscles on to an awfully crowded bandwagon." By Victor Votsch. In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 3, Number 8 (April, 1999), pages 32-33. "Recent announcements from vendors large and small point to the inevitable rise of XML and industry-specific DTDs as the enabling tools for the next generation of Web automation, from content exchange to e-commerce. But while XML provides the means for setting standards for e-commerce, it's up to the market to decide just what tagset and protocols will be adopted. In contrast with content syndication, where consensus among users and vendors has led to the adoption of the ICE protocol, the larger and more nebulous world of e-commerce remains more like a trip to the bazaar, where a cacophony of vendors vie for your attention. Amidst the din, there were some recent significant developments. . ."

• [April 16, 1999] "XTech '99: Mainstream Vendors Join the Rugged Frontier." By Liora Alschuler. In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 3, Number 8 (April, 1999), page 40. "It would be difficult, nay impossible, to reproduce the exhilaration of XML conferences of days past: there will only be one breakthrough year, there will be only one year when the big computer firm in Redmond endorses XML. In the first year of the activity that started life as 'SGML for the Web,' the question was would we see XML in the browser and when? At this year's XTech forum the week of March 8 in San Jose, with speakers from Netscape and Microsoft vying for the title of most-XML-compliant browser on the planet, it was difficult to work up much dramatic tension over XML in the browser, although substantive implementation issues remain. Instead, XML in the browsers was overshadowed this year by the rise of XML support by other technology vendors. Proclamations of strategic directions and forthcoming products from Sun, IBM, Oracle, Object Design and others ensure that XML will be used not only for Web publishing but also as glue in many facets of our high-tech, information-handling infrastructure."

• [April 16, 1999] "Lotus Notes as a Web-Publishing Platform: Will Release 5 Change Things?" By Steve Gillmor. In Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 3, Number 8 (April, 1999), pages 21-27. [Steve Gillmor spent several months working with the beta version of Release 5 and filed this assessment of the new product and its suitability for Web publishing.] "Coming soon: XML support - For XML metadata, the Notes document library application already captures name, category, time stamp, document size and other metadata into fields in the Domino object store. With this sort of metadata, it's trivial for the designer to create custom views, provide enterprise-wide search capabilities, and publish to paper, the Web, and/or handheld devices. XML is already at work unofficially behind the scenes, carrying the View and Outline applet code stream to and from the Domino server over HTTP. In the future, Lotus plans to extend this functionality and to clean up the implementation for public documentation. Lotus understands the utility of separating form from content and sees the value in using XML for interchange. Some sort of XSL-based transformation facility can be expected as an upgrade to Domino in the near future, and, in the meantime, Lotus' parent, IBM, is making available a whole range of Java-based XML and XSL tools that can be called by Domino in Release 5. At this point, the XML support in Notes is not sufficiently mature for us to recommend the product as a platform for building a high-end XML document-management system (instead, stick with Chrystal, Xyvision, et al.), but it could handle many of the XML metadata needs of Web developers and publishers."

• [April 16, 1999] "XHTML: The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language." [W3C team] Written by Dave Raggett. In W3C Talks W3LA event in Stockholm, 24th March 1999. 'slide set for XHTML firstpresented at the W3LA event in Stockholm on 24th March 1999. The presentation covers the history of HTML and explains the work underway for the next generation [of HTML].'

• [April 16, 1999] "White Space Handling In XML Parsing." Edited by [OpenXML] arkin (arkin@openxml.org). "White space handling is an unresolved issue in the present definition of XML parsers, falling outside the scope of both the DOM specification and the SAX API. This is a recommendation for the behavior of XML parsers in regards to white space appearing in the source document, and what portions are to be delivered to the application. This RFC is published and made available for public review in an open process. We encourage parser developers to take part in formulating the final specification and to abide by it, in an effort to provide a uniform behavioral model that will allow applications and documents to be portable across a variety of parsers." [local archive copy]

• [April 16, 1999] "Formatting Objects Considered Harmful." By Håkon Wium Lie (Opera Software, Norway). April 15, 1999. Abstract: "The W3C Working Group on XSL is currently producing two specifications: a transformation language (called 'XTL' in this document) and a set of formatting objects written in XML (called 'XFO' in this document). The idea is for XTL to transform XML data and documents into set of formatting objects which subsequently can be rendered. On the ladder of abstraction from presentation to semantics, XFO is at the level of presentational HTML elements. A Web of XFO documents can be compared to a Web of HTML documents with only FONT and BR tags. Although not intended to be used on the Web, it's unlikely that it can be prevented. XFO is therefore a threat to accessibility, device-independence and the dream of a semantic Web. The note ends with some suggestions on how to solve the problem." [local archive copy] This paper was announced on April 16, 1999, and generated a thread with scores of responses on the XSL Mailing List.

• [April 15, 1999] "Open-source Application Server Enters the Fray." By Dana Gardner. In InfoWorld (April 14, 1999). "Lutris Technologies, a consultancy in Santa Cruz, Calif., will announce April 19 that its free, open-source Java/Extensible Markup Language (XML) application server, Enhydra, is gathering momentum both in deployment and via the efforts of developers contributing to its evolution. The privately held company, which oversees Enhydra's development in the open-source milieu, claims Enhydra is the only open-source XML compiler and server available. Available now for free download at www.enhydra.org, Enhydra -- a word that when used with lutris forms the Latin name for surfers' mascot, the California sea otter -- is designed to provide both the server platform and development framework for building dynamic, adaptable multitier Internet applications . . . Furthermore, Enhydra uses XML to simplify the inter-relationship of graphic designers and Java developers during the development of dynamic HTML presentation."

• [April 15, 1999] "XML Comes of Age at Internet World." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld (April 14, 1999). "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) found its way into actual products and not just vendor hype here Wednesday at Spring Internet World. Announcements featuring XML came from Interleaf, RightDoc, General Magic, Sqribe Technologies, IPNet Solutions, and Blue World Communications."

• [April 15, 1999] "WebCGM: Industrial-Strength Vector Graphics for the Web." By John C. Gebhardt (InterCAP Graphics Systems) and Lofton Henderson (Inso Corporation). An OASIS / CGM Open White Paper. April 1999. "For years, companies, industry groups, and government organizations have used Computer Graphics Metafiles (CGMs) for storing and exchanging 2D graphics. CGM is a format defined by the International standard ISO/IEC 8632:1992 for digitally describing vector, raster, and hybrid (raster and vector) graphic pictures very compactly. It has proven to be a very good format for the technical illustrations in electronic documentation, geophysical data visualization, and other demanding 2-dimensional graphics presentation applications. About the same time the CGM standard matured, the World Wide Web began to explode and graphics began to play an increasingly important role. Until recently, graphics on the Web consisted of raster images - pictures represented as large arrays of colored pixels. The formats typically used to transmit these images are GIF, JPEG, and more recently PNG. However, rather than sending pixel values over the Internet, an alternate approach is to send the instructions for drawing lines, circles, ellipses, curves, and other shapes. The advantages of describing pictures abstractly are manyfold. . . WebCGM is an 'intelligent graphics' profile of the CGM standard, which means that in addition to graphical content based on CGM Versions 1-3, the profile defines the semantics of non-graphical content (metadata) based on CGM Version 4, Application Structures. The non-graphical content allows the definition of hierarchies of application objects, as well as the association of metadata, such as link specifications and layer definitions, with the objects. WebCGM was developed as a joint effort of the CGM Open Consortium, in collaboration the W3C under the W3C-LA project. The W3C has been working on integrating CGM with the Web since 1996. In June of 1997 it identified the need for a profile of CGM for use on the Web. Shortly thereafter, a group of vendors and large users of CGM technology met and agreed to form a consortium. As a result of those early meetings CGM Open was incorporated in May 1998. . . The CGM standard does not define a way to formally express profile and content rules. XML has been chosen as the language for expressing metadata content in WebCGM. XML is not valid content in WebCGM metafile instances. One advantage to the choice of XML as the formal language is that validating parsers are widely available. Even though XML syntax is not valid in WebCGM instances, such tools could be adapted to perform content validation of WebCGM instances. . ." See also "Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM)." [local archive copy]

• [April 15, 1999] "GCARI is New Host for ICE." By Dianne Kennedy. In XML Files: The XML Magazine Issue 13 (March 31, 1999). "During the recent XTech Conference in San Jose, Graphic Communications Association Research Institute, Inc. (GCARI) and the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) Authoring Group jointly announced a letter of understanding between the two organizations in which GCARI is named as the official Host organization for the ICE Authoring Group. GCARI has entered into this relationship to fulfill its ongoing mission of promoting standards for use in fields of information technology and publishing. Under this agreement, all members of ICE Authoring Group (ICE AG) and Advisory Council (ICE AC) also shall become Special Membership Group (SMG) members of GCARI. The new Host Organization will host the ICE web site as well as upcoming ICE standards activities. GCARI will also sponsor an ICE Seminar Series to promote understanding and implementation of the fledgling standard. The first ICE seminar will take place on May 17 and 18 in New York City." See further on ICE: "Information and Content Exchange (ICE) Protocol."

• [April 15, 1999] "The Emerging eCommerce Wars." By Dianne Kennedy. In XML Files: The XML Magazine Issue 13 (March 31, 1999). "Over the past month we have seen a host of exciting announcements from established market leaders such as Netscape and Microsoft as well as from emerging players. We also see an increasing number of specific vocabularies, or tag sets, designed to facilitate eCommerce in particular industry sectors. And finally we see great claims by organizations that transcend any particular industry specific DTD, claiming to have already achieved interoperable XML-based eCommerce frameworks on their newest technology platforms. What's hot in eCommerce? And what can we count on?"

• [April 15, 1999] "Jon Bosak Opens XTech Conference." By Dianne Kennedy. In XML Files: The XML Magazine Issue 13 (March 31, 1999). "Jon Bosak, co-editor of the XML Specification, chair of the XML Coordination Group, and co-chair of GCA's new XTech conference provided this year's opening keynote. After welcoming all to GCA's newest technical conference, Bosak began with a discussion on the XML family of standards. . . [Summary of the five main XML-related W3C Working Groups, liaison groups, and XML Coordination Group.] Bosak concluded his keynote by discussing the importance of XML and documents. Although XML has many other uses on the Web, to Bosak, documents are still a critical focus for XML. To demonstrate the importance of documents to us all, Bosak provided the audience with a historical perspective. . ."

• [April 15, 1999] "Cascading Style Sheets: A Primer." Book Review by Dianne Kennedy. In XML Files: The XML Magazine Issue 13 (March 31, 1999). Cascading Style Sheets: A Primer is authored by Joseph R. Jones and Paul Thurrott. [The reviewer says:] "I would highly recommend this text to anyone who wants to move from cluttered HTML tagging for style to clean structure coded HTML with CSS style codes. Not only does this text provide mechanics of CSS, but spends a great deal of time on good Web design."

• [April 15, 1999] "Binary To Unveil VelociGen For XML." By Charles Babcock. In Inter@ctive Week [Online] (April 14, 1999). "Binary Evolution, a supplier of Web application tools, today is planning to announce at Internet World in Los Angeles an eXtensible Markup Language development and deployment software package for Web servers. VelociGen for XML is designed to let a developer view the structure of an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) document, then map it to a HyperText Markup Language page, or use the scripting languages Perl and Tcl to create advanced mappings to back-office applications."

• [April 15, 1999] "Rockford Plays An EJB-XML Tune." By Ellis Booker. In InternetWeek Issue 760 (April 12, 1999), page 19. [Section: Intranet Applications.] "Car audio maker Rockford Corp. is linking a Java application server with Extensible Markup Language to extend the capabilities of its intranet and link to back-end systems, including EDI. A scalable Web server is especially important to Rockford. The company expects the number of accounts on its extranet site to increase from 268 to more than 2,000 within two months as 1,200 independent dealers are added, as well as users from Rockford's corporate offices in Tempe, Ariz., and manufacturing centers in Grand Rapids, Mich., overseas and Canada. While it swaps application servers, Rockford is moving rapidly on the XML front, applying it to incoming EDI purchase orders from Sterling Commerce Inc.'s private EDI network."

• [April 13, 1999] "XML and the Second-Generation Web. The combination of hypertext and a global Internet started a revolution. A new ingredient, XML, is poised to finish the job. [How XML Will Fix the Web: Tags categorizing facts, not formats, speed up transactions.]" By Jon Bosak and Tim Bray. In Scientific American Volume 280, Number 5 (May 1999), pages 89-93. For the week of April 12, 1999. Cover story, feature article. "Extensible Markup Language (XML), a tool for writing World Wide Web pages, promises another on-line revolution. Pages written in XML can deliver needed information more quickly and efficiently than HTML pages can. They can also automatically reformat themselves for convenient access by computer, telephone, handheld organizer or other devices. . . [Conclusion:] Thus, for its users, the XML-powered Web will be faster, friendlier and a better place to do business. Web site designers, on the other hand, will find it more demanding. Battalions of programmers will be needed to exploit new XML languages to their fullest. And although the day of the self-trained Web hacker is not yet over, the species is endangered. Tomorrow's Web designers will need to be versed not just in the production of words and graphics but also in the construction of multilayered, interdependent systems of DTDs, data trees, hyperlink structures, metadata and stylesheets -- a more robust infrastructure for the Web's second generation." For other introductory articles, see "Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML)."

• [April 13, 1999] "Wireless Palm VII Gains Support. The first wireless version of Palm's Pilot organizer is receiving industry support." By Darren Gladstone. In ZDNN TechNews (April 12, 1999). Wireless Palm VII is "scheduled to ship this summer. . . Bluestone Software Inc., meanwhile, is working on XML (Extensible Marking Language) based client/server software called XML-Contact, according to sources. It will allow users to remotely synchronize data by translating it into XML. The Mount Laurel, N.J., company also has XML-Expense and XML-Calendar versions of the software in development."

• [April 13, 1999] "Zveno Swish XML Editor Version 1.0 Beta 1." By [Staff]. In Linux Today (April 3, 1999). Swish is a non-validating XML document editor that allows the user to view and edit a XML document in both a tree-mode and a document-mode simultaneously. Swish reads and saves XML version 1.0 documents and features integrated tree and document views. Plugins make Swish fully extensible and customisable. Third-parties may use Tcl/Tk scripting and DOM version 1.0 to create plugin modules to change or enhance Swish's functionality."

• [April 12, 1999] "XML standards are too much of a good thing." By Lauren Gibbons Paul. In PC Week [Online] (April 12, 1999). "The lack of standards for conducting business-to-business transactions over the Web is hindering widespread acceptance of electronic commerce, according to Graham Clarke, director of product industries for Microsoft Corp., in Redmond, Wash. "Extranets don't scale. Every private extranet requires a different set of data," Clarke said. An increasing number of vendors believe that XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the answer. Companies ranging from Microsoft to Ariba Technologies Inc. are proposing standards that would extend the XML flexible Web page design language with a common set of transaction tags. These extensions are needed because XML is only a generic standard for tagging documents. These new standards would define the XML document types so that companies could easily exchange purchase orders, invoices and the like. That's the vision. Unfortunately, the reality is turning out to be more like the Tower of Babel because companies and industry groups have proposed a variety of different XML extensions and protocols. As a result, IT managers planning an XML-based, e-commerce strategy need to proceed with caution, said experts who are tracking the progress of the different XML extensions while pressing vendors to converge their efforts."

• [April 12, 1999] "Instant E-Commerce: Realizing Immediate ROI with UWI.Com's High-Value XML Business Objects." By David Manning [CTO, UWI.Com]. April 9, 1999. UWI.Com White Paper. "This document outlines the advantages that UWI.Com's solutions offer to organizations conducting business-to-business e-commerce. By providing a low barrier-to-entry and a realistic migration path that enables the expansion and automation of trading networks, UWI.Com's high-value XML business objects allow trading organizations to realize an immediate return on their e-commerce investments."

• [April 09, 1999] "Federated Search of Scientific Literature." By Bruce Schatz, William Mischo, Timothy Cole, Ann Bishop, Susan Harum, Eric Johnson, Laura Neumann, Hsinchun Chen, and Dorbin Ng. [Originally published in] IEEE Computer Magazine Volume 32, Number 2 (February 1999), pages 51-59. ISSN: 0018-9162. "The Illinois Digital Library Project has developed an infrastructure for federated repositories. The deployed testbed indexes articles from many scientific journals and publishers in a production stream that can be searched as though they form a single collection. The Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was one of six sponsored by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA from 1994 through 1998. Our goal was to develop widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. We concentrated on building the experimental Illinois DLI Testbed with tens of thousands of full-text journal articles from physics, engineering, and computer science, and on making these articles available over the Internet before they are available in print. The team, based in the Engineering Library at UIUC, had primary goals to [...] construct and test a multi-publisher, full-text Testbed that employs flexible search and rendering capabilities and offers rich links to internal and external resources, with the sources tagged in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The Illinois DLI Testbed supports full text in SGML format, associated article metadata, and bit-mapped figure images for scientific journal articles. At present (February 1999), the collection includes 63 journals containing 66,000 articles from 5 engineering professional societies: American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, American Society of Civil Engineers, Institution of Electrical Engineers, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society. Our Testbed team developed a Web-based retrieval system, which supports federated search across this collection, called DeLIver (DEsktop LInk to Virtual Engineering Resources). A critical element of the Testbed was the effective use of SGML to reveal document structure and produce associated article-level metadata, which homogenizes heterogeneous SGML and allows short-entry display. We take the SGML directly from the publishers' collections, converting it to a canonical format for federated searching and transforming tags into a standard set. The metadata also contains links to internal and external data, such as other Testbed articles and bibliographic abstract databases. The metadata and index files, which contain pointers to the full-text data, are stored independently and separately from the full-text. With SGML, documents can be treated as objects, allowing viewing, manipulation, and output. For retrieval purposes, SGML's major strength is its ability to reveal a document's component structure. While SGML is becoming ubiquitous in publishing, it is largely generated by publishers as a production by-product. The coming widespread availability of rich markup formats, such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language), a nearly complete instance of SGML, will likely make them the standard for open document systems. Future versions of our Testbed are planning to use XML to represent structure." See the broader scope of heavily-funded DLI research. See also Illinois Digital Library Project and CANIS Laboratory, University of Illinois. The IEEE article is also available in PDF format; local archive copy PDF, and HTML.

• [April 09, 1999] "XSL: How Stylish Can You Get?" By Neil Randall. "XML (Extensible Markup Language) is about to get better with the addition of a style mechanism: Extensible Style Language. XSL lets you mark data with author-defined elements that allow more control over data presentation and organization than with HTML alone. HTML has spawned the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) mechanism, while SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), much earlier, added the Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL). . . XML (Extensible Markup Language), the most recent addition to authoring languages for the Web, now has a style mechanism as well. Extensible Style Language, or XSL -- a language for formatting XML documents and, especially, the data in XML documents -- has reached the working-draft stage with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XSL lets authors format XML elements. It uses the syntax of XML, allowing XML specialists to style their documents and data without necessarily learning either CSS or DSSSL. The most powerful aspect of XSL is its ability to map a single data source onto multiple display targets -- that is, more than one implementation of an XML or HTML document on-screen -- and to style the data in each target. . ."

• [April 09, 1999] "Oracle to Detail XML Strategy, Unveil App Servers." By Matthew Nelson. In InfoWorld (April 8, 1999). "Oracle will announce its plans to be the instrument for XML-based Internet commerce, as well as several new application servers, at the Internet World show in Los Angeles next week. Oracle will reveal its framework for storing, publish, routing, and processing XML information with Oracle's Internet Platform, which includes the Oracle 8i database, Oracle Application Server, and a new message broker application code-named Messenger. 'What's happening is that people are rapidly standardizing on XML as a way to publish out of one system and into another,' said Jeremy Burton, vice president of server marketing for Oracle. '[But] when you have millions of XML documents floating around, that tends to get out of control. It's easier to find things in a database than it is to find them in a [Microsoft] Word file,' Burton said. 'Using the database to store XML documents is going to happen more and more over time'."

• [April 09, 1999] "Oracle Lifts Lid on XML, App server Plans." By Antone Gonsalves. In PC Week [Online] (April 8, 1999). "Oracle Corp. hopes to advance the use of Extensible Markup Language for moving data through the enterprise with the release by the end of the year of a new message broker that provides the translation and transformation layer for moving XML documents between applications. Oracle plans to update JDeveloper, the company's Java IDE, to build adapters, and leverage its Designer modeling tool to generate metadata that can be stored in the message broker's repository as business rules. The message broker will be responsible for translating and transforming XML documents between applications and routing the data based on the business rules. Oracle Enterprise Manager can be used with the new product to manage and monitor the system. Oracle has given XML adoption a high priority in its overall Internet strategy."

• [April 09, 1999] "XML Starts to Live Up to its Hype." By Sebastian Rupley. In ZDNN Tech News (April 7, 1999). "After being hyped heavily as a makeover for the Web, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is starting to live up to the hype. Recently, a slew of announcements from giant backers and the formation of new consortiums have delivered a shot of adrenaline to the promising new standard designed to describe the contents of Web pages. Those who have been following the XML story know that it has broad implications for intelligent Web searching, but XML is going in some brand new directions too -- such as assisting voice-based information sharing." Similarly: "XML Spreads Out."

• [April 08, 1999] "Emilé Makes Mark on XML." By Wendy J. Mattson. In MacWeek (April 7, 1999). Media Design in*Progress this week released Emilé Lite, a free version of a Mac-based Extended Markup Language editor that is also due to ship in a commercial version in the second half of this month. Emilé Lite is a document editor that lets Web authors create XML documents and apply custom tags and mark-up constructs via dialogs. The application combines a clone of the Emacs text editor with a graphical user interface for Mac. Emilé Lite automatically adjusts the user interface to match the current document-type definition and can customize the authoring environment accordingly. Emilé Lite can export an XML document as HTML. Users can also employ the software to create documents for interactive Web sites or create content for the company's XPublish Web site publishing system."

• [April 08, 1999] "War of Words Heats Up." By Chris Fournier. In Ottawa Citizen Online (April 7, 1999). "With Corel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. both preparing to launch new office suite software packages, the war of words between developers is heating up. And in this arena, at least, Ottawa's Corel Corp. is not about to back down from the giant from Redmond. Executive vice-president of engineering Derek Burney says Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000 package beats Microsoft Office 2000 on several fronts. A principal difference between the competing packages is how they handle Extensible Markup Language, or XML, a data format for structured document interchange on the Web. Mr. Burney says Microsoft has been making 'loss leader statements' by laying claim to XML innovation in its new office products. In fact, he says, Microsoft's XML functionality is not as useful as Corel's. According to Mr. Burney, the problem is that Microsoft does not publish the Document Type Descriptor (DTD) -- the file that goes hand-in-hand with an XML file and explains its format. 'They're using XML as their native file format,' he says. 'But they're not publishing the DTD, meaning they're the only ones who can make use of that file'."

• [April 08, 1999] "The XML Factor." By Gerald Lazar. In Federal Computer Week (April 7, 1999). "A new World Wide Web tool has emerged that promises to revolutionize the way federal agencies do electronic commerce while protecting investments in such technologies as electronic data interchange (EDI). Extensible Markup Language is a way of defining the content of a document, similar to the way Hypertext Markup Language defines a document's appearance on the Web. XML may enable agencies to rescue data trapped in legacy systems, speed application development and actively configure graphics presentations to suit client hardware. 'XML is probably the culmination of 20 to 30 years of computer theory,' said Rita Knox, vice president and research director at Gartner Group. 'Within the next year, XML will be everywhere. It will be stabilized, and everyone will be able to use it.'

• [April 08, 1999] "Enhanced EDGAR on the Way. Easter Bunny tries to make finding eggs easier." By Michael Collins. In CBS MarketWatch (April 04, 1999). [Re: 'EDGAR, the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system that contains the documents that public companies are required to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.'] "On the scene again is Carl Malamud, who with the non-profit Internet Multicasting Service and New York University first put SEC company filings online in 1994 and then turned the basics of the current system over to the SEC. He took away many of the government's arguments against unlimited electronic access to public information by showing it was possible, and relatively inexpensive, to put huge document dumps on the Internet for all to see. Malamud's new project, Active Spaces, is creating a mirror of the SEC EDGAR database that is coded in XML, eXtensible Markup Language. He says that will allow deeper and more complicated searches. 'With XML you can more precisely specify the information you are looking for,' Malamud said. 'You can pull the documents apart, work with graphing data. It gives you more control over the document you're pulling out'. The SEC project is just the first step toward what Malamud hopes will be a whole new way of navigating the Internet." See also: "Death to Sleepy Stock Data." By Leander Kahney. In Wired News (April 01, 1999).

• [April 07, 1999] "Electronic Catalog. XML: A New Internet Language." By Shannon Oberndorf. In Catalog Age (April 01, 1999). "Now catalogers can get extremely specific in describing product attributes such as price, color, size, and features. For example, XML will allow catalogers to place a tag code for the cost of an item, a code to specify product colors, and tags to identify certain makes of a product. Using XML-based systems, online customers will be able to quickly search for products based on specific criteria, as well as comparison-shop across multiple catalogs. 'XML allows consumers to compare apples to apples, rather than apples to oranges, by adding context to each item,' says John Rosenfeld, electronic commerce operations manager for Lexmark International, a $2.5 billion Lexington, KY-based home and office products manufacturer/cataloger. Lexmark is working with the U.S. government and Commercenet, a Palo Alto, CA-based nonprofit consortium focused on Internet-based electronic commerce solutions, on the XML-based Catalog Interoperability Pilot program. The program allows 35 buyers from 11 government agencies, such as the General Services Administration (GSA), the Department of Defense (DOD), and Social Security, to compare and buy products across several electronic catalog databases from one Website."

• [April 06, 1999] "XML in an Instant: A Non-Geeky Introduction." By Charles F. Goldfarb. April, 1999. OASIS Paper. "By now, everyone familiar with the World Wide Web knows that it is undergoing a radical change that is introducing wonderful services for users and amazing new opportunities for Web site developers and businesses. HTML -- the HyperText Markup Language -- made the Web the world's library. Now its sibling, XML -- the Extensible Markup Language -- is making the Web the world's commercial and financial hub. Dynamic information [from databases, used to generate Web pages] needn't be served up raw. It can be analyzed, extracted, sorted, styled, and customized to create a personalized Web experience for the end-user. For this kind of power and flexibility, XML is the markup language of choice. You can see why by comparing XML and HTML. Both are based on SGML -- the International Standard for structured information. . ." [local archive copy]

• [April 06, 1999] "Microsoft's XML is More Than Just Standards." By David Strom. In Web Review (April 02, 1999) "With all due respect to Tim Bray's recent analysis of Internet Explorer 5.0's use of XML, I think he is missing the point. Microsoft's entry into the XML universe will do lot more harm than good initially for the XML standards effort, and has the ultimate intention of replacing the way most of us create and exchange documents. The real news is how MS-XML is designed from the start to be the common file interchange format for all Microsoft Office 2000 applications. In doing this, Microsoft has taken to extreme its time-honored practice of embracing and extending an ongoing standards effort. This time, MS-XML has something other than XML in mind. Microsoft is trying to move people away from ordinary HTML 3.0 documents and make Office 2000 the standard tool for Web authoring. And while earlier efforts, FrontPage most memorable, haven't really caught on, I think this time Office 2000 has a solid chance. . ."

• [April 06, 1999] "Knowledge Management: Get Smart. More Companies Are Learning How To Leverage Their Knowledge Assets, Starting With The Basics." By Beth Davis and Brian Riggs. In Information Week Issue 728 (April 05, 1999). "Using groupware, databases, and other software tools, a growing number of businesses are trying to combine organizational data with the tacit information in employees' heads to create an enterprise repository of intellectual capital. It's an ambitious undertaking, and one that few companies have mastered. . . Defining objects that tag or identify information about data-a twist on the metadata concept-is becoming increasingly popular in companies trying to leverage both the structured data in relational databases and unstructured data found on the Internet and in other sources. And it's where the up-and-coming Extensible Markup Language fits into the knowledge-management discussion. XML is a set of rules for defining data structures. To date, nearly every software vendor has pledged support for XML, and a growing number of IT shops are using it to integrate disparate sources. Platinum Technologies is using XML to build an index for a knowledge-management repository that holds documents on all the software vendor's products. Each piece of content gets an XML tag that identifies the source of the content. Other bits of information in the tag can identify who the product is sold to, which business unit within Platinum is responsible for the product, and which operating systems the product runs on. The first system to come out of the project was Jaguar, a Web knowledge portal for sales and marketing that includes the XML-based index. Platinum has since built six portals around knowledge communities, or groups of individuals with common interests such as product development, sales and marketing, and business development."

• [April 06, 1999] "The End Of The Web As We Know It." By Sean Gallagher. In Information Week Issue 728 (April 05, 1999). "While application servers successfully push corporate applications out into the brave new world of the Internet, they're fundamentally just a reconstruction of the terminal-based application model with a client-server model on the back end. They just aggregate the database connections and push display data over the wire, for the most part. That may be enough for the lowest common denominator of applications, but in the long term, it's a model that doesn't have a lot of life left in it. There are two technologies that will lead to the death of the browser application. The first is the spawn of HTML-the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The second is directory services. XML is more than just an extension of HTML. It essentially provides a way to embed applications into the data they run on. XML can be used to build a data object that knows not just how to display itself, but what the relationships within it mean-data and business logic fused into a single, self-aware form. How that information gets delivered-by E-mail, HTTP, or carrier pigeon-is no longer important; it's how it gets parsed that matters. The browser doesn't just display XML data; it becomes a run-time environment for the application built into it. While XML becomes the application, the directory will become the delivery vehicle for that application. As Novell, Microsoft, and others extend the scalability and functionality of directories, those directories will become the glue that binds together a new class of enterprise and Internet applications. . ."

• [April 06, 1999] "The Essence and Quintessence of XML. Retrospects and Prospects." By Robin Cover. December 31, 1998. Report written for Sun Microsystems and OASIS. "The annals of descriptive markup may record 1998 C.E. as the year when the XML scene became noticeably chaotic, while the prospects for its widespread adoption grew increasingly hopeful. . . we witnessed a perceptible and sometimes disconcerting loss of consensus as to what XML actually is. . ."

• [April 06, 1999] "Enterprise Java 2 On Tap From Sun." By Amber Howle. In Computer Reseller News Issue 836 (April 05, 1999). "While Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to unveil an enterprise version of Java 2 in June, a JavaServer Pages update is expected to be ready for review this week, the company said. The Enterprise Edition runs on top of Java 2 Standard Edition and is based on Enterprise JavaBeans, a component platform allowing developers to write, deploy and manage business applications. Sun is bundling several products together in the Enterprise Edition, including an XML extension the company recently began developing, Roth said. The XML standard extension will be an industry-developed API for developers needing XML language integration with the Java platform."

• [April 06, 1999] "XML Processing Description Language (XPDL)." By Simon St.Laurent. April 04, 1999. Technical paper from a collection of articles. Originally announced on XML-DEV 19990-4-4. "After two years spent explaining to a wide variety of folks how and why the XML Document Type Definition mechanisms work (and don't work), and why XML documents seem to be accumulating more and more references to external resources (notably style sheets), I've decided that it might be worthwhile to take a different approach that XML's current 'document controls its own destiny'. I'd like this to be as open a process as possible, including discussion on xml-dev, the primary XML development mailing list. All comments, suggestions, and contributions are welcome and will be credited. These documents have no official standing with any standards body or process. . . XML Processing Description Language (XPDL) seeks to provide a means of describing document classes which will simplify the management of document classes and make processing more reliable. By creating descriptions for classes of documents, rather than relying on documents to link to sets of resources themselves, XPDL makes it possible both to move beyond the monolithic model presented by DTDs today and to add new resources, like schemas, style sheets, and processing information to the concept of a document class." [local archive copy, 1999-04-05]

• [April 06, 1999] "XML, Integration, and the Smaller Developer." By Simon St.Laurent. April 01, 1999. Technical paper from a collection of articles. ". . . a tool has arrived that promises to free data and documents from the tar of proprietary formats and incompatible features. The freedom that Extensible Markup Language (XML) gives data has business implications well outside the world of document and data interchange. Developers now have an opportunity to integrate components on their own terms, mixing and matching software as seems appropriate to them rather than having to rely on schemes created by large vendors to lock developers in to the vendors' own vision of computing."

• [April 06, 1999] "What's happening to workflow? Web-based workflow gets down to business." By Lynda Radosevich. In InfoWorld Volume 21, Issue 14 (April 05, 1999). "Integration with Web technologies and better ties to back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications are quickly pulling workflow into the mainstream. Rather than constructing stand-alone systems, users can now tap into embedded workflow technology in packaged applications to automate business processes. . . Whether the workflow engine comes with an ERP system or on its own, XML support is next on the horizon. XML is the syntax that will allow diverse workflow applications to exchange information. For instance, an online store could use XML tags and workflow triggers to take a customer's order, notify suppliers of the order, and use the shippers' tracking system to follow progress of the delivery. 'We see XML as a common language that will allow our applications to interact with themselves or with external applications. It can be an Internet replacement for EDI [electronic data interchange], enable interaction with desktop systems like Office, or display information in a browser,' said PeopleSoft's Bergquist."

• [April 05, 1999] "XML Takes on E-commerce. Originally conceived as a more powerful Web publishing tool, XML is now a driving force behind e-commerce." By ames E. Gaskin. In InternetWeek Issue 759 (April 05, 1999), pages 42-43. "'XML makes quick and dirty implementations compared to EDI,' says Benoit Lheureux, research director for Gartner Group's application integration and middleware strategies division. EDI is the e-commerce standard used by some large companies and their trading partners, but is considered too complex and overkill for medium and small companies. Unlike XML, EDI is not text-based and is hard for people to read. 'XML makes it easy for vendors to agree on [formats] for purchase orders and the like,' Lheureux says. Developers and tools vendors are quickly exploring XML, and products using XML are readily available for Web publishing applications. Many data integration and exchange products powered by XML have been announced, but most won't ship until this summer."

• [April 05, 1999] "Tap XML's Potential Now." By [Staff]. In InternetWeek Issue 759 (April 05, 1999), page 34. ". . . If XML isn't on your company's agenda, here's a call to action: Laggards will be left in the e-commerce dust. For the uninitiated, the HTML follow-on was originally conceived as a sophisticated way to publish Web pages. But XML has since taken on a life of its own, largely because of the real-world problems it can solve. XML represents one of the most promising technologies for helping companies realize the Web's full potential: bridging differences in computing platforms and data formats to make the exchange of information, as well as transactions, pervasive."

• [April 05, 1999] "NatSemi Site Lets Customers Choose." By David Joachim. In InternetWeek Issue 757 (March 22, 1999), page 17. "National Semiconductor earlier this month launched an e-commerce site that lets customers track live inventory data and order online. National gives customers the option to order directly from the manufacturer or from one of six distribution partners. At the heart of the site (buy.national.com) is the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) protocol, which lets the company publish catalog updates to distributors in real time." See "Information and Content Exchange (ICE) Protocol."

• [April 05, 1999] "XML Tools to Relieve Web Pains." By Jeff Walsh. In InfoWorld Volume 21, Issue 14 (April 05, 1999). "IBM and WavePhore are pushing the Extensible Markup Language (XML) further down the path from innovation to implementation. IBM recently posted the XML Enabler on its alphaWorks site. XML Enabler is a servlet that converts XML data to HTML by using the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL). This would allow sites to store a single XML version of each document, with the XML Enabler generating client-specific versions on the fly. WavePhore, at Internet World next week, will release the beta version of WavePhore NewsPak, which uses XML as a data format to deliver news feeds to Web sites. This should make it easier for companies to integrate relevant news content into their public sites and intranets."

• [April 02, 1999] "Death to Sleepy Stock Data." By Leander Kahney. In Wired News (April 01, 1999). "Say you're looking for new investments and you want to know all the publicly traded Internet companies with annual sales of less than US$20 million. Come May, investors may be able to query a souped-up version of the [SEC] database that will return results in the form of a spreadsheet, or an elegant graphic. In the example above, a user wouldn't actually search the original SEC database. Rather, she would dig through the new mirror of the database, coded in eXtensible Markup Language, or XML. 'The challenge is to visualize the Internet,' Malamud said. 'Our plans are much more grandiose than just visualizing a federal government database.' But the EDGAR mirror is a good step toward taking the power of XML out of the realm of the abstract and arcane, where it currently resides, and placing it in the hands of actual end users. . . The EDGAR database is a good test of the team's XML prowess. It consists of about one million documents occupying 40 GB of data. The SEC adds about 30 MB of new documents a day. Malamud said Invisible Worlds, the pair's company in Redwood City, California, will mark up the documents with XML and post them on its mirrored site. When the site goes live, it will be accessible through Invisible Worlds' Web site." See also

• [April 02, 1999] Microsoft Database to Support XML." By Wylie Wong and Mike Ricciuti. In CNET News.com (March 31, 1999). "The next version of Microsoft's database software will support XML, an emerging Web standard, according to company executives. Four months after releasing SQL Server 7.0, Microsoft is designing its next-generation database, code-named Shiloh, with several new features including XML, a standard that simplifies the exchange of data over the Web and corporate networks, said Dave Wascha, Microsoft's XML product manager. Wascha said Microsoft has even transferred Adam Bosworth, the company's chief XML expert, into the SQL Server group. But Wascha would not confirm whether Bosworth would be working on XML support for SQL Server, or some other technological area of the database."

• [April 02, 1999] "If You Meet a Data Bigot on the Road, Kill Him." By Lou Rosenfeld. In WebReview.com (April 02, 1999). [Web Architect] ". . . Data is highly structured; documents are semi-structured, and there is a lot of variation and ambiguity in how you might structure documents. That's why, for example, a legal transcript is structured differently than a newspaper article. And why there are so many DTDs (Document Type Definitions) in the XML world. Why should you care about the differences between data and documents? Two words: snake oil. Motivated by commercial gain or just plain ignorance, a few bad eggs in the data community will try to tell you that data and documents are essentially the same, and should be modeled and retrieved in the same way. . . "Dave Blair's 13 Reasons Why Data and Document Retrieval are not The Same. . ."

• [April 01, 1999] "Automatically Constructing the Intersection/Union/Difference of Schemata." By MURATA Makoto (Fuji Xerox Information Systems). Presentation slides from the paper delivered at the XTech '99 Conference, San Jose, March 7 - 11, 1999. The paper abstract: "This talk demonstrates a new technology for automatically constructing the intersection/union/difference of two schemata. The hedge automaton theory provides the foundation of this technology. First, input schemata (written in XSchema) are converted to hedge automata (formerly called forest automata). Second, by applying boolean operations to these hedge automata, an output hedge automaton is constructed. Last, the constructed automaton is converted to a schema (again, written in XSchema). The internal representation and boolean operations of hedge automata are built on top of the "Grail" automaton construction toolkit." See also in this connection "Regularity and Locality of String Languages and Tree Languages" (also by Makoto), and "SGML/XML and Forest/Hedge Automata Theory."

• [April 01, 1999] "Active TEX and the DOT Input Syntax." By Jonathan Fine. To be presented at TUG '99, on Wednesday, August 18, 1999 in the session 'TeX in Publishing'. "The usual category codes give TEX its familiar backslash and braces input syntax. With Active TEX, all characters are active. This gives the macro programmer complete freedom in defining the input syntax. It also provides a powerful programming environment. The dot input syntax, like TROFF, uses a period at the start of the line as an escape character. However, its underlying element, attribute and content structure is based on SGML. It is both easy to use and easy to program for. Conversion to other formats, such as SGML, HTML and XML, or to proprietary formats such as Word and RTF, will be straightforward. This is because the DOT syntax is rigorous. This new syntax will be described and demonstrated. All manner of problems connected with TEX disappear when Active TEX packages are used. For example, all input errors can be detected and corrected before they cause a TEX error message. This will make TEX accessible to many more users." Note: This document [also in HTML] is a preliminary version of a paper to be presented to the 20th Annual Meeting of the TEX Users Group (Vancouver, Canada, 15-19 August 1999). Jonathan Fine wrote similarly on CTX (1999-04-01): "Active TeX. I've written a TeX macro package that makes all characters active. With Active TeX, every character is a macro! Believe it or not, many problems with TeX can as a result be solved. For more information visit http://www.active-tex.demon.co.uk/."

• [April 01, 1999] "BUS: An Effective Indexing and Retrieval Scheme in Structured Documents." By Dongwook Shin, Hyuncheol Jang, and Honglan Jin [Department of Computer Science, Chungnam National University, Taejon, South Korea]. Pages 235-243 (with 16 references) in Digital Libraries '98. Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Digital Libraries (Held June 23-26, 1998). New York, N.Y.: Association for Computing Machinery, 1998. Abstract: "In recent digital library systems or the World Wide Web environment, many documents are beginning to be provided in the structured format, tagged in mark up languages like SGML or XML. Hence, indexing and query evaluation of structured documents have been drawing attention since they enable to access and retrieve a certain part of documents easily. However, conventional information retrieval techniques do not scale up well in structured documents. This paper suggests an efficient indexing and query evaluation scheme for structured documents (named BUS) that minimizes the indexing overhead and guarantees fast query processing at any level in the document structure. The basic idea is that indexing is performed at the lowest level of the given structure and query evaluation computes the similarity at a higher level by accumulating the term frequencies at the lowest level in the bottom up way. The accumulators summing up the similarity play the role of accumulating all the term frequencies of the related part at a certain level. This paper also addresses the implementation of BUS and proves that BUS works correctly. In addition, along with several experiments, it shows that BUS facilitates efficient indexing in terms of space and time and guarantees the reasonable retrieval time in response to user queries. . . The basic idea is that indexing is performed at the leaf elements of the given structure and query evaluation computes the similarity at higher level by accumulating the weights at the lowest level in the bottom up way. It underlies the result of R. Wilkinson that 'the retrieval of whole documents can he carried out effectively using just their parts' in part and the idea of UID (Unique element IDentifier) that enables to compute ancestor element of a given element fast." See the bibliographic entry for references.

March 1999

• [March 31, 1999] "An Investigation of XML with Emphasis on Extensible Linking Language (XLL)." By Justin Ludwig. March 23, 1999. An Independent Study Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the College of Wooster and the Program in Computer Science. Advisor: Dale Brown. Abstract: "This paper describes Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents. It explains how to construct XML documents with Document Type Descriptions (DTDs), XML Namespaces, Extensible Linking Language (XLL), Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Level 1. Each chapter includes a real-world case study of XML usage related to the chapter. This paper also describes an XML browser that can process and display XLL hyperlinks. It includes a full implementation in Java, using the Document Object Model (DOM) Core Level 1." See the fuller description of Link in the 'XML Linking Software' section. [local archive copy]

• [March 30, 1999] "Procurement-software vendors look to the sell side." By Tim Clark. In CNET News.com (March 29, 1999) [E-Commerce]. "Commerce One and Ariba Technologies are waging a pitched battle in the market for systems that automate billions of dollars of routine purchases for corporate America. This fight goes beyond selling paper clips and airline tickets. It's part of a larger effort by many vendors seeking to help companies put catalogs, purchase orders, and approvals online. The goal: save time and money. Vendors estimate companies spend between $40 to $100 per purchase order, which usually goes toward processing paperwork. Today, Commerce One responded [to Ariba] by launching MarketSite.net [supported by XML technology], which requires only a Web browser, not Commerce One's software, to make purchases. Commerce One will run the U.S. purchasing site, hosted by MCI WorldCom, but it announced partnerships with British Telecom for Europe and NTT for Japan to run similar marketplaces there. Commerce One also is opening up MarketSite.net to allow rival makers of procurement software to tie into the Commerce One site. The first to announce that its customers can use MarketSite.net is Right Works. Users of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software from giant SAP, an investor in Commerce One, also can purchase from Commerce One's site."

• [March 30, 1999] "Putting E-Commerce Into Words. Global Group Using New Technical Language to Bridge Gap on Net." By P.J. Huffstutter. In LA Times (March 29, 1999). "Business-to-business electronic commerce is blocked by a war of words. Companies doing business on the Internet keep returning to the same point: Buyers and sellers aren't speaking the same digital language. RosettaNet, a high-tech global business consortium, hopes to change all that. The Santa Ana-based organization is using a new technical language on the World Wide Web as the base for building a lingua franca for the electronic marketplace. This digital pidgin aims to close the gap between the Internet's promise of an open electronic marketplace and today's reality of incompatible, proprietary systems." See also "RosettaNet."

• [March 30, 1999] "GroupWise goes to pieces. New framework to leverage XML. " By Paul Krill and Emily Fitzloff. In InfoWorld Volume 21, Issue 13 (March 29, 1999), page 14. "Novell in 2000 plans to mold its GroupWise messaging system into a component-based platform, anchored by a back-end server and Web-based clients in a framework based on Extensible Markup Language (XML). The latest incarnation of GroupWise will include an application framework, in which all data is exposed via XML. XML is becoming critical to Novell's plans, said a Novell executive hinting at a broad-based XML strategy for the company."

• [March 30, 1999] "Web Trading Hub Moves a Step Closer to Reality." By Jim Kerstetter. In PC Week [Online] (March 29, 1999). "Commerce One Inc. has laid the foundation for a major business-to-business Web trading hub, long the Holy Grail of online commerce. The Walnut Creek, Calif., developer this week will unveil MarketSite 3.0, procurement software designed to facilitate a variety of relationships and transactions for companies doing business on the Web. The new iteration of MarketSite removes much of that complexity. Using a free Extensible Markup Language tool called the XML Commerce Connector, all companies -- not just those that are using Commerce One software -- will be able to tie their buying applications into the MarketSite portal." See the Commerce One press release of March 29, 1999.

• [March 30, 1999] "XML - Noun or Adjective?" By Brian Travis [Managing Editor]. In <TAG> Volume 13, Number 3 (March 1999), pages 1, 4-5. "Everyone is beside themselves this month concerning trademarks. Most XML people don't know that 'XML' is a trademark of MIT and the W3C. Our editor has been through this before, and is getting a headache thinking about the ramifications. . . Travis says: 'My suggestion is that the W3C should just put "XML" in the public domain, and not worry about how it is used. They might have done that, already, by not going after anyone for using the mark without permission. Just remove the trademark and let us get on with the work that "XML technology" can achieve. It is enough to give a guy an Excedrin headache'."

• [March 30, 1999] "If Not DTDs, Then What?" By Bob DuCharme. In <TAG> Volume 13, Number 3 (March 1999), pages 1-3. "On an XML discussion mailing list, someone once claimed that no one would use DTDs if they were optional. Why bother, he asked, with something that just restricts your freedom when creating documents? XML Specification coeditor Tim Bray replied that the opposite effect had happened: people complained that DTDs did not allow enough restrictions. This article corrects most peoples' misconceptions that the current work on schemas in the W3C don't constitute alternatives to the DTD, but different ways of representing the DTD. [. . .] None of the four [current schema] proposals will ever 'win' as the accepted alternative to traditional DTD syntax. Instead, the W3C has assembled an XML Schema Working Group to evaluate the proposals and then construct a new proposal combining their best features, and probably adding some new ones as well. The Working Group's membership includes at least two authors, editors, or contributors involved in the creation of each of the original four proposals."

• [March 30, 1999] "XML Parsing, SAX, and the DOM." By Neill A. Kipp. In <TAG> Volume 13, Number 3 (March 1999), pages 5-8. "Every XML document has a textual representation that is strictly defined by the W3CXML Recommendation (http://www.w3.org/XML/). But for an XML document to be 'understood' by a computer, it must be 'parsed.' The result of the parse is a 'parse tree.' While parse trees come in many forms, the purpose is plain. If the parse tree of a document uses the XML grammar exactly, then the document is an XML document. XML is useful for structuring information and SAX is useful for reporting the key features of those structures to applications. Meanwhile DOM is a way that applications can maintain XML-oriented structured information in memory or in databases. Is the DOM really necessary? Or will XML and SAX suffice? [...] XML is superb: it is critical for smart information management and canonical document interchange. SAX is good: XML applications can use SAX as a standard interface to XML parsers. But while DOM is a useful way to think of 'database' XML, dynamic- DOM confuses the boundaries between data, presentation, and programming. Therefore I will continue to write XML."

• [March 29, 1999] "Putting The Pedal To The XM-etaL." By Mel Duvall. In Inter@ctive Week [Online] (March 29, 1999). "General Motors is launching a significant effort to gain access to a sea of information in its legacy systems - by deploying Internet technologies based on eXtensible Markup Language. The giant automaker earlier this month announced plans to build an application architecture framework that will allow it to roll out Web-based applications for internal and external use. Software built on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) will be a key component of the new architecture, allowing applications to reach into, and share information from, previously incompatible sources. Over the years, GM has accumulated some 8,500 legacy systems to run its operations, most of which are mainframe applications. They access 110 terabytes of data, stored in processing centers around the globe. A large percentage of those applications cannot share or exchange data, requiring specialized knowledge to get at the underlying information. . . DataChannel is one of the early vendors working with GM on the automaker's initiative. It has developed a portfolio of software, training, design and integration services built around deploying XML-based systems in the enterprise."

• [March 29, 1999] "Enterprise Information Portals and XML." Keynote presentation by Norbert H. Mikula. Presented Tuesday, March 16, 1999, 5:30 p.m, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Sponsored by the SGML Forum of New York. "Information is one of the most important assets -- if not the most important one -- of a modern-day company and XML is likely to become the general standard for the markup of information in web-based applications. Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) enable workers at all levels of an organization to get access to information on a personalized level. XML is a natural fit for EIPs as it provides an abstraction layer for all kinds of legacy data - on the level of metadata as well as actual data. The presentation will discuss the problems of information distribution/contribution, approaches to this problem and what role XML does/will play." See the announcement from Chet Ensign for other background. Note: [as of March 29, 1999] the presentation is available in Streaming Media format. The SGML Forum of New York "is a nonprofit corporation which promotes the effective use of SGML and related technologies (e.g., XML, HTML, composition, databases, etc.) through education, the free exchange of information, and by contributing to the further development and expansion of the Standard. [It] sponsors quarterly events consisting of a specific topic with a keynote speaker or a case study and a vendor presentation, providing our members with an opportunity to network with SGML/XML professionals who are involved in SGML/XML related projects.

• [March 29, 1999] "XML Buoys Databases for Corporate Markets. Web and XML Keep Object-Oriented Databases Afloat in a World Gone Relational." By Brett Mendel. In InfoWorld (March 29, 1999). "For some time, the object-oriented database market has languished in a sea of arcane development requirements. But thanks to the emerging Web document standard designed to continue where HTML leaves off -- Extensible Markup Language (XML) -- proponents of object-oriented DBMSes (ODBMSes) are now thinking that their ship has come in. . . Until now, ODBMSes have been largely confined to highly technical niche markets and corporate settings with the resources to assemble sophisticated object-oriented systems. However, XML with its use of tags to describe data types, could be seen as the perfect match for similarly enabled ODBMSes. [this has tended to leave object databases out in the cold, but] Beckoning them inside is XML. ODBMSes' capability to accommodate unique data in the hierarchical, object-oriented nature of XML-defined meta data, or intelligence about the kind of data residing therein, should help make ODBMSes a major tool for taming complex Web sites and moving important corporate data to the Web, experts said. And this time, it may be relational DBMSes (RDBMSes) feeling the chill. Although object-oriented approaches are viewed as ideally suited to XML -- with its unlimited, developer-defined tags -- the tables, rows, and columns of traditional RDBMSes are ill-fitting."

• [March 29, 1999] "Web Architectures Rule Future Development." By Michael Vizard. In InfoWorld Volume 21, Issue 12 (March 22, 1999), page 5. "As the application development paradigm shifts from client/server to Web-based architectures, there are a handful of technologies that will be critical in any IT organization's future. Within the context of client/server, the dominant technologies were Windows, Visual Basic, C++, and the relational database. In a Web-based architecture, the dominant technologies are the browser, Java, Extensible Markup Language (XML), application servers, object-enabled databases, and asynchronous message queues. Although this may seem more complex than client/server, these technologies combine to have two desirable effects. On the front end, it makes it possible for the scores of people who have acquired application development skills using HTML to build more complex programs, such as an XML-based application that is linked to a transaction engine. What makes that possible is a new wave of application servers that will make it easier to leverage transaction processing monitors from companies such as IBM and BEA."

• [March 29, 1999] "Procurement Shifts To Portals." By Richard Karpinski. In CMPNet TechWeb News (March 26, 1999). "Commerce One will move beyond electronic procurement next week and lay out broad plans to enable the building of open-trading marketplaces worldwide. Commerce One will introduce MarketSite3.0, the latest version of its software platform to build and link online trading communities via a flexible XML-based architecture. . . It also will unveil new deals with international carriers BT and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, which will join MCI WorldCom in the United States in hosting large MarketSite trading communities. With MarketSite 3.0, those three umbrella-trading hubs can be linked via XML, as well as to any future communities built with the platform."

• [March 29, 1999] "XML: Revenge of the Nerds." By Brian Walsh. In Network Computing (April 05, 1999). "The future of e-commerce will depend upon protocols such as IOTP (Internet Open Trading Protocol). Let's step back for a second and examine the foundation on which IOTP is based--XML (Extensible Markup Language)--and what it means to you. . . XML is no longer a bleeding-edge technology. The browser you are using today supports it. Vendors from Allaire to webMethods support it. Major database companies, including Oracle, Sybase and Informix are now aware that XML is more than a blip on the radar screen. Expect products from them to publish the results of queries as XML and import XML into their tables."

• [March 29, 1999] "XML Aims To Cut Costs." By Vicki August and Justin Hibbard. In CMPNet TechWeb News (March 24, 1999). "Everybody likes a standard, especially if it promises to simplify information exchange between businesses. XML looks set to do just that. What started as a better way to build a Web page is now being heralded as the definitive method to integrate data sources by technology giants Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Netscape. . . nvestment banker Merrill Lynch also said XML offers huge cost savings. In many cases, XML can save between 30 percent and 60 percent of the cost of distributing data, said Ben Meiry, director of collaboration. 'There's no question that XML is a standard for common data exchange,' he said. Later this year, Merrill Lynch will use XML to distribute news and financial data to desktop systems. Merrill Lynch is also experimenting with using XML to distribute data to handheld devices such as PalmPilots." On Merrill Lynch and XML, see also "XML Gains Ground -- Vendors Pledge Support As XML Stands Poised To Become A Universal Format For Data Exchange. [Top Story]" By Justin Hibbard, Gregory Dalton, and Jeff Sweat. In Information Week Issue 725 (March 15, 1999).

• [March 29, 1999] "Sun extends Java to support XML." By James Niccolai. In CNN News [Tech] (March 26, 1999). "Sun Microsystems has announced it is creating an extension for the Java platform to provide support for the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The company said this move will make it easier for developers to build applications that integrate the two technologies. The extension will take the form of a standard API that will be developed using the Java Community Process, which takes input from multiple vendors to define Java standards. . ."

• [March 29, 1999] "Sun gives a hill of JavaBeans for e-commerce." By Wylie Wong. In CNET News.com [Enterprise Computing] (March 25, 1999). "Sun Microsystems is designing a blueprint for software developers who want to use Enterprise JavaBeans to build applications for e-commerce, enterprise resource planning, and other needs. The core product in the Enterprise Edition is EJBs. [Sun's Bill] Roth said it will likely include a new version of EJBs--version 1.1 -- that will offer XML support and possibly other new features. Sun is working with other Java vendors, including IBM, on the specification."

• [March 29, 1999] "Will Sun's Java2 Pack In Too Much?" By Charles Babcock. In Inter@ctive Week [Online] (March 24, 1999). "Sun will spell out how it plans to implement Java2 Enterprise Edition (EE) in mid-June, when the annual JavaOne conference convenes in San Francisco. However, some developers say Sun Microsystems is trying to include too much in the package and that its size may weigh it down. . . 'It's getting oversized. It's too complex,' says Bob Bickel, chief technology officer at Bluestone Software. Java2 EE will enjoy only limited success as "XML [eXtensible Markup Language] overtakes EJB as the thing that developers build to," he says. Bluestone produces an XML server as well as Sapphire/Web, a Java application server.

• [March 26, 1999] "Beyond SGML." By Roger Price. Pages 172-181 (with 23 references) in Digital Libraries '98. Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Digital Libraries Pittsburgh, PA. June 23-26, 1998. "The International Standard for the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) published in 1986 is now seen as a mature language for expressing document structure and is accepted as the basis for major projects such as the Text Encoding Initiative and important hypertext languages such as HTML and the XML. The historical origin of SGML as a technique for adding marks to texts has left a legacy of complexities and difficulties which hinder its wide acceptance. A key difficulty is the dual role that SGML documents currently play: they are both a representation for interchange and a human readable presentation. We examine possible document markup techniques in a post-SGML 86 world with emphasis on the framework architecture and the inclusion of richer agent behaviour. The novel ideas include the generalized recursion of elements and attributes, and the generalization of the notion of a 'character' to much broader token which is strongly typed." See particularly the document sections "Relation between grammar and document" and "The recursion of elements and attributes" ['SGML 86 allows mutual recursion of elements, but not recursions between elements and attributes. The overall design may be simplified by removing this restriction; at the same time allowing more general structures to be created in the ASN.l style. SGML 86 also distinguishes between the content of the those elements which have content, and the other properties represented by attributes. This also seems to be an artificial complexity which we shall remove.'] - NB. This article may be of interest to researchers working on XML schemas; the main bibliography entry provides a fuller summary, and link to the online version.

• [March 26, 1999] "An XML Framework for Agent-Based E-Commerce. Emerging standards for commercial document exchange promise open business-to-business e-commerce." By Robert J. Glushko, Jay M. Tenenbaum, and Bart Meltzer. In Communications of the ACM (CACM) Volume 42, Number 3 (March 1999), pages 106-114. [Department Theme: Agents in E-Commerce] "Today's Web gives people unprecedented access to online information and services. But its information is delivered in format-oriented, handcrafted hypertext markup language (HTML), making it understandable only through human eyes. Software agents and search engines have difficulty using the information because it is not semantically encoded. Clever programmers work around some of HTML's inherent limitations by using proprietary tags or software that 'scrapes' Web pages to extract content. Unfortunately, such ad hoc approaches do not scale. Proprietary tags require browser plug-ins, and scraping approaches require a customized script for each Web site. These approaches balkanize the Web, making it inaccessible to agents. Tomorrow's Web will use the extensible markup language (XML) to encode information and services with meaningful structure and semantics that computers can readily understand. In Internet commerce, companies will use XML documents for publishing everything from product catalogs and airline schedules to stock reports and bank statements. They will also use XML forms to place orders, make reservations, and schedule shipments. Any agent with the proper authorization will be able to obtain computer-interpretable data sheets, price lists, and inventory reports through the Web or email, then request quotes, place orders, and track shipments. By making the Web accessible to agents and other automated processes, XML will fundamentally transform the nature of e-commerce."

• [March 26, 1999] "Share the Ontology in XML-Based Trading Architectures. First Bring Semantic Order to the World of XML." By Howard Smith and Kevin Poulter [Ontology.Org]. In Communications of the ACM (CACM) Volume 42, Number 3 (March 1999), pages 110-111. [Department Theme: Agents in E-Commerce] "Recent e-commerce application activity involving the extensible markup language (XML) has led to a proliferation of XML-based standards and markup language proposals. Among them are several designed to support site-to-site Web automation that lean naturally toward the agent paradigm of distributed computation. Although XML represents a major step forward in e-commerce technology, business-to-business trading partners should also recognize XML's limitations. . . How should foundation ontologies (from which higher-level content is composed) be defined? How can the numerous heterogeneous e-commerce frameworks (such as ICE, OBI, OTP, and XML/EDI) be unified to enable the expected low-friction market of the future? And will the future electronic marketplace be dominated by a series of commerce islands with trading groups isolated by the proprietary protocols and domain models with which their commerce agents interact? [. . .] Consistent schema semantics will certainly enable efficient e-commerce using predefined DTDs between fixed networks of trading partners. But to enable the full benefits of agent-based e-commerce -- where agents act in an autonomous or semiautonomous way, comparing and contrasting products or suppliers and negotiating with other agents -- participating agents have to communicate in terms of a detailed ontology of the business domain. The challenge for technology vendors, e-commerce participants, and standards bodies is to capitalize on the experience available in the knowledge representation and distributed agent communities." A related version of the document is available as a white paper from Ontology.Org: "The Role of Shared Ontology in XML-Based Trading Architectures." - 'Ontology.Org is contributing to the development of XML-based Web-agent architectures by developing foundation ontologies and associated XML schemas.'

• [March 26, 1999] "W3C's Berners-Lee urges agent-readable Web sites." By Jeff Partyka. In InfoWorld (March 25, 1999). "Internet-commerce Web site developers need to make the data on their pages more easily identifiable by search engines and agents, according to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Director Tim Berners-Lee. 'Your data needs to be understood not by people, but by machines,' Berners-Lee said during his Internet Commerce Expo (ICE) keynote address here Thursday. Berners-Lee strongly urged I-commerce developers to start migrating toward the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which, according to the W3C's Web site, 'integrates a variety of Web-based meta-data activities including site maps, content ratings, stream channel definitions, search engine data collection (Web crawling), digital library collections, and distributed authoring, using XML [Extensible Markup Language] as an interchange syntax.' Berners-Lee said widespread RDF adoption will vastly improve Web searching."

• [March 25, 1999] "Novell Exec Plays up Forthcoming Role of XML." By Emily Fitzloff. In InfoWorld (March 24, 1999). "In his annual 'Future Technologies' keynote speech this Friday -- the closing day of Novell's Brainshare '99 -- Novell Chief Technology Officer Glenn Ricart plans to discuss the possible implications of supporting the Extensible Markup Language (XML) in Novell's products. 'XML is an interesting standard for representing structured data, and it could be very valuable in sharing directory information and even sharing digitalme information,' Ricart said in an interview earlier this week. Digitalme is the digital identity technology that Novell announced earlier this week for creating more secure, personal Internet services. According to Ricart, the contents of Novell Directory Services and of NetWare would potentially be more valuable to developers if the data could be represented in XML. 'XML is ideal for the interchange of data,' Ricart said. 'For example, objects recognizable within the directory might be represented in XML and likewise, objects recognized by the directory might be represented in XML'."

• [March 25, 1999] "The KDE Office Suite. A Glimpse Into the Future." By Reginald Stadlbauer. Translated from German ['Officepaket für KDE. Ein Blick in die Zukunft'] by Uwe Thiem and Andreas Pour. Originally published in the German Linux Magazine (March 1999). "File Formats: In general, all KOffice applications save their data as XML. There already are Document Type Definitions (DTDs) for most of the KOffice parts, though they are not yet completely implemented. With the decision to use XML as the native file format, KOffice certainly is embracing the future. . . a filter manager that simplifies the development of filters for various data formats already exists. While currently few file filters are supported, the principal obstacle has been that many data formats are inadequately documented and often contain binary data, making filter writing non-trivial. But several format filters have already been started. In the future KOffice will support the most popular file formats, such as WinWord, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF and MIF." See also from the KOffice FAQs document [Jost Schenck]: "All KOffice applications store their document data as XML code (eXtensible Markup Language). So KOffice files are stored in a more or less human readable form with 'tags' similar to the ones you know from HTML. Like with HTML, this also garantees compatibility when the file format is going to be extended in the future: like an HTML browser, KOffice applications skip the tags that are unknown to them, so you're going to be able to read files created with a newer version of KWord with an older version (of course without the information provided by the new tags). XML is stored in simple text files and can easily be parsed - so it's possible to write filters e.g., in Perl."

• [March 24, 1999] "Current Events On The 'XML For E-commerce' Front." By Mark Merkow. In Internet.com Web Reference (March 18, 1999). [Updated news on industry efforts to extend XML to E-commerce. Learn what Ariba Technologies and Microsoft are up to. . .] "In early March 1999, the Ariba.com Network was launched, establishing the largest worldwide business-to-business commerce network using the Internet. Ariba.com connect buyers and suppliers with services that offer content and catalog management, order transaction routing, and multiprotocol support for sharing content and transaction information.Ariba's approach to content management employs indexing techniques rather than content aggregation. Through their Operating Resource Management System (ORMS), standardized access and control of supplier catalog data provides comprehensive and robust searching capabilities for interested buyers. Multiprotocol support eases the routing and translation of transaction data across a number of industry standards, including cXML, Internet EDI, Value-Added Network (VAN) based EDI, OBI, secure HTTP, e-mail, auto-FAX, and Catalog Interchange Format (CIF)."

• [March 24, 1999] "XML for the Absolute Beginner. A Guided Tour from HTML to Processing XML with Java." By Mark Johnson. In JavaWorld (April 1999). "This article will present the history of markup languages and how XML came to be. We'll look at sample data in HTML and move gradually into XML, demonstrating why it provides a superior way to represent data. We'll explore the reasons you might need to invent a custom markup language, and I'll teach you how to do it. We'll cover the basics of XML notation, and how to display XML with two different sorts of style languages. Then, we'll dive into the Document Object Model, a powerful tool for manipulating documents as objects (or manipulating object structures as documents, depending upon how you look at it). We'll go over how to write Java programs that extract information from XML documents, with a pointer to a free program useful for experimenting with these new concepts. Finally, we'll take a look at an Internet company that's basing its core technology strategy on XML and Java. . . [Conclusion:] Using XML with XSL or CSS, you can manage your Web site's content and style, and change style in one place (the style sheet) instead of editing piles of HTML files or, worse, editing the scripts that produce HTML dynamically. Using SAX or DOM, you can treat Web documents as object structures and process them in a general and clean way. Or, you can leave browsers behind entirely and write pure-Java clients and servers that talk to each other -- and other systems -- in XML, the new lingua franca of the Internet. Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, has perhaps best described the power of XML and Java together in its slogan: Portable Code -- Portable Data. Start experimenting with XML in Java, and you'll soon wonder how you ever lived without it."

• [March 24, 1999] "XML-Anwendung - Verknüpfung von Webdaten mit XML." By Ingo Macherius, Peter Fankhauser, and Gerald Huck. In iX - Magazin für professionelle Informationstechnik (April 1999), pages 90-112.

• [March 24, 1999] "Was bringt XML? iX zeigt XML auf der CeBIT 1999 - XML-Demo in XML und HTML." By [iX, Henning Behme]. CeBIT 1999 Presentation, 23 slides in HTML. Text in German.

• [March 24, 1999] "Novell Lays out Plans to Reinvent GroupWise." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (March 23, 1999). Novell in 2000 plans to mold its GroupWise messaging system into a component-based platform, anchored by a back-end server and Web-based clients in a framework based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), Novell officials said here at BrainShare '99 Monday. Instead of deploying large, monolithic messaging applications, users will be able to assemble the pieces they want, such as workflow and document management, said Novell's John N. Gailey, director of directory-enabled applications, based in Orem, Utah. The new iteration of GroupWise will include an application framework, in which all data is exposed via XML. Users will be able to customize the platform with such utilities as a homemade rules processor, Gailey said. Novell Directory Services (NDS) will be used for setting access privileges."

• [March 24, 1999] "Whisper 1.0 - a new opensource Mac/Win32 C++ app framework." By Jesse Jones. In MacTech (March 18, 1999). "Whisper is a free general purpose Mac/Win32 C++ application framework. It's the successor to the Mac framework Raven. Like Raven Whisper is a modern framework that takes advantage of templates, multiple inheritance, STL, and exceptions. It's also designed around the notion of Design by Contract and includes numerous debugging tools. The Esoterica [layer] includes automata classes, a regular expression class, a compression class (based on zlib), a simple text parser, a more complex parser (it builds parse trees), and a validating XML parser."

• [March 23, 1999] "E-commerce too expensive? Take a look at XML." By Maurice Martin. In Washington Business Journal (March 22, 1999). "Everyone is looking to the future of e-commerce, and some see it in a new technology called the extensible markup language (XML). But to understand what XML is, you first have to understand what it's not. . . 'XML will make e-commerce faster and cheaper for everyone,' said Charles Goldfarb, an expert in computer markup languages. How can XML do this? Well, think of the Euro, the new currency introduced by the European Union this year. The idea is that if people don't have to spend time and effort converting their money from one currency to another when they move between countries, everything will move faster and easier. The economy will heat up, and everything will become cheaper. And, alread