September 2002

• [September 30, 2002] "XML to Drive Office Update." By Peter Galli. In eWEEK (September 30, 2002). "The next version of Microsoft Corp.'s Office productivity suite will come with XML support baked into Word, allowing users to, among other things, more effectively mine their data. Code-named Office 11, the suite will feature built-in support for XML in Word, allowing developers to create 'smart' documents that automatically search for code or updates as needed. In addition, the software -- the first beta of which is expected to be announced by company CEO Steve Ballmer at Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Fla., on October 9 [2002] -- will allow developers to use Word as a development platform to create XML templates and solutions, as well as re-purpose content with database and Web service interaction, said Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president of productivity and business services, in an interview with eWeek... Arbitrary schemas, also known as "open" or "customer" schemas, let users define their own tags in a way that suits their businesses. In Office 11, applications will be able to interact with customer-defined schemas -- unlike Office XP, in which Excel 2002 uses Spreadsheet XML..." See also the image for "Programmable Task Pane and Baked-In XML Let Data be Imported Into Word File" and the text from the interview: "[Raikes:] what we are doing that is very exciting is using XML capabilities more fully in the next major release such that the Office tools become a way to connect into functionality that will be specific to certain verticals. For example, we were just reviewing the idea of Excel accepting information done in a schema for financial reporting, so you can compare different companies. There's a vertical characteristic to that, but it's not a specific product for that. Today we have a small-business version [and a] student and teacher license edition, but there will be nothing beyond this. But there are things that people will do that will supplement Office for various vertical industries... Office 11 is a big step forward in this regard because of the arbitrary schema approach, where you have a standard schema for reporting financial information and immediately be able to access that data without massaging it. In Word too, which is a tool people use to create content. If you can have access to XML schema associated with content databases within your organization, you can dramatically pull that boilerplate text... the arbitrary XML schema element is the most interesting because your ability to connect up with business application systems grows phenomenally because you don't have to write Excel specifically for a financial reporting schema or a content management schema. It just knows how to accept a new schema and do the right thing. And that's what we do in Office 11... our Task Pane now also becomes programmable in XML so that as part of accepting that schema the actions that are associated with how to operate on that schema can be defined by the person who programmed the solution as well. So in effect it becomes a mechanism that guides you through the solution that's built on Office..." See: "Microsoft Office 11 and XDocs."

• [September 30, 2002] "The Importance of TMX." By David Pooley (SDL International). In Globalization Insider: The LISA Newsletter Volume XI, Number 3.6 (September 26, 2002). ISSN: 1420-3693. TMX Special Issue. "TMX stands for Translation Memory eXchange. OSCAR (Open Standards for Container/Content Allowing Re-use) is the LISA Special Interest Group responsible for its definition. OSCAR members include translation tools developers, service providers and other interested parties (e.g., large translation clients). They came together over five years ago to specify a way in which translation memory data could be exchanged between tools and/or vendors with little or no loss of critical data in the process. OSCAR has recently voted TMX version 1.4 as an accepted standard... TMX is an XML format for the interchange of translation memory data. As such, it consists of elements (with attributes) that provide information about translation "segments". The size of a segment is not pre-defined and it will usually be a phrase, sentence or paragraph. For most tools using TMX, the default segment size is a sentence. Within each segment of TMX, there are optionally elements that provide information about the formatting contained in the segment (change of font, hyperlink etc.). TMX also provides for the definition of text "subflows" such as footnotes and index entries..." Note: The TMX 1.4a Specification (OSCAR Recommendation, 10-July-2002) "defines the Translation Memory eXchange format (TMX). The purpose of the TMX format is to provide a standard method to describe translation memory data that is being exchanged among tools and/or translation vendors, while introducing little or no loss of critical data during the process... TMX is defined in two parts: (1) A specification of the format of the container (the higher-level elements that provide information about the file as a whole and about entries). In TMX, an entry consisting of aligned segments of text in two or more languages is called a Translation Unit (the <tu> element); (2) A specification of a low-level meta-markup format for the content of a segment of translation-memory text. In TMX, an individual segment of translation-memory text in a particular language is denoted by a <seg> element. TMX is XML-compliant. It also uses various ISO standards for date/time, language codes, and country codes. TMX files are intended to be created automatically by export routines and processed automatically by import routines. TMX files are 'well-formed' XML documents that can be processed without explicit reference to the TMX DTD. However, a 'valid' TMX file must conform to the TMX DTD, and any suspicious TMX file should be verified against the TMX DTD using a validating XML parser..." References in: (1) the TMX website; (2) "Translation Memory Exchange"; (3) "Markup and Multilingualism."

• [September 30, 2002] "TMX 1.4a." By Yves Savourel, (OSCAR). In Globalization Insider: The LISA Newsletter Volume XI, Number 3.6 (September 26, 2002). ISSN: 1420-3693. TMX Special Issue. "... a standard is only as good as its implementations. TMX follows that rule as well. A compliance kit is incorporated with the new version. This should help developers to implement solid and interoperable TMX functionalities. Tools vendors can develop import and export functions so their applications can read and write TMX documents. Those TMX files must be valid, that is: well-formed XML that can be validated against the TMX DTD. However some aspects of the implementation cannot be verified by the DTD (for example: what type of inline elements the document uses to enclose inline codes). One way to verify a tool does a good job is to provide test case and check that the model TMX documents [in the compliance kit] are the same as the ones generated by the tool. TMX 1.4a has two [certification] levels: Level 1 is for TM with no inline codes (e.g., strings from a resource file), Level 2 is for formats that have inline codes (e.g., HTML content, where bold, italics, etc. are inline codes). Depending on what type of original format you are working with, you should get TMX Level 1 or Level 2. A tool that offer HTML support but doesn't generate TMX document with inline codes is not TMX-compliant. Also keep in mind that tools may perhaps only import TMX or only export TMX (or do both). There are compliance tests for each of those aspects... In general standards such as TMX, OLIF, TBX, or XLIFF are good because they allow the users to have their assets -- whatever they are -- stored in a common and open format. This permits them to use various applications with the same data, and to migrate to newer and better tools without loosing too much data..." [Next version:] "Some additional work to be done would be to provide an XML schema for TMX, in addition to the current DTD, so we can take advantage fully of XML features. A possible addition, linked to XML Schema, would be to allow for non-TMX constructs inside a TMX document, using XML namespaces. This would be more flexible than the <prop> element and the ts attribute currently used for extensibility purpose. And finally, there is the yet-to-be-resolved issue of segmentation. This is not a problem specific to TMX - it affects any TM repository and translation tool in general. Hopefully the Segmentation and Word Count Working Group newly created at OSCAR will be able to bring some solution to the problem, But this will take time..." References in: (1) the TMX website; (2) "Translation Memory Exchange"; (3) "Markup and Multilingualism."

• [September 30, 2002] "A Conceptual Markup Language that Supports Interoperability between Business Rule Modeling Systems." By Jan Demey, Mustafa Jarrar, and Robert Meersman (VUB STARLab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium). Paper prepared for CoopIS 2002 (Tenth International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, October 30 - November 1, 2002, University of California, Irvine). 17 pages. "The Internet creates a strong demand for standardized exchange not only of data itself but especially of data semantics, as this same internet increasingly becomes the carrier of e-business activity (e.g., using web services). One way to achieve this is in the form of communicating 'rich' conceptual schemas. In this paper we adopt the well-known CM technique of ORM, which has a rich complement of business rule specification, and develop ORM-ML, an XML-based markup language for ORM. Clearly domain modeling of this kind will be closely related to work on so-called ontologies and we will briefly discuss the analogies and differences, introducing methodological patterns for designing distributed business models. Since ORM schemas are typically saved as graphical files, we designed a textual representation as a marked-up document in ORM-ML so we can save these ORM schemas in a more machine exchangeable way that suits networked environments. Moreover, we can now write style sheets to convert such schemas into another syntax, e.g., pseudo natural language, a given rule engine's language, first order logic... The ORM conceptual schema methodology is fairly comprehensive in its treatment of many 'practical' or 'standard' business rules and constraint types. Its detailed formal description makes it an interesting candidate to nontrivially illustrate our XML based ORM-markup language as an exchange protocol for representing ORM conceptual models...We describe the main elements of the ORM-ML grammar and demonstrate it using a few selected elementary examples. A complete formal definition of the grammar for this ORM-ML is an XML Schema instance... ORM-ML allows the representation of any ORM schema without loss of information or change in semantics, except for the geometry and topology (graphical layout) of the schema (e.g., location, shapes of the symbols), which we however easily may provide as a separate graphical style sheet to the ORM Schema... Verbalization of a conceptual model is the process of writing its facts and constraints in pseudo natural language sentences, which assumedly allows non-experts to (help) check, validate, or even build conceptual schemas. In ORM-ML, generating such verbalizations from agreed templates (i.e., 'template NL' syntax) parameterized over the ORM schema is done by building separate XML-based style sheets. Moreover, multilingual style sheets also become easier by translating these template sentences into different languages, its parameter values (which come from the ORM schema) translated by a human or machine..." See: (1) "STARLab Object Role Modeling Markup Language (ORM-ML) Represents ORM Models in XML"; (2) "STARLab ORM Markup Language (ORM-ML)." [cache]

• [September 30, 2002] Employment Tax e-file System Implementation and User Guide 2003. Forms 940, 940PR, 941, 941PR, 941SS, and Related Schedules. US Internal Revenue Service, Electronic Tax Administration. IRS Publication 3823 (Draft). 135 pages. Appendix B: Name Control Conventions; Appendix C: Street Abbreviations; Appendix D: Postal Service State Abbreviations and Zip Code Ranges; Appendix E: Sample Form 9041; Appendix F: Sample Form 8633; Appendix G: Glossary of Terms. "This publication contains the procedural guidelines and validation criteria for the Employment Tax e-file System. Planned implementation of the System for Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Processing Year 2003 includes the following forms, schedules, and attachments: Form 941; Forma 941PR; Form 941SS; Form 940; Form 940PR; Form 941 Schedule B; Forma 941PR Anexo B; Form 941c; Forma 941c; PIN Registration; Payment Record. Formatted return files will be transmitted electronically via the IRS Electronic Management System (EMS), located at the Tennessee Computing Center (TCC). Formatted PIN Registration files will be transmitted electronically via EMS, located at the Austin Submission Processing Center (AUSPC). Software Developers and Transmitters should use the guidelines provided in this document along with electronically published XML Schemas, and Test Scenarios in order to develop and test their software for use with this system. You may obtain additional copies of this publication by calling 1-800-829-3676. The publication is also available electronically on the IRS Web Site, in the 94x XML Developers' Forum (www.irs.gov)..." See references in the news item "US Internal Revenue Service Establishes Online XML Developers' Forum for Employment Tax E-file System." [cache]

• [September 30, 2002] "OMB Names Microsoft and IBM Tools as E-Gov Platforms." By Jason Miller. In Volume 21, Number 28 (September 16, 2002), page 7. "Slowly, a plan is emerging for taking the administration's 24 Quicksilver projects from ideas on paper to interactive online services. Mark Forman, the Office of Management and Budget's associate director for IT and e-government, said by next summer agencies will choose from two Web service platforms that will let the e-government initiatives more easily handle transactions. He said the platforms will be the IBM Grid Computing Platform and the next generation of Microsoft .Net using Extensible Markup Language. The platforms will build on what OMB identified in April as the two underlying technologies for the 24 projects, Java2 Enterprise Edition and .Net... To provide links between disparate applications, the selected Web services platforms use technologies such as Web Service Definition Language; Universal Discovery, Description and Integration; and Simple Object Access Protocol. The links between unrelated applications will let agencies share transaction engines or services more easily because different pieces of software or hardware will have interfaces with one another through XML schemas. Forman said there are many areas where Web services could cut costs by integrating functions. For instance, financial management could include debt collection, payment processing and reporting applications, he said. The keys to applying a Web services platform include identifying agencies' common functions and interdependencies and evaluating the barriers that prevent them from sharing information, Forman said. The plan for meshing some services comes as many agencies are preparing to release the second iterations of their initial sites and portals, although some have yet to roll out their first online services... Two other projects came online earlier this summer, Forman said. The Health and Human Services Department put an E-Grants portal prototype online, and the Treasury Department's Simplified and Unified Tax and Wage Reporting project put the 94x series of IRS forms on the Web..." See: (1) preceding bibliographic entry; (2) Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office (Fea-Pmo) - 24 Presidential Priority E-Gov Initiatives; (3) IRS (US Internal Revenue Service) e-file system.

• [September 30, 2002] "RLG Best Practice Guidelines for Encoded Archival Description." By RLG EAD Advisory Group. August 2002. 34 pages. "The objectives of the guidelines are: (1) To facilitate interoperability of resource discovery by imposing a basic degree of uniformity on the creation of valid EAD-encoded documents and to encourage the inclusion of elements most useful for retrieval in a union index and for display in an integrated (cross-institutional) setting. (2) To offer researchers the full benefits of XML in retrieval and display by developing a set of core data elements to improve resource discovery. It is hoped that by identifying core elements and by specifying 'best practice' for those elements, these guidelines will be valuable to those who create finding aids, as well as to vendors and tool builders. (3) To contribute to the evolution of the EAD standard by articulating a set of best practice guidelines suitable for interinstitutional and international use. These guidelines can be applied to both retrospective conversion of legacy finding aids and the creation of new finding aids... The document focuses on general issues that cross institutional boundaries." A 2002-09-27 posting from Merrilee Proffitt provides background to this publication; see "RLG Best Practice Guidelines for Encoded Archival Description Now Available": "These guidelines were developed by the RLG EAD Advisory Group between October 2001 and August 2002 to facilitate interoperability of resource discovery by imposing a basic degree of uniformity on the creation of valid EAD-encoded documents, encourage the inclusion of particular elements, and develop a set of core data elements. In fall 2001, RLG charged a reconstituted EAD Advisory Group with revising RLG's existing guidelines for three reasons: (1) an awareness that encoding practices have evolved considerably since pioneering repositories began submitting finding aids under the original 1998 RLG encoding guidelines; (2) an appreciation that the community of EAD practitioners has grown markedly since then, including a significant expansion outside the United States; (3) the knowledge that the impending release of EAD 2002, the updated version of the DTD would of itself require changes in the encoding guidelines. Nine experienced EAD users worked with program officer Merrilee Proffitt to evaluate and rework the existing guidelines; members of the group surveyed best practice documents from a number of different repositories and projects before beginning their task. Group members settled on two key objectives. One was to identify and define the use of a minimal set of EAD elements and attributes complete enough to assure that information in finding aids is adequate to serve the users' needs and yet parsimonious enough to prevent excessive encoding overhead on the creators. Their second objective was to assure that the guidelines stand a reasonable chance of meeting the needs of an international encoding community..." See references in: (1) RLG EAD Support Site; (2) EAD Round Table Help Pages; (3) "Encoded Archival Description (EAD)."

• [September 30, 2002] "Web Services Wars Take Artistic Turn." By Stuart J. Johnston. In XML Magazine Volume 3, Number 6 (October/November 2002), pages 8-9. ['Choreography or orchestration? Industry leaders duke it out over standards for process assembly and management.'] "Lack of standards for service orchestration and business process modeling has been acknowledged as one of the thorniest problems slowing widespread adoption of Web services to date. Several XML-based workflow description languages have sprung up, but so far none has been adopted as a standard. In addition, some experts and vendors have suggested that an additional higher-level syntax, which some term 'choreography,' is also needed. In late June, Sun Microsystems and three partners introduced just that -- a proposed choreography standard aimed at filling in the gaps between existing orchestration technologies. Developed by Intalio, BEA Systems, SAP, and Sun, the Web Services Choreography Interface specification (WSCI) -- pronounced 'whiskey' -- is an XML specification for the flow of messages between interacting Web services... Current orchestration languages -- such as Microsoft's XLang, IBM's Web Services Flow Language (WSFL), and the Business Process Management Initiative's Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) -- focus on the nuts and bolts of passing business-oriented messages back and forth. To date, this has been a very task-oriented approach; although, XLang does attempt to deliver some functionality in what some term 'the choreography layer.' ... In early August, IBM and Microsoft, along with BEA Systems, announced a new specification resulting from a merger of XLang and WSFL [BPEL4WS]... In addition to the orchestration announcement, the IBM/Microsoft coalition proposed two other XML subspecifications: WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination. If adopted, WS-Transaction could threaten work done on other transaction languages, possibly including Business Transaction Protocol (BTP), a standards project overseen by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). While both coalitions say they will submit their specifications to a recognized standards body, neither of them has committed to which one or how soon. A likely choice for either spec would be OASIS, because it governs Electronic Business using XML (ebXML) as well as Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), and is the body to which Microsoft, IBM, and VeriSign submitted the WS-Security specification in June. The question of standards bodies also raises questions as to whether any of the parties plan to charge royalties for the use of intellectual property they may have embedded in either specification. The Sun coalition has already announced that WSCI is available on a royalty-free basis. At press time, however, the IBM/Microsoft coalition would say only that it would follow the royalty policies of the standards body they submit it to... BEA Systems is part of both coalitions, something that analysts say points to the company's potential role as a peacemaker between the warring factions..." See: "Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)."

• [September 28, 2002] "ConTeXtualized Local Ontology Specification via CTXML." By Paolo Bouquet and Stefano Zanobini (Dept. of Computer Information and Communication Technologies, University of Trento, Italy), Antonia Donà and Luciano Serafini (ITC-Irst, Trento, Italy). Presented at the AAAI-02 Workshop on Meaning Negotiation (MeaN-02), July 28, 2002, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. 8 pages, with 6 references. "In many application areas, such as the semantic web, knowledge management, distributed databases, it has been recognized that we need an explicit way to represent meanings. A major issue in all these efforts is the problem of semantic interoperability, namely the problem of communication between agents using languages with different semantic. Following [a paper by Bonifacio, Bouquet, and Traverso], we claim that a technological infrastructure for semantic interoperability between 'semantically autonomous' communities must be based on the capability of representing local ontologies and mappings between them, rather than on the attempt of creating a global, supposedly shared, conceptualization. The goal of this paper is to define a theoretical framework and a concrete [XML-based] language for the specification of local ontologies and mappings between them... Despite the effort for defining a standard semantic for various domains, people seem to resist to such an attempt of homogenization. Partly, this is due to practical problems (it can be very costly to change the overall organization of a database, or the classification of large collections of documents. But we believe that there are also theoretical reasons why this homogeneity is not accepted, and in the end is not even desirable. In fact, lots of cognitive and organizational studies show that there is a close relationship between knowledge and identity. Knowledge is not simply a matter of accumulating 'true sentences' about the world, but is also a matter of interpretation schemas, contexts, mental models, [and] perspectives which allow people to make sense of what they know. Therefore, any attempt of imposing external interpretation schemas (and a definition of meaning always presupposes some interpretation schema, at least implicitly) is perceived as an attack to an individual's or a community's identity. Moreover, interpretation schemas are an essential part of what people know, as each of them provides an alternative lens through which reality can be read. Thus, imposing a single schema is always a loss of global knowledge, as we throw away possibly innovative perspectives... If we accept that interpretation schemas are important, then we need to approach the problem of semantic interoperability from a different perspective. Instead of pushing towards a greater uniformity, we need a theoretical framework in which: (1) different conceptualizations (called 'local ontologies') can be autonomously represented and managed (and, therefore, we call them contextualized); (2) people can discover and represent relationships between local ontologies; (3) the relationships between local ontologies can be used to semantic-based services without destroying the 'semantic identity' of the involved parties... We see meaning negotiation as the process that dynamically enable agents to discover relationships between local ontologies. The goal of this paper is to create an 'environment' in which the preconditions for meaning negotiation are satisfied. In particular, on the one hand, we define a theoretical framework in which local ontologies and mappings between them can be represented; on the other hand, we provide a language for describing what we call a context space, namely a collection of contexts and their mappings; this language is called ConTeXt Markup Language (CTXML) and is based on XML and XML-Schema. Local ontologies are represented as contexts... we will use knowledge management as our main motivation for contextualized local ontologies; however, as we said at the beginning, we believe that similar motivations can be found in any semantically distributed application, e.g., the semantic web..." General references: "Conceptual Modeling and Markup Languages." [cache]

• [September 28, 2002] "Linguistic Based Matching of Local Ontologies." By Bernardo Magnini, Luciano Serafini, and Manuela Speranza (ITC-Irst Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Trento, Italy). Presented at the AAAI-02 Workshop on Meaning Negotiation (MeaN-02), July 28, 2002, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. "This paper describes an automatic algorithm of meaning negotiation that enables semantic interoperability between local overlapping and heterogeneous ontologies. Rather than reconciling differences between heterogeneous ontologies, this algorithm searches for mappings between concepts of different ontologies. The algorithm is composed of three main steps: (i) computing the linguistic meaning of the label occurring in the ontologies via natural language processing, (ii) contextualization of such a linguistic meaning by considering the context, i.e., the ontologies, where a label occurs; (iii) comparing contextualized linguistic meaning of two ontologies in in order to find a possible matching between them. differences, but by designing systems that will enable interoperability (in particular, semantic interoperability) between autonomous communities. Autonomous communities organize their 'local knowledge' according to a local ontology. A local ontology is a set of terms and relations between them used by the members of the autonomous community to classify, communicate, update, and, in general, to operate with local knowledge. Materializations of a local ontology can be, for instance, the logical organization of a web site used by the community to share information, the directory structure of a shared file system, the schema of a database used to store common knowledge, the tag-structure of an XML schema document used to describe documents or services shared by the members of the community. In all these cases, we think that two of the main intuitions underlying local ontologies are the following: (1) Each community (team, group, and so on) within an organization has its own conceptualization of the world, which is partial (i.e., covers only a portion of the world), approximate (i.e., has a degree of granularity), and perspectival (i.e., reflects the community's viewpoint on the world -- including the organization and its goals and processes); 2. There are possible mappings between different and autonomous conceptualizations. These mappings cannot be defined beforehand, as they presuppose a complete understanding of the two conceptualizations, which in general is not available. This means that these mappings are discovered dynamically via a process that we call meaning negotiation... In the [Section 2] we define a theoretical framework, context space, were local ontologies and mappings between local ontologies are represented. A context space is composed of a set of contexts and a set of mappings. Contexts are the main data structure used to represent local knowledge, mappings represent the results of matching two (or general many) contexts. In the Section 'Linguistic-based interpretation' we describe the computing of the local semantics of a context. Knowledge in a context is represented by structured labeled 'small' linguistic expressions, as complex noun phrases, prepositional phrases, abbreviations, etc. The semantics of this structure is computed by combining the semantics of each single label... In the last section we describe how the local semantics of the labels of different contexts are compared in order to find possible overlaps and mappings between two structures and finally we draw some conclusions..." [cache]

• [September 28, 2002] "Framework for a Music Markup Language." By Jacques Steyn. Paper presented at MAX 2002 - International Conference Musical Application using XML, September 19 - 20, 2002, State University of Milan, Italy. "Objects and processes of music that would be marked with a markup language need to be demarcated before a markup language can be designed. This paper investigates issues to be considered for the design of an XML-based general music markup language. Most present efforts focus on CWN (Common Western Notation), yet that system addresses only a fraction of the domain of music. It is argued that a general music markup language should consider more than just CWN. A framework for such a comprehensive general music markup language is proposed. Such a general markup language should consist of modules that could be appended to core modules on a needs basis... What is lacking is an HTML-like music markup language; one that is as simple, yet powerful enough. Creating such a language has become possible after the introduction of XML, but there is as yet no widely accepted language for music, and those that have been introduced focus only on small and particular subsets of CWN (Common Western Notation). Known attempts of XML-based music markup languages are: 4ML (Leo Montgomery), FlowML (Bert Schiettecatte), MusicML (Jeroen van Rotterdam), MusiXML (Gerd Castan), and MusicXML (Michael Good), all of which focus on subsets of CWN. ChordML (Gustavo Frederico) focuses on simple lyrics and chords of music. MML ('Music Markup Language', Jacques Steyn) is the only known attempt to address music objects and events in general. In this paper I will investigate the possible scope of music objects and processes that need to be considered for a comprehensive or general music markup language that is XML-based. The proposed general music markup language, in this case MML, is a work in progress and far from complete. It is possible that further modules will be introduced, or that the organization of modules change due to practical demands. But even in its incomplete state it presently seems to be the only XML-based attempt to describe a very large scope of the domain of music. Other current attempts at marking music focus on a subset of CWN, which is useful in the early days of an XML-based markup language addressing music issues, but which do not address important issues such as performed music or playlists. Hopefully MML can serve as a basis for future joint efforts to comprehensively describe music using XML as basis..." Also available in printable HTML and PDF. See: "XML and Music." [cache, conference reference]

• [September 28, 2002] "The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI)." By Perry Roland (Digital Library Research & Development Group, University of Virginia Library). Paper presented at MAX 2002 - International Conference Musical Application using XML, September 19 - 20, 2002. State University of Milan, Italy. ['This paper draws parallels between the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and the proposed Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), reviews existing design principles for music representations, and describes an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document type definition (DTD) for modeling music notation which attempts to incorporate those principles.'] "... TEI is mute regarding the 'proper' way to compose text. Even when texts are initially created using the TEI DTD, they are still essentially transcriptions of an ur-text. Similarly, the MEI does not attempt to encode all musical expression, but instead limits itself to the written form of music, i.e., common music notation (CMN). Like the TEI, the MEI must also remain unconcerned with how music is created. It is not primarily an aid to musical composition just as the TEI does not function as an aid in the creation of text. Some may see the adoption of CMN as the basis for encoding as too limiting. Legitimate arguments could be made for an entirely new form of music notation for the purpose of electronic transcription. However, common music notation is applicable to a wide range of contemporary and, perhaps more importantly, historical music. It has been eloquently described by Selfridge-Field as 'the cornerstone of all efforts to preserve a sense of the musical present for other and later performers and listeners'. Given its expressiveness, extensibility, nearly universal usage, and longevity, there seems to be little reason not to adopt CMN as the starting point for the MEI. The fact that the MEI fundamentally conceives of music as notation does not limit its usefulness for encoding performance and analytical information. While it cannot rival a human rendition, a basic performance suitable for many purposes may be mechanically derived from the notation. Of course, any additional information necessary to complete this process may also be encoded. Likewise, descriptive and critical information may be included to assist bibliographic and analytical applications. Ultimately, a limited scope makes the design of a representation easier. For example, both the pitch and rhythm models can be greatly simplified when non-CMN requirements are not considered... Because progress toward an encoding standard for music notation is much more feasible when not locked into constant re-invention of past wheels, large parts of the design of the MEI DTD are drawn from existing standards. On the largest scale, the MEI is modeled upon the TEI. At lower levels, the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) system is used to record pitch information, performancespecific data is encoded using elements which have similar names and functions as those in the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard, most of the mark up for text is designed to be familiar to users of HTML, and TEI header and Dublin Core elements form the basis of the meta-data components. Of course, the Unicode standard underlies the character encoding model for XML, obviating the need to re-invent special character encoding schemes. Finally, while it is not a formal standard, a well-known, authoritative source [Gardner Read, Music Notation: A Manual of Modern Practice, 2nd ed., 1979] has been used as the basis for the grammar for music notation parts of the MEI..." An alpha version XML DTD is available. See: (1) "Music Encoding Initiative (MEI)"; (2) general references in "XML and Music." [cache, conference reference]

• [September 28, 2002] "A Comparison of XPDL, BPML, and BPEL4WS." By Robert Shapiro (President and Chief Technology Officer, Cape Visions). Published by ebPML.org. 'Rough Draft' version 1.4, August 27, 2002. 17 pages. "The Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) is representative of a new family of process definition languages intended for expressing abstract and executable processes that address all aspects of enterprise business processes, including in particular those areas important for webbased services. Microsoft's XLANG is another member of this family, as is IBM's Web Services Flow Language (WSFL). These latter two have now been combined in BPEL4WS. In this paper we focus on a comparison of BPML with XPDL, the WfMC proposed standard for an XML-based process definition interchange language. Comments in red have been added to extend the comparison to BPEL4WS, hereafter abbreviated to BPEL... Our primary objective is to clarify the differences between the BPML and XPDL (and BPEL) paradigms. We are interested in exposing what can be done with one language and cannot be done, or done only with difficulty in the other. When simple extensions are possible, we propose them. We are also concerned about the work being done by the three standards organizations: WfMC, OMG, and BPMI..." Note: "ebPML.org promotes a new vision for IT infrastructures shared by many and based on the convergence of several technologies and standards, including but not limited to: Business Process Management Systems, ebXML, Web services, and Content standards such as OAGIS the standard of the open application group, or RosettaNet." See: (1) "Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)"; (2) XML-Based Workflow and Process Management Standards: XPDL, Wf-XML"; (3) "Business Process Modeling Language (BPML)." [source .DOC 2002-09-28, fetch from www.ebpml.org/ for update]

• [September 27, 2002] "Sun Sneak-Previews Next Version of J2EE." By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek (September 26, 2002). "Sun Microsystems this week is previewing the latest version of its J2EE server environment, the first release to include full, baked-in support for Web services protocol. The preview is happening at its JavaOne Japan Developer Conference, and includes a first look at some of the Web services integration Sun has planned for J2EE 1.4. Application server vendors are just beginning to roll out servers supporting the last J2EE release, 1.3, which despite its 'dot' moniker included many significant upgrades. Users also are only beginning to move up to J2EE 1.3. Despite the work involved in a major J2EE upgrade, enterprises are closely watching the latest move, particularly the tighter integration of Web services protocols into the J2EE platform. J2EE 1.4 includes support for UDDI and ebXML registries, SOAP transactions, XML schemas, and processing and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Most application-server vendors already provide fairly comprehensive Web services protocol support, but a formal J2EE version release bakes that support right into the standard platform. 'Using J2EE v 1.4 Web services developers won't have to carefully pick and choose in order to achieve interoperability. They will get it by design,' said Mark Hapner, Sun's architect and co-specification lead for J2EE v 1.4, in a statement..." See "Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition 1.4 (J2EE 1.4) Specification (JSR 151)."

• [September 27, 2002] "Content at Your Fingertips: Better Ways to Classify and Tag." By Michael P. Voelker (Equinox Communications, Inc). In Transform Magazine (October 2002). ['From manual to automated approaches and from content creation to content searching, metatagging helps businesses combat infoglut.'] "[A taxonomy provides] the structure of topics and subtopics that comprises a virtual filing cabinet in which content can be sorted. Placing content into a topic 'bucket' requires no special technology at its most basic level; anyone who's chosen a specific subfolder in which to save a file has done as much. But this fully manual approach becomes impractical and potentially inaccurate as the volume of information increases. It also doesn't necessarily allow for searchable retrieval of content, something that the application of metadata to content does. There are two schools of thought as to when metadata should be applied to content (in a process known as metatagging). The first school advocates applying tags at creation, a theory that, not surprisingly, many vendors in the content management and taxonomy software vendor community support. The second school calls for categorization of content at the search end using various algorithms that analyze content for meaning. These algorithms aren't dependent upon metadata applied to the content along the creation path. This method, again not surprisingly, is championed by categorization and search vendors. Anyone who has followed technology headlines has seen convergence in the marketplace between classification and search vendors and between classification and content management technologies in recent months. For example, search vendor Inktomi acquired classification vendor Quiver in July, and divine acquired Northern Light in January. Where acquisitions haven't occurred, partnerships have, such as taxonomy and classification vendor Stratify integrating with Plumtree and BEA portal offerings, and content management vendor Interwoven integrating with Inktomi. Of course, by definition content management has a classification component, and vendors have worked to enhance the tagging capabilities of their products. For example, Stellent recently added a Content Categorizer that suggests metadata to users when documents are checked in. Interwoven's MetaTagger suggests metadata fields to users and also provides fully automated tagging, if desired. Standard taxonomies (geographic locations and SIC codes) combined with any customized vocabularies developed at the installation ensure the consistency of available metadata that is applied. In automated mode, MetaTagger uses a hybrid approach of rules-based and statistical analyses to suggest metadata and can also 'discover' a customized taxonomy by reviewing collections of stored content. Documentum added auto-categorization and auto-tagging to its content management platform this summer via a new Content Intelligence Services (CIS) module. With prebuilt and custom-designed taxonomies as guides, CIS uses pattern recognition and rules-based logic to assign metatags to content in documents, Web pages, XML components and media assets. The process can be fully automated or combined with manual review..." See also (1) Taxonomy and Classification Vendors and (2) Balancing Human Intervention With Automation.

• [September 27, 2002] "'Bluefin' to Provide Standard SAN Management Interface." By Roger Reich. In InfoStor Volume 6, Number 9 (September 2002), pages 22-24. "The industry is primed to tackle issues surrounding storage management-one of the top concerns of storage users today. For example, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) recently announced the launch of the Storage Management Initiative (SMI), a program dedicated to developing a storage management standard. At the heart of SMI is the Bluefin specification. The Bluefin specification for storage area network (SAN) management began years ago, when SANs had just emerged and multi-vendor interoperability problems loomed large. At the time, no standard interface existed to allow products from multiple vendors to reliably interoperate for the purpose of monitoring and controlling resources in a storage network. Interface technology at the time (developed primarily for the networking, or "pre-SAN," industry) was unable to provide reliable and secure control of resources in complex, heterogeneous SANs. And no single vendor was capable of driving a de facto interface for SAN management... In 2000, the Partner Development Program (PDP) consortium was established, with 17 member companies: BMC Software, Brocade, Computer Associates, Compaq, Dell, EMC, Emulex, Gadzoox, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, JNI, Prisa Networks, QLogic, StorageTek, Sun, and Veritas. This consortium began work on a specification code-named "Bluefin." The objective was to create a standard that would be transferred to the SNIA for completion. The PDP group embraced a new object-oriented interface technology, called Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), being developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) as a foundation for Bluefin. The object model that will be expressed through the WBEM architecture is an extension of the Common Information Model (CIM), also developed by the DMTF. The Bluefin specification will help to accelerate work completed by the DMTF and SNIA. The SNIA's Disk Resource Management (DRM) Technical Working Group has laid the groundwork for developing CIM/WBEM technology for use in vendor products and held its first public demonstration of storage management using the technology in 1999..." [Note: "The core of Bluefin is an object model, built with the CIM (Common Information Model) standard, and a language binding and protocol solution that employs CIM-XML (CIM operations over HTTP), and SLP. Bluefin goes beyond just specifying the object model and documents what implementations need to do in order to acheive interoperability."] See: (1) "SNIA Announces Bluefin SAN Management Specification Using WBEM/MOF/CIM"; (2) "DMTF Common Information Model (CIM)."

• [September 27, 2002] "Sun Software Supports CIM." By Lisa Coleman. In InfoStor Volume 6, Number 9 (September 2002), pages 1, 20. "Claiming to be the first systems vendor to offer storage management software based on the Common Information Model (CIM) standard, Sun Microsystems recently released its StorEdge Enterprise Storage Manager (ESM) software. ESM rounds out Sun's storage management software line by providing storage area network (SAN) visualization, topology reporting, device configuration, and diagnostics in a centralized platform, according to Steve Guido, product line manager in Sun's network storage product group. But relative to competing products, CIM compliance may be the primary differentiating feature. 'CIM is the basis for all of our open standards work, and it will [afford] long-term customer benefits in terms of scalability and rapidly accelerating device support by providing interoperability among various components in SANs and other topologies,' says Guido. The software is also compliant with the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standard and is part of the Sun Open Net Environment (SunONE). Steve Kenniston, an analyst with the Enterprise Storage Group, says that Sun's ESM is on par with other vendors' management software, but differs in its support for the CIM and WBEM standards. 'It has all the features and function sets at a standards-based level to interoperate with not only Sun's management console, but also management consoles from [other vendors]. It really opens up what they'll be able to manage,' says Kenniston... Sun officials cite EMC as their main competitor, while acknowledging that vendors such as BMC Software, IBM, and Veritas also offer some of the same capabilities that ESM provides... Although Sun claims to be the first systems vendor to release CIM-based SAN management software, another company is also claiming to be first with CIM-based management software. StorScape, a joint venture of Eurologic Systems and Hermes SoftLab, is expected to release CIM-based storage management software next month..." See "DMTF Common Information Model (CIM)."

• [September 27, 2002] "Holistic Web Services." By Jeremy Allaire. From Jeremy Allaire's Radio: An exploration of media, communications and applications over the Internet. September 24, 2002. "It's been really interesting to watch the continuing efforts of the Internet industry to define and deliver platforms for web services. I've been involved in helping to define XML protocols for distributed computing for a long time, and Macromedia has put together an extremely powerful yet simple set of software to help people build web services. Last week's Web Services II conference, held by InfoWorld, pulled together the latest thinking and technology in this crucial emerging space. You can read extensive coverage of the event here. But I've continued to be annoyed by the narrow-minded thinking that has dominated discussions of web services to date. Like many IT technologies, the central thrust of the web services worldview has emerged from the classic middleware infrastructure providers, which has in turn colored our thinking on web services significantly. The essential problem is that web services as defined by a core collection of XML protocols (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) focuses almost entirely on API-level application integration, rather than a broader view of how software will be created, distributed and consumed in the future. Most importantly, it lacks any real notion of what the user experience of web services will be (though there are nascent standards efforts such as the Portlet specs, and WSUL)... The over-focus on protocols and middleware reflects the political economy of the IT industry, where control of programming languages, APIs and runtimes draw the most attention because the stakes are so high. There are many people who have actively considered a broader view of web services, one that encompasses the client-side user experience as well as the back-end plumbing that enables transparent use of logic and data in the network. But those people have been few and far between, and certainly not very visible in the broader industry discourse on web services..."

• [September 27, 2002] "IBM Plans WebSphere for Web Services." By Matt Berger. In InfoWorld (September 26, 2002). "IBM Corp. is working to develop new software combining elements of its WebSphere and Tivoli product lines that is designed to allow companies to monitor, meter and bill for Web services, a company executive explained Wednesday. Known as Project Allegro, the effort aims to provide an infrastructure for hosting Web-based applications and services, said Bob Sutor, IBM's director of e-business standards strategy. One example could be a Web-based application run by a bank that gives people access to their banking information using standards-based transactions to collect data from multiple sources. Allegro will be able to monitor the health of the Web service, meter how often customers access the service, and manage the process for charging and billing customers that access a service through what IBM called "electronic contracts." Those contracts could be designed to charge users per transaction or on a subscription basis, Sutor said... Using standard technologies such as XML (Extensible Markup Language) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), the software is being designed to manage any number of Web-based applications no matter where they reside, whether it be on a company's internal servers or elsewhere on the Web. Customers most suited to use Allegro would include carriers that provide wireless services to customers; application service providers that host things like customer relationship management software; as well as enterprises that use Web services internally to allow data to be shared across disparate servers, according to IBM... The software will combine pieces of IBM's WebSphere application server and portal server, in addition to its Tivoli management and security software. An early implementation of the concept was embodied in a project IBM detailed late last year called the Web Services Hosting Technology, Sutor said..."

• [September 27, 2002] "IBM Readying New WebSphere Software For Web Services Hosting. Project Allegro Product Available Next Year." By Elizabeth Montalbano. In CRN (September 25, 2002). "IBM is readying new software to provide a Java- and XML-based infrastructure for the hosting of Web services, an IBM executive told CRN Wednesday. The product, currently in development under Project Allegro, will be branded under the WebSphere software line and combine functionalities from WebSphere application server, portal and commerce products, as well as Tivoli security and systems management software, said Bob Sutor, IBM's director of e-business standards strategy. The new product is built on a host of Web services standards such as WSDL and SOAP and will rely heavily on the WS-Security standard, for which IBM recently announced support in its Tivoli and WebSphere products, Sutor said. IBM will make a reference implementation of the product available on its developerWorks site by the end of the year, with the full product available sometime next year, Sutor said. IBM has not decided on the name or pricing of the product, he added. Sutor used the example of a human resources outsourcing function to illustrate what the Project Allegro product will do. Sutor said that if a company has a Web-based application it wants to offer as a Web service -- e.g., the ability to access salary history and other human resources functions online -- there are contract, billing functions and user registration functions to consider... 'The definition of Web services can sometimes confuse people because they're not sure if you're talking about the application or all the computer science that goes along with that, such as SOAP and WSDL,' Sutor said. He said that Allegro actually brings those two definitions together into one product, showing how IBM is using the Web services standards it has built into its software products as a 'modular framework' to build an infrastructure allowing people to offer Web-based services... Sutor admitted that the flexible definition of Web services -- which has been used both to define a Web-based application offered as a service, as well as the actual linking of applications using XML over the Internet -- might be puzzling to solution providers and companies that want to use the technology..."

• [September 27, 2002] "Extending RSS 2.0 With Namespaces." By Morbus Iff [aka Kevin Hemenway]. 2002-09. "With the recent release of RSS 2.0 by Userland, there's been a healthy amount of discussion over the smallest part of the spec: Extending RSS. This document attempts to clarify that section, by discussing the creation of the blogChannel Module from Dave Winer, and the underlying principles of namespaces. This document is not intended to be the 'end-all, be-all' of namespace discussions. For the sake of simplicity, I've left a lot of things out and I'm not talking in all the 'right technical terms'. If you have a healthy knowledge of namespaces already, you'll probably find something to nitpick about, and that's ok... this document is not definitive but rather an end-level, low-tech bundle of joy. This is a work-in-progress... Without getting overly complicated, a namespace is like a toy chest. 'You can buy as many toys as you want', your Mother says, 'but at the end of the day, be sure to put them away'. You know your Mother has a reason for saying this, because you've seen your Father fall a few times, thus breaking your new toys. The loss of time, money, and back pain mowing lawns is not a pleasant one..." See otherwise RSS-DEV and "RDF Site Summary (RSS)."

• [September 25, 2002] "At the Center of The Patent Storm." By Paul Festa and Daniel J. Weitzner (Director, W3C Technology and Society Activity). In CNET News.com (September 25, 2002). ['If you want to adhere to the latest official protocol for building a Web application, it could cost you. Welcome to the latest controversy roiling the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body responsible for shepherding Web technologies like XML and HTML. This particular controversy began brewing nearly a year ago when the W3C first contemplated a change that would let its working groups incorporate technologies that already had intellectual property claims -- and royalties -- attached to them. The W3C subsequently backed away from that stance in the face of strong opposition and reaffirmed its policy of only recommending royalty-free technologies. But the issue is far from over... Weitzner spoke to CNET News.com about the fate of the W3C's royalty-free policy and potential royalty exception, and about the role of the Semantic Web.'] Excerpts: "What's the core motivation, then, for promoting a royalty-free policy? [Weitzner:] "The critical concern that has led us to push so hard for a royalty-free policy is that for all the different Web software implementers it would be terribly hard to negotiate with the parent holders. They don't have their own patent portfolios or intellectual property lawyers. How are they going to do it? That doesn't mean they can go and steal the IP, but we want to prevent putting them into a situation where they have to negotiate on such a lopsided playing field. We want to create standards that can be implemented without infringing on patents. In some cases, patent holders will still see it in their advantage to disseminate their technology for free... The goal is to avoid these very difficult, time-consuming licensing negotiations that require that implementers have lawyers and patent portfolios that they can trade with. We think there are very important pieces of the Web that can be developed by people who don't have those resources." ... Like the open-source groups? [Weitzner:] "The open-source community has played a really important role at the W3C because, clearly, royalty-bearing standards create a fundamental problem for open-source software. But the need for royalty-free standards would exist even if there were no open-source solutions. What has been so successful about the Web is that its technology can be implemented everywhere by large and small developers, who don't have to worry about these licensing negotiations. The need for royalty-free standards goes beyond just the needs of the open-source community..." See: (1) Patent Policy Working Group Royalty-Free Patent Policy [W3C Working Draft 26-February-2002]; (2) earlier summary of the W3C patent policy discussions; (3) general references in "Patents and Open Standards."

• [September 25, 2002] "Introduction to Xindice. An Open Source Native XML Database System." By Arun Gaikwad (Independent Software Consultant). From IBM developerWorks, Web architecture, XML zone. September 2002. ['This article is an introduction to an Open Source Native XML Database System, called Xindice (pronounced zeen-dea-chay). It is also an introduction to Native XML Database concepts.'] "Xindice is an Open Source Native XML Database System. In this article, you will learn how to: (1) Install Xindice; (2) Create and delete collections; (3) Insert and delete documents into these collections; (4) Use XQuery to query these documents. You can perform these operations on the command line or embed them in Java programs using the Java API. You will also learn to use the Java API to write JDBC style programs to communicate with Xindice. An XML Database System is something which you may think is unnecessary but once you start using it, you wonder how you would survive without it. I say this from personal experience. When I first heard of Native XML Database Systems about two years ago, I completely ignored them thinking that it was just hype. At that time, I was involved in the development of a project for a large financial brokerage company. We were using XML to send and receive financial feed data. It was necessary to save the feed data in some kind of permanent storage. As a Relational Database programmer, my first choice was to use a Relational Database System to save these XML documents. I decided to use CLOBs (Character Large Objects) with a modern RDBMS to save these documents. Since the RDBMS supported a Java API to insert and retrieve CLOBs, this was a very easy task. As our project evolved, I found that this approach had a major drawback. This was nothing but DIDO (Document In, Document Out). Retrieving partial documents or nodes from a DOM tree was not possible. I would have found a tool which saved the XML documents, performed database-like queries on nodes, and retrieved partial or full documents very useful. This is when NXDs came into the picture. If I had to do this project all over again, I would definitely use an NXD. If you need simple DIDO functionality, you might want use an RDBMS to save your documents, but for extended functionality such as Query and Update you should consider an NXD. Sometimes people try to save XML documents into Normalized Relational Database tables by mapping the document nodes into Relational format. This is not always easy. It is relatively easy to build an XML document from RDBMS tables, but not to store them because XML documents are hierarchical and almost free format..." Also available in PDF format. See: "XML and Databases."

• [September 25, 2002] "Canonical XML Encoding Rules (cXER) for Secure Messages. An ASN.1 Schema for Secure XML Markup." By Phil Griffin (Griffin Consulting). Presentation prepared for the RSA Conference 2002 Europe, October 7 - 10, 2002, Le Palais des Congrès de Paris, Paris, France. 19 pages. The ZIP package contains PPT format with additional notes. "ASN.1 is a schema for encoded values: Types describe general structure of abstract values; Each builtin type defines a class, a set of distinct values; Constraints restrict a class and the validity of values; Encoding rules define how abstract values are transferred... Encoded ASN.1 values are binary or text: [1] Binary and XML Canonical Forms (Distinguished Encoding Rules => DER, Canonical XML Encoding Rules => cXER) [2] Each DER encoding maps to a cXER value; The Canonical XML Encoding Rules (cXER) are defined in: ISO/IEC 8825-4 -- ITU-T X.693 ASN.1 XML Encoding Rules (XER). The same ASN.1 value is cXER encoded in one and only one way as a single long string containing no 'white-space' characters outside of data... ASN.1 XML Benefits: [1] A single schema for all values, Binary and text encodings are all based on ASN.1 types (Eliminates multiple schema mappings and Provides an efficient schema for XML values) [2] ASN.1 <=> XML communications (ASN.1 applications can send and receive XML values, Efficient transfer, simple signature processing)..." See: (1) OASIS XML Common Biometric Format (XCBF) TC; (2) the related paper "X9.84:2002: Biometric Information Management and Security." [ZIP source with included PPT, from Griffin Consulting]

• [September 24, 2002] "RSA Solves Your Company's Identity Crisis." By Steve Gillmor. In InfoWorld (September 24, 2002). ['As a founding member of the Liberty Alliance and a driver for the SAML (Security Associates Markup Language) standard, RSA Security is actively involved in finding ways to secure business transactions. CEO Art Coviello met with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor and InfoWorld editors to talk about the strategic importance of security standards for Web services and explain the differences between identity management and authentication.'] "The big strategic thing that is happening right now is the definition of standards around Web services and around security standards for Web services. We're integrally involved in that through our association as a founding member of the Liberty Alliance and as one of the drivers for the SAML standard. The Liberty Alliance is basically designed to create a standard for federated identities so that your identity can be passed to multiple Web sites and be recognized. Creating that standard would allow RSA to create a security solution that makes that identity a trusted identity. It's a very important development, not only for commerce on the Internet but [also as] an opportunity for us to provide a secure solution for these identities... Identity management is more than just the provisioning and creation of an identity. Where RSA adds tremendous value ... is adding the trust, the verification that you are who you say you are. We do that with a combination of technologies: time synchronous tokens, digital certificates, and the ability to manage biometric information if that's one of the ways you use to establish [identity]. It's obviously a heck of a lot more than just creating an identity. It's also more than creating a digital certificate. It's managing those identities, protecting those identities, and making sure that people can trust that that identity is really you... One of the things that we're working on is the SAML, which is a standard for passing on these identity credentials [and] privileges. Not only proving that you are who you say you are, but [verifying] what you get to do, what your authorizations are. For instance, as a purchasing person, you have the ability to sign off on [certain items]. These assertions can be passed along using this standard and understood by other applications that comply with the standard. RSA would be providing the material that would go into the SAML assertion. Not only the trusted identity but also, with our Web access management product RSA Clear Trust, we have an authorization engine that defines what rights and privileges you have and signs you on to multiple applications across the Web..." See: "Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)."

• [September 24, 2002] "The Liberty Alliance Gets New Members, and a President." By Sebastian Rupley. In PC Magazine (September 24, 2002). "The Liberty Alliance -- a consortium of business and technology companies seeking to implement federated standards for authenticating online identities -- has announced 26 new member companies and the appointment of a new president. Michael Barrett, vice president of Internet strategy at American Express, one of the leading partner companies in the Liberty Alliance, will head the organization. The news comes on the heels of Sun Microsystems' delivering the first software layer for implementing Liberty Alliance applications and two weeks after an announcement that a slew of new companies had joined the alliance. Now that the Liberty Alliance has released its 1.0 specification for Liberty-enabled Web services, and Sun has produced a software layer to allow companies to build and test applications, one of the remaining questions is who will oversee standards... the Liberty specification from July was created by the founders of the alliance -- 17 companies, including Sun and AOL -- but that the founders were not officially designated as overseers of Liberty standards. The announcement of Barrett's new role as alliance president did not include any information about new policies for overseeing Liberty standards, although Barrett's role will clearly be to oversee the disparate solutions that various companies may deliver... The other top administrators of the Liberty Alliance include vice president Ian Johnson, who is senior director of strategic technologies at Vodafone, and secretary Bill Smith, who is director of Liberty Alliance technology for Sun Microsystems. Among the 26 new companies joining the alliance are Discover Card, Merck, and Wells Fargo..." See: (1) the announcement: "Liberty Alliance Project Announces New Management Board President and New Members. Michael Barrett, American Express to Help Guide Progress of Growing Consortium - Now More than 120 Companies Strong."; (2) LA complete list of members; (3) Sun Offers Developers Interoperability Prototype for Liberty; (4) "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization."

• [September 24, 2002] "IBM Releases WebSphere Studio 5.0." By Stacy Cowley. In InfoWorld (September 24, 2002). "Version 5.0 OF IBM's WebSphere Studio software for developing Web applications is scheduled for release Tuesday, featuring new tools for working with legacy applications written in Cobol and PL1 and support for the latest batch of open-source standards and software. WebSphere Studio 5.0 is the first piece of IBM's WebSphere 5.0 line to launch, and it will be followed soon by other products including WebSphere Application Server 5.0, a version of which is built into the new WebSphere Studio. The software comes in two versions. WebSphere Studio Application Developer is for building, testing, debugging and deploying Java and J2EE applications. The more advanced IBM WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer includes additional tools for working with legacy applications... Version 5.0 brings to WebSphere Studio new features for coordinating the workflow of multiple back-end applications. It also adds support for J2EE, Version 7.2 of both Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux, Version 2.0 of the IBM-backed Eclipse open-source IDE (integrated development environment) and several new Web services standards. The key advantage of the new WebSphere Studio is its openness, said WebSphere Director of Marketing Scott Hebner. More than 175 plug-ins from vendors including Rational Software, Interwoven,and Macromedia are now compatible with Eclipse, giving developers significant customization choices and the freedom to focus on building applications rather than integrating tools, he said..." See the announcement: "First In Industry, IBM Delivers Single, Cross-Enterprise Development Environment For Web Services. IBM WebSphere Studio Version 5 Relies on Latest Open Technologies to Advance Web Services."

• [September 24, 2002] "Analysis: IBM's Tool Strategy -- How WebSphere Stacks Up." By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek (September 24, 2002). "IBM is placing a major emphasis on development tools as part of its next-generation IT strategy. It's a bit of a departure -- tools have never been a big business -- but one that many other leading software players are aping as well. Here's how IBM's tool strategy stacks up with some key rivals... IBM vs. Microsoft: This is the key battle of course, and one IBM is throwing all its weight behind. Microsoft's strength is its ubiquity, which starts with Windows, obviously, but also extends to its development tools, from its C++ tools on through the popular Visual Basic and Web-age features like ASP and now .Net. IBM's major weapon here is Eclipse, its open-source development tools framework project, which it hopes can give it the developer seats and third-party market that will help it catch up with Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net. Can support for Linux, Eclipse, Apache, and other open-source projects -- backed with its deep expertise in the legacy world of mainframes and message queuing -- help IBM topple Microsoft? The verdict is out... IBM vs. Sun: Now [IBM and Sun] are pursuing similar tools strategies. They both have development tools, open-source tools frameworks (IBM's Eclipse to Sun's NetBeans) and the full suite of middleware server software. Sun has been much later to the game in supporting Web services (Microsoft's early backing of SOAP arguably threw Sun for a loop) and is just now catching up with what it calls 'LAMP' -- Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. But Sun is fully backing those technologies now. For these two competitors, the thing to watch is who can better play the standards and open-source game..."

• [September 24, 2002] "The Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB)." Public Draft. Version 0.7. Status: Pre-FCS. September 12, 2002. 188 pages. Edited by Joseph Fialli and Sekhar Vajjhala. The JAXB Public Draft and API Documentation are available for download. The Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) "provides an API and tools that automate the mapping between XML documents and Java obects. JAXB makes XML easy to use by compiling an XML schema into one or more Java technology classes. The combination of the schema derived classes and the binding framework enable one to perform the following operations on an XML document: (1) unmarshal XML content into a Java representation; (2) access, update and validate the Java representation against schema constraint; (3) marshal the Java representation of the XML content into XML content. JAXB gives Java developers an efficient and standard way of mapping between XML and Java code. Java developers using JAXB are more productive because they can write less code themselves and do not have to be experts in XML. JAXB makes it easier for developers to extend their applications with XML and Web Services technologies. The public version of the specification is available with the following enhancements over the previous released early access version V0.21: Support for a subset of W3C XML Schema and XML Namespaces; More flexible unmarshalling and marshalling functionality; Validation process enhancements..." From the JAXB V0.7 Introduction: "The primary components of the XML data-binding facility described in this specification are the binding compiler, the binding framework, and the binding language. (1) The binding compiler transforms, or binds, a source schema to a set of content classes in the Java programming language. As used in this specification, the term schema includes the W3C XML Schema as defined in the XML Schema 1.0 Recommendation [XSD Part 1 and Part 2]. (2) The binding runtime framework provides the interfaces for the functionality of unmarshalling, marshalling, and validation for content classes. (3) The binding language is an XML-based language that describes the binding of a source schema to a Java representation. The binding declarations written in this language specify the details of the package, interfaces and classes derived from a particular source schema..." As of 2002-09, 'Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB)' is in Public Draft Review through The Java Community Process. A pre-release version of the Reference Implementation and User's Guide is expected by early Q4 CY2002. Note: The Java Web Services Developer Pack (Java WSDP) is also available for download; it has been tested on Solaris 2.8, Solaris 2.9, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and RedHat Linux 7.2. Java WSDP contains: Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM), Java API for XML Processing (JAXP), Java API for XML Registries (JAXR), Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC), SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ), JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL), Java WSDP Registry Server, Web Application Deployment Tool, Ant Build Tool, and Apache Tomcat 4.1.2 container. Java WSDP is "an integrated toolset that in conjunction with the Java platform allows Java developers to build, test and deploy XML applications, Web services, and Web applications. The Java WSDP provides Java standard implementations of existing key Web services standards including WSDL, SOAP, ebXML, and UDDI as well as important Java standard implementations for Web application development such as JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology pages and the JSP Standard Tag Library. These Java standards allow developers to send and receive SOAP messages, browse and retrieve information in UDDI and ebXML registries, and quickly build and deploy Web applications based on the latest JSP standards." [cache JAXB v07]

• [September 24, 2002] "Liberty Alliance Plans Interoperability with Passport." By John Blau. In InfoWorld (September 24, 2002). "The Liberty Alliance Project, which is developing Web technology to facilitate single-sign-on authentication, plans to support interoperability between its system and Microsoft's rival Passport system. 'We see opportunities for interoperability between Passport and Liberty Alliance; this option could be part of a 1.1 specification, possibly later this year,' said Paul Madsen, product manager at Entrust in Addison, Texas, on Tuesday at The Burton Group's Catalyst conference in Munich, Germany. Entrust is a member of the Liberty Alliance consortium, which is made up of vendors, service providers, and enterprise users. The Liberty Alliance, which unveiled its first public release in July, is promoting a standard specification that will allow users to travel the Internet and access applications over networks using a single sign-on. Users logging into a Web site supporting the specification, for instance, could then visit other password-protected Web sites that support the technology without having to sign in again... The Passport single sign-on service allows users to access password-protected sites that support the Microsoft technology without having to re-enter their user name and password each time. According to Madsen, the Liberty Alliance is working on a 2.0 version, which will further simplify the sign-on process. The group hopes to release that version in the first quarter of 2003, he said. At least one industry observer views the Liberty Alliance largely as a U.S.-dominated group, although its members include companies from Japan, the U.K., Germany, and Finland..." See: "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization."

• [September 23, 2002] "Comparison of DAML-S and BPEL4WS." By Sheila McIlraith and Dan Mandell (DAML Research Project, Knowledge Systems Lab, Stanford University). Initial Draft. September 05, 2002 (or later). With 9 references. "... DAML-S and BPEL4WS have broad and somewhat complementary objectives. DAML-S's ServiceProfile complements and extends ideas in UDDI. DAML-S's ServiceGrounding connects the application level content description of a service to communication level descriptions in WSDL. It is the ServiceModel (aka ProcessModel) in DAML-S that relates most closely to the business process model in BPEL4WS. Both provide a mechanism for describing a business process model. With so many candidate formalisms for describing a business process (e.g., XLANG, WSFL, BPMI, BPML, now BPEL4WS, etc.) DAML-S was designed to be agnostic with respect to a process model formalism. Rather, it aimed to provide the vocabulary and agreed upon (necessary) properties for a process models. In so doing, we hoped to remain compatible with what we anticipated would eventually be an agreed upon standard for process modeling. If such a standard did not come to pass, DAML-S would provide a way of talking about different process models, in keeping with the approach and spirit of NIST's Process Specification Language (PSL). Here are some of the features that distinguish/differentiate DAML-S from BPEL4WS..." See: (1) DAML-based Web Service Ontology (DAML-S); (2) "Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)." [Posting to W3C list]

• [September 23, 2002] "DAML-S: Web Service Description for the Semantic Web." Presented at The First International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), June, 2002. 15 pages (with 26 references). By 'The DAML Services Coalition' (alphabetically: Anupriya Ankolenkar, Mark Burstein, Jerry R. Hobbs, Ora Lassila, David L. Martin, Drew McDermott, Sheila A. McIlraith, Srini Narayanan, Massimo Paolucci, Terry R. Payne and Katia Sycara). "In this paper we present DAML-S, a DAML+OIL ontology for describing the properties and capabilities of Web Services. Web Services -- Web-accessible programs and devices -- are garnering a great deal of interest from industry, and standards are emerging for low-level descriptions of Web Services. DAML-S complements this effort by providing Web Service descriptions at the application layer, describing what a service can do, and not just how it does it. In this paper we describe three aspects of our ontology: the service profile, the process model, and the service grounding. The paper focuses on the grounding, which connects our ontology with low-level XML-based descriptions of Web Services. We are developing a DAML+OIL ontology for Web Services, called DAML-S, with the objective of making Web Services computer-interpretable and hence enabling the following tasks: discovery, i.e., locating Web Services (typically through a registry service) that provide a particular service and that adhere to specified constraints; invocation or activation and execution of an identified service by an agent or other service; interoperation, i.e., breaking down interoperability barriers through semantics, and the automatic insertion of message parameter translations between clients and services; composition of new services through automatic selection, composition and interoperation of existing services; verification of service properties; and execution monitoring, i.e., tracking the execution of complex or composite tasks performed by a service or a set of services, thus identifying failure cases, or providing explanations of different execution traces. To make use of a Web Service, a software agent needs a computer-interpretable description of the service, and the means by which it is accessed. This paper describes a collaborative effort by BBN Technologies, Carnegie Mellon University, Nokia, Stanford University, SRI International, and Yale University, to define the DAML-S Web Services ontology. We [...] discuss the important problem of the grounding, i.e., how to translate what is being sent in a message to or from a service into how it is to be sent. In particular, we present the linking of DAML-S to the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). DAML-S complements WSDL, by providing an abstract or application level description lacking in WSDL..." See (1) DAML-based Web Service Ontology (DAML-S); (2) "DARPA Agent Mark Up Language (DAML)." [cache]

• [September 23, 2002] "The Web's future: XHTML 2.0. A Sneak Peek at the Changes." By Nicholas Chase (President, Chase and Chase, Inc). From IBM developerWorks, Web architecture. September 2002. ['Over the years, HTML has only become bigger, never smaller, because new versions had to maintain backward compatibility. That's about to change. On 5 August 2002, the first working draft of XHTML 2.0 was released and the big news is that backward compatibility has been dropped; the language can finally move on. So, what do you as a developer get in return? How about robust forms and events, a better way to look at frames and even hierarchical menus that don't require massive amounts of JavaScript.'] "This article takes a sneak peek at what's new in XHTML 2.0 and how you might one day put it to use. Readers should be familiar with HTML and/or XHTML 1.0... When the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first working draft of XHTML 2.0 on 5 August 2002, the major surprise was that, unlike its predecessors, it was not backward compatible. With previous releases, such as the move from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0, and later to XTHML 1.1, the changes were about additions; a browser that could read XHTML 1.0 (Transitional) documents could also understand HTML 4.01 documents. Not so with XHTML 2.0. If, two years ago, you had announced that today we'd be looking at a version of HTML without an img tag or a bold tag, the vast majority of Web developers would have looked at you in disbelief. Yet here it is. In addition to replacing both forms and frames outright, XHTML 2.0 removes the b, i, and img tags (as well as big, small and tt), and even deprecates br in preparation for removing it from a future release. But why? The reason is that most of these tags are presentational. Their sole purpose is to give the browser instructions on how their contents should look, while providing absolutely no information on what their contents are... whole purpose of stripping out presentational elements is to try to finish the job the inventors of CSS started, namely that content should be marked up according to what it represents, and style sheets should be used to make it look pretty... The only thing that is certain about the 5 August 2002 working draft of XHTML 2.0 is that nothing about it is certain. It will almost definitely change in some way between now and adoption as a recommendation, but the goal of emphasizing structure and semantics isn't likely to change. For this reason, it's a good idea to take a look at the pages you build now, and start getting into the habit of using structure and styles appropriately. Use markup to designate what something is, not what it should look like, and use CSS to do the rest. Overall, think more about the structure of your documents and what you want them to do, and not necessarily so much about what they should look like..." See: "XHTML 2.0"

• [September 23, 2002] "Arbortext Helps US Airways' Mechanics Find Information Faster." By Linda Rosencrance. In ComputerWorld (September 23, 2002). "US Airways Group Inc., for example, must create, publish and maintain more than 13 different publications that support the maintenance of its entire fleet of 300 aircraft, which handle more than 1,400 flights every day. Finding the right information used to take US Airways' mechanics as long as 15 minutes using a combination of microfilm and paper documents, says Stanley Davis, manager of electronic publications at the Arlington, Va.-based airline. To shorten those delays, the airline turned to publishing software from Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Arbortext Inc. to overhaul its documentation production process and convert its manuals from print to an electronic format, says Davis. Using Epic Editor, Arbortext's XML-based authoring and editing software, US Airways created a central data store of content components that can easily be searched, managed, tracked and improved, Davis explains. Changes that occur in one manual are now easily reflected in other manuals... Based on XML and related standards, Arbortext's Epic Editor is used to create information in a media-independent format that can be stored on a file system or in a content management system. Epic creates a single XML-based source of information and automates the publishing to all types of media, including the Web, print, CD-ROM and wireless devices. The software constrains the author so the structure and content of the information conform to the XML data model the system designer specifies. Because of these constraints, the information is consistent across all platforms. Out of the box, Epic Editor works with file systems and Documentum Inc.'s Documentum 4i. An optional adapter integrates Epic Editor with Oracle Corp.'s 8iFS repository. Also available are integrations with repositories from Empolis GmbH and Xyvision Enterprise Solutions Inc. Epic Editor is compatible with Windows 95, 98, 2000 and NT 4.0, and Solaris 7 and 8... 'The ultimate success of your implementation depends on your data model, so that's the one area where you must not skimp,' says P.G. Bartlett, a spokesman for Arbortext. 'Whatever investment you make in outside experience will be returned many times in lower implementation costs and greater rewards'..."

• [September 23, 2002] "OAGIS 8: Practical Integration Meets XML Schema." By Mark Feblowitz. In XML Journal Volume 3, Issue 9 (September 2002), pages 22-28. "When asked to join the OAGIS modernization project (OAGIS 8), I leapt at the chance. Here were two renowned specifications just waiting to get acquainted: (1) Open Applications Group's OAGIS, the solid, proven Integration Specification, an early XML application (1998) with a lot of miles on it, and (2) W3C's XML Schema Recommendation, a sophisticated new metamodeling chassis, ready to be road tested The outcome exceeded expectations: OAGIS's established and widely used family of horizontally focused, DTD-encoded interchange messages was updated, eliminating major usability issues inherent in a DTD-based implementation of this scale. At the same time, Schema enabled the horizontal OAGIS specification to employ an extensible architecture, OAGIS 8 Overlay Extensibility, to address the specific needs of vertical industries. Vertical market fit versus broad horizontal reusability has long been a sticking point between competing integration standards - Overlay Extensibility enabled an approach that leverages the strengths of both models. Developing a specification that promotes both horizontal coverage and vertical specialization wouldn't have been possible without Schema's advanced capabilities. However, the experience also opened our eyes to some challenging aspects of developing a usable, practical XML Schema solution to a complex real-world problem. This article describes the Open Applications Group Integration Specification, discusses the enhancements made possible by rearchitecting to Schema, and explores the challenging aspects of applying current Schema technology. Despite those challenges, OAGI architects were able to work with Schema to craft a new OAGIS that sustains proven strengths and adds desirable and innovative features, most notably, Overlay Extensibility..." See the six associated figures: [1] Purchase Order Interchange, Integration Scenario; [2] E-business Integration Scenario; [3] EAI Integration Scenario; [4] Purchase Order BOD schema definition; [5] Extending PurchaseOrderHeader; [6] Table 1: Characteristics of OAGIS 8 BODs. General references: see "Open Applications Group."

• [September 23, 2002] "CDuce: A White Paper." By Véronique Benzaken, Giuseppe Castagna, and Alain Frisch. From the CDuce project. Version 0.27. June 2002 (or later). 15 pages (with 12 references). "In this paper, we present the functional language CDuce, discuss some design issues, and show its adequacy for working with XML documents. Peculiar features of CDuce are a powerful pattern matching, first class functions, overloaded functions, a very rich type system (arrows, sequences, pairs, records, intersections, unions, differences), precise type inference and a natural interpretation of types as sets of values. We also discuss how to add constructs for programming XML queries in a declarative (and, thus, optimizable) way and finally sketch a dispatch algorithm to demonstrate how static type information can be used in efficient compilation schemas." Note: "The starting point of the work on semantic subtyping and CDuce was XDuce. CDuce extends XDuce with first-class and late-bound overloaded functions, and generalizes the boolean connectives (explicit union, intersection, negation types)... CDuce ('seduce') is a new typed functional language with innovative features: (1) a rich type algebra, with recursive types and arbitrary boolean combinations (union, intersection, complement); (2) a natural notion of subtyping, which allows to use a value of a given type where a value of a supertype is expected; (3) overloaded functions with late binding (dynamic dispatch); (4) a powerful pattern matching operation, with dynamic dispatch on types and recursive patterns. Altough is CDuce is a general programming language, it features several characteristics that make it adapted to XML documents manipulation (transformation, extraction of information, creation of documents). Our point of view and our guideline for the design of CDuce is that a programming language for XML should take XML types into account to allow: [i] static verifications of properties for the applications (for instance, ensuring that a transformation produces a document of the expected type); [ii] good integration in a general purpose typed programming language; [iii] static optimizations of applications and storage (knowing the type of a document seems important to store and extract information efficiently)..." See bibliographic entry following. [source Postscript]

• [September 23, 2002] "Semantic Subtyping: Theoretical Foundations for the CDuce Type System." By Alain Frisch, Giuseppe Castagna, and Véronique Benzaken. Paper presented at LICS 2002 (IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science), July 22-25, 2002, Copenhagen, Denmark. 10 pages. "Usually subtyping relations are defined either syntactically by a formal system or semantically by an interpretation of types in an untyped denotational model. In this work we show how to define a subtyping relation semantically, for a language whose operational semantics is driven by types; we consider a rich type algebra, with product, arrow, recursive, intersection, union and complement types. Our approach is to 'bootstrap' the subtyping relation through a notion of set-theoretic model of the type algebra. The advantages of the semantic approach are manifold. Foremost we get 'for free' many properties (e.g., the transitivity of subtyping) that, with axiomatized subtyping, would require tedious and error prone proofs. Equally important is that the semantic approach allows one to derive complete algorithms for the subtyping relation or the propagation of types through patterns. As the subtyping relation has a natural (inasmuch as semantic) interpretation, the type system can give informative error messages when static type-checking fails. Last but not least the approach has an immediate impact in the definition and the implementation of languages manipulating XML documents, as this was our original motivation." See CDuce referenced in the preceding bibliographic entry. [source Postscript]

• [September 23, 2002] "SVG - The Future of Web Rendering?" By Bill Trippe. In The Gilbane Report Volume 10, Number 6 (July/August 2002), pages 1-11. "... there is still a critical gap between graphically-rich content that is difficult if not impossible to integrate with other enterprise data, and XML data that can be integrated with virtually any enterprise application but usually ends up rendered as graphically-challenged HTML. This month we publish an excerpt from SVG for Designers: Using Scalable Vector Graphics for Next-Generation Web Sites, a new book by Bill Trippe and Kate Binder, published by McGraw Hill... in our article Bill looks at why Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) has the potential to fill this gap. Whether you think SVG will take over the Web or not, it is difficult not to be intrigued with what SVG can do... SVG holds this promise for a few simple reasons. First, vector graphics are a necessary complement to the bitmap graphic formats such as JPG and GIF that now dominate the Web. Vector graphics mean better quality and greater precision for many types of illustrations and artwork, especially technical illustrations and other kinds of artwork created by computer-aided design programs. Second, SVG brings an industry standard approach to creating vector graphics on the Web. Up until now, there have been only proprietary methods for creating vector graphics. Third, and, perhaps most importantly, the SVG standard provides more than vector graphics handling, as it allows for the incorporation of vector graphics, bitmap graphics, text, style sheets, and scripts. Users of SVG cannot only create stand-alone illustrations; they can also create and exercise greater control over the design of entire Web pages. They can also flexibly incorporate other text, other graphics, data, and scripts. And finally, because SVG files are text files, they can be easily generated and manipulated, allowing for applications like data-driven graphics and personalization. SVG gives the graphic designer, using virtually the current standard industry toolbox, the power to create live Web images. Unlike bitmap images, SVG images can dynamically update as the designer, the Web developer, or the end user enter or change data and otherwise interact with the Web image. SVG files can be scripted to automatically take this information and modify the existing graphic or regenerate the graphic. Importantly, SVG often provides this flexibility using less disk space and memory, providing faster upload and download times, and putting more creative control into the graphic designer's hands than current static bitmap technology... Ultimately, SVG will prove itself in how it is used in real-world applications. The compelling thing is that SVG is an entirely open, entirely textual format. It can be easily generated from a database for applications such as dynamic page serving. It can also be modified on the fly for such applications as personalization... Adobe is building SVG support into their products, as is Corel. Perhaps more significantly, database vendors and content management companies are adding SVG support, as they understand well how central SVG is likely to become to Web development and publishing..." Book reference: SVG For Designers: Using Scalable Vector Graphics in Next-Generation Web Sites, by Bill Trippe and Kate Binder (ISBN: 0072225297; August 2002; see Amazon.com). General references: "W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)."

• [September 23, 2002] "Father of Java Has His Eye on 'Jackpot'." By Darryl K. Taft and James Gosling. In eWEEK (September 23, 2002). ['In the seven years since its introduction, Java has made rapid advancements into the enterprise. In the burgeoning field of Web services, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java-based technology is in tight competition with Microsoft Corp.'s .Net initiative for the heart and soul of developers. James Gosling, a Sun vice president and fellow, and father of Java, spoke with eWEEK Senior Writer Darryl K. Taft about Web services, the future of Java, open source software and its impact on the software business, and Sun's success in the tools business.'] "... I've been mostly working on analysis and transformation tools based on having a complete semantic model of the application... It's one where I have the application as a database and then can do analysis on it, though it's not exactly a database, it's more data structure. I keep sort of an annotated parse tree, which means that instead of the way that most tools look at programs as a series of lines and text, with punctuation and letters, left to right on a page, top to bottom, I actually have all of the different entities all related so I can do things like find all the places a particular variable was used, trivially. If I want to rename a class, that's a trivial operation. You're including accounting for changing that name every place that it's occurred. It's easy for me to do things like if you've got any such variable and you make it private, then go and find all the places where that variable is used, turns them into instantiations of access or methods, and if the access or methods don't exist then construct them as well. That's not a difficult thing to do in my experiment test bed. It's still kind of early. It's still a research labs project. The project is called Jackpot." [...] On Web Services: "The way that I look at it, people have been building Web services under different names for 20 or 30 years, so there are a lot of protocols that people have used to build communications between components and across networks, and they've been in pretty wide use for quite a long time. The distinction that SOAP brings to the party over CORBA and XML, some of them are interesting, but I wouldn't call any of them life-changing. One of the descriptions of XML is that it is HTML for a silicon-based life form. Namely it's this observation that we've been building distributed systems for years out of using CORBA and RMI [Remote Method Invocation] and all of that. But as a matter of common practice, people haven't been doing a lot of interconnection between disjointed organizations that also are distributed. And we've had these facilities available on the Web for years through HTML -- things like auctioning and booking reservations. What people have done when they want to write an application that finds things on an auction service is they've essentially screen-scraped the HTML and that's worked perfectly well. It's awkward, but XML is really. One way of looking at XML is a way of cleaning up that process. So I don't see how that changes everything. There's certainly a mindset and a business proposition people have to answer about -- do you want to have what services you are offering on the Web available to other organizations available through something other than the Web? So do you want to have the ability to have applications that other people write talk to your airline reservations or auctioning or online payments or whatever? And I think the real hard issues there are the business ones..."

• [September 23, 2002] "Transform Data Into Web Applications With Cocoon. Use Java to Implement Logic in Cocoon." By Lajos Moczar. In Java World (September 20, 2002). ['If you've read about Apache Cocoon or started dabbling with it, you might be wondering about the best approach for implementing your custom Java logic into it. This article will get you coding with XSPs (Extensible Server Pages) and actions. Lajos Moczar walks you through a few examples of each, including database and email examples, and wraps up with some design principles that'll help you figure out how and when to use these components.'] Cocoon is officially defined as an XML publishing engine, and while technically correct, the description does not do the product justice. The best way to understand Cocoon is to view it as a framework for generating, transforming, processing, and outputting data. Think of Cocoon as a machine that receives data from a wide variety of sources, applies various processing to it, and spits data out in the desired format... We could also define Cocoon as a data flow machine. That is, when you use Cocoon, you define the data paths or flows that produce the pages that make up your Web application. Even a simple hello-world.html page has a data flow defined to serve the page. In Cocoon, you can implement logic in four main ways: Using components called transformers: They do exactly what their name implies: they transform incoming data according to the rules they are given. The classic example is the TraxTransformer, which you can see in action in the pipeline above. In the pipeline using various components that help choose the correct processing path based on various request/session/URI settings. In the pipeline based on stock or custom Java-processing units called actions. Using input files that mix Java and content -- these are called Extensible Server Pages (XSPs). This article covers this list's last two approaches: XSPs and actions. If you develop with Cocoon to any extent, you'll end up using them and probably liking them. Plus, you'll be happy to know that in both cases, you are essentially programming within a servlet context. More correctly, both components (in fact, all Cocoon components) have access to request, response, session, and context objects. Much of the logic you implement interacts with these objects in some way... the overview of XSPs and actions gives you some idea of the possibilities that Cocoon offers... the components provide rather well defined areas in which to implement your own logic. The built-in logicsheets and actions that come with Cocoon can help you do things that you would have to code from scratch in another framework. The advantage is that you can get your Cocoon-based application up and running much faster. And when you couple this with all the other powerful components that Cocoon offers -- like matchers, selectors, generators, transformers, serializers, and readers -- you can build yourself quite powerful Web applications..." [alt URL]

• [September 23, 2002] "Netegrity Ships SAML-Ready Security Platform." By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek (September 23, 2002). "Netegrity said Monday it has begun shipping a new version of its access- and identity-management platform, its first supporting Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standards. The SAML 1.0 standard, which was highlighted in an interoperability test earlier this summer, is expected to be approved by the OASIS group by the end of this month. It provides a mechanism for enterprises to trade so-called 'authentication' tokens between different systems, which will enable applications such as single sign-on. Netegrity's SiteMinder 5.5 enables federated identity and security via support for SAML, Microsoft's .Net Passport platform, and the Kerberos authentication technology. SiteMinder 5.5 enables a proprietary SiteMinder identity to be mapped to a SAML-based identity. SiteMinder creates a standards-based SAML assertion for that individual and makes it available to other sites to consumer. As for Microsoft Passport, Siteminder lets users log in just one time with their Passport ID and then log into all Passport-enabled Web sites and enterprise apps that support Passport authentication. Kerberos support, meanwhile, lets users log in their Microsoft desktop using Windows credentials that are provided with single sign-on to the SiteMinder protected environment..." See the announcement: "Netegrity Ships SiteMinder 5.5 with SAML, Passport, and Kerberos Support. Enables Enterprises to Extend their Security Infrastructure with Federated Identity Services."

• [September 23, 2002] "Practical Matters Rule IBM's Tactics With Competitors." By Brier Dudley. In Seattle Times (September 23, 2002). Excerpt from an edited transcript of a recent interview The Seattle Times had with Steve Mills, IBM Software Division (Senior Vice President and Group Executive). [Q:] How are XML (extensible markup language) and Web services progressing and when will they be broadly adopted? [Mills:] "We've been looking to XML for quite a few years as a way to improve the interfaces between applications, between business processes. The track to leverage XML in Web services is a very long-term, multidecade process. It's a very long process when one considers what are in fact millions of applications that have to be in some way interfaced through this Web services technology and linked together. It's an important change in the industry but a very long change." [Q:] What about the current activity around Web services? [Mills:] "It is certainly rolling now in the sense that we're seeing early adopter activity. Hundreds of businesses around the world are beginning to work with the technology and look for ways to apply it. But you've got to think about it not in terms of single use of the technology but widespread deployment. It's still rising on the height curve but it will reach its peak here from a business standpoint probably over the next year. I would suspect as we get into 2004 everybody will accept this as a commonplace thing. It's like repaving all of the roads in Seattle -- it's probably an important thing to do but you're not going to do it all at once." [Q:] Does IBM plan to collect royalties on the Web-services standards it's developing with Microsoft? [Mills:] "There's been no collection on any of the Web-services standards or proposed standards that have come out so far, nor are there any plans to collect royalties on any of those things. I think that the reality is that what has been coming out here, we've been pushing into Oasis and WC3, which are the accepted standards bodies, which have all come out royalty-free..."

• [September 21, 2002] "Web Services Security Core Specification." Edited by Phillip Hallam-Baker (VeriSign), Chris Kaler (Microsoft), Ronald Monzillo (Sun), and Anthony Nadalin (IBM).