May 2003

• [May 31, 2003] "Introducing WS-Transaction, Part 1. The Basis of the WS-Transaction Protocol." By Dr. Jim Webber and Dr. Mark Little (Arjuna Technologies Limited). In Web Services Journal Volume 3, Issue 6 (June 2003), pages 28-33 (with 6 figures and source code). WSJ Feature Article. "In July 2002, BEA, IBM, and Microsoft released a trio of specifications designed to support business transactions over Web services. These specifications, BPEL4WS, WS-Transaction, and WS-Coordination, together form the bedrock for reliably choreographing Web services-based applications, providing business process management, transactional integrity, and generic coordination facilities respectively. In our previous article we introduced WS-Coordination, a generic coordination framework for Web services, and showed how the WS-Coordination protocol can be augmented to support coordination in arbitrary application domains. This article introduces the first publicly available WS-Coordination-based protocol -- Web Services Transaction -- and shows how WS-Transaction provides atomic transactional coordination for Web services... An important aspect of WS-Transaction that differentiates it from traditional transaction protocols is that a synchronous request/response model is not assumed. This model derives from the fact that WS-Transaction is layered upon the WS-Coordination protocol whose own communication patterns are asynchronous by default... WS-Coordination provides only context management -- it allows contexts to be created and activities to be registered with those contexts. WS-Transaction leverages the context management framework provided by WS-Coordination in two ways. First, it extends the WS-Coordination context to create a transaction context. Second, it augments the activation and registration services with a number of additional services (Completion, Completion WithAck, PhaseZero, 2PC, Outcome Notification, BusinessAgreement, and BusinessAgreementWithComplete) and two protocol message sets (one for each of the transaction models supported in WS-Transaction) to build a full-fledged transaction coordinator on top the WS-Coordination protocol infrastructure... In common with other transaction protocols (like OTS and BTP), WS-Transaction supports the notion of the service and participant as distinct roles, making the distinction between a transaction-aware service and the participants that act on behalf of the service during a transaction: transactional services deal with business-level protocols, while the participants handle the underlying WS-Transaction protocols... No one specific protocol is likely to be sufficient, given the wide range of situations that Web service transactions are likely to be deployed within. Hence the WS-Transaction specification proposes two distinct models, each supporting the semantics of a particular kind of B2B interaction... As with WS-Coordination, the two WS-Transaction models are extensible, allowing implementations to tailor the protocols as they see fit, e.g., to suit their deployment environments..." Previous article: "Introducing WS-Coordination. A Big Step Toward a New Standard," by Jim Webber and Mark Little (Arjuna Technologies Limited). In WebServices Journal Volume 3, Issue 5 (May 24, 2003). [alt URL]

• [May 30, 2003] "Reconstructing J2EE: Java Business Integration Meets the Enterprise Service Bus. Changing the Economics of Integration." By Dave Chappell (Sonic Software; Web Services Journal Technical Editor). In Web Services Journal Volume 3, Issue 6 (June 2003), pages 12-16 (with 5 figures). WSJ Feature Article. "The Java Business Integration (JBI) specification JSR 208 has set out to define a loosely coupled integration model that aligns with Web services-style distributed computing. The JBI expert group hopes to utilize existing J2EE integration components such as the Java Message Service (JMS), J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA), and the J2EE 1.4 Web services APIs, and add a host of new capabilities as well. The charter of the expert group promises to define an open-ended, pluggable architecture that will support both industry-standard integration components as well as proprietary elements through the use of standardized interfaces. Coincidentally, the ESB addresses similar goals. It is based on today's established standards, and has real implementations that have been shipping for at least a year. JBI can learn a great deal from what the ESB approach offers... An ESB is based on a distributed, federated network model. It takes on the responsibility of reliable communication within the network with a common security model, and provides the integration capabilities that allow applications to easily interoperate. Integration capabilities such as data transformation are themselves implemented as services and can be independently deployed anywhere within the network. The result is precise deployment of integration capabilities at specific locations, which can then be scaled independently as required. It also means that services can easily be upgraded, moved, or replaced without affecting applications. Intelligent routing based on content is accomplished through specialized services that apply XPATH expressions to identify a document type and route it based on values within the document. Routing of messages is also accomplished using a message itinerary. Think of a message itinerary as a list of destinations that travels with the message as it moves from service to service, or application to application. The ESB evaluates the itinerary at each step along the way, without the requirement of a centralized rules engine. More complex orchestrations, including stateful, long-duration conversations, are also possible using orchestration facilities. An ESB architecture is well suited for supporting choreography languages such as BPSS or BPEL4WS... Web services have given newfound importance to service-oriented architectures and promise to drive down the cost of integration by providing a standards-based approach to interoperability between applications. The trouble is, what people really want is a new way of doing integration. Until now, we haven't really had a way to incorporate Web services into a meaningful architecture for integrating applications and services into a fabric that spans the extended enterprise in a large-scale fashion. With the advent of the enterprise service bus we have that architecture..." [alt URL]

• [May 31, 2003] "Business Flows with BPEL4WS." By Doron Sherman (CTO, Collaxa). In Web Services Journal. May 2003. With 5 figures. "BPEL4WS is now moving rapidly into becoming the de facto standard for Web service orchestration with most platform vendors following in IBM and Microsoft footsteps after the submission of the specification to OASIS. This increased momentum and visibility will drive a great need for educating developers on how to put BPEL to work. This article illustrates a payment flow example coded using BPEL, highlighting some of the main constructs of the language and demonstrating how the flow can be monitored and managed once it is deployed. The example can be extended in various ways to include more advanced language constructs. Such extensions will be illustrated in subsequent articles... The PayFlow business flow example illustrated in this article is comprised of a client initiating a request to a BPEL process and ending with the process calling back the client with the result of the payment request (receipt). The process includes use of <receive> and <invoke> activities for interacting with the outside world which includes the client (request) and a partner (payment processor service). XML Variables are used for holding messages exchanged between the process and the partners. To make this example interesting, the payment processor service is asynchronous and can take anywhere from several minutes to several days before the service calls back the process. Another interesting element demonstrated by this example is the handling of exceptions and managing of timeouts. These constructs are instrumental to enable a BPEL process to deliver reliable business flows..." See also from Collaxa: Fast facts on BPEL4WS 1.1, BPEL 101 Tutorial, and Sample BPEL Scenarios. General references in "Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)."[alt URL]

• [May 30, 2003] "The Differentiation of Web Services Security. How Can You Leverage Your Investment in Enterprise Security?" By Dave Stanton (Talking Blocks). In Web Services Journal Volume 3, Issue 6 (June 2003), pages 18-20. "Traditional applications are connection oriented, allowing many security details to be implemented at the connection level, and requiring a direct connection between the service provider and consumer. However, Web services are message oriented and lack the guarantee of a direct connection between service provider and consumer, so many traditional connection-oriented approaches to common security challenges are inappropriate or insufficient for a Web services security architecture. In addition, the introduction of Web services into an organization may be the first time that organization has ever allowed external users access to their business applications; the security practices and standards which are appropriate for inside use may be completely unacceptable when outside users are introduced... A Web service security architecture supports message confidentiality through: (1) Encryption of the message itself, and (2) Transportation-level confidentiality schemes. When a message is encrypted to ensure message confidentiality, any portion of it can be encrypted subject to the requirements of the encoding scheme used to include the encrypted data in the message. A Web service security architecture should support the XML-Encryption standard for encoding arbitrary encrypted data in an XML document, applied either through the WS-Security standard for encapsulating encrypted data in a SOAP message, or by arbitrarily replacing portions of the SOAP envelope (including the whole envelope as necessary) with an encrypted data element. When sending messages, a managed external service can generate WS-Security-encoded and encrypted message bodies, which ensures that the message itself is confidential. It may also replace the entire SOAP body with a single XML-Encryption-encoded element for communicating with external services that don't comply with the WS-Security standard. Either system, when combined with proper certificate management, will ensure complete confidentiality between message producer and message consumer... While many enterprises have made an investment in a public key infrastructure to complement their other security initiatives, for those that have not, the reliance on public key cryptography in a Web services architecture can be daunting. A Web service security architecture supports key management using (1) An internal key management facility; (2) An organization's existing XKMS service; (3) An organization's existing Java Key Store architecture. Because many organizations have existing public key infrastructures that provide them with an XKMS service deployed inside their organization, or a Java Key Store-based system that allows access to central registration and certificate authorities, a key management solution allows the use of either one of these types of enterprise key management integration. However, for organizations that don't have an existing public key infrastructure, but which want to use public key-based Web service security systems (such as XML Digital Signatures or Encryption), the organization should provide a key management facility internally that provides a centralized security realm based on certificate management, distributed private key management, and association of certificates and keys with user management facilities..." See general reference list in "Security, Privacy, and Personalization." [alt URL]

• [May 30, 2003] "Mappers Write Cookbook 1.0 for Web Services." By Susan M. Menke. In Government Computer News (May 30, 2003). "The Open GIS Consortium Inc. has put together a batch of not-yet time-tested recipes in Cookbook 1.0, the first in a planned series about Web map services. The Wayland, Mass., consortium's Web Map Service interface specification makes a browser overlay -- a maplike raster-graphic image -- of multiple data layers from one or more distributed geographic information systems. The recipes tell users how to insert a WMS client into various commercial and open-source products such as ESRI ArcExplorer and ArcIMS, FreeBSD, Intergraph GeoMedia WebMap, Java deegree, Microsoft Internet Information Server and University of Minnesota MapServer. A WMS client can be an HTML page returned by a WMS server or a browser plug-in using Java or ActiveX to connect to different servers. The client can specify which layers to display from a specified geographic area, the file formats and the degree of transparency..." See details in the news story "OpenGIS Consortium Publishes Web Map Server Cookbook." General references in "Geography Markup Language (GML)."

• [May 30, 2003] "GSA Chooses Web, XML Access to Data." By Jason Miller. In Government Computer News Volume 22, Number 12 (May 26, 2003). "The cost of reporting data to the Federal Procurement Data Center this fall will drop to less than $1 per transaction from a current average of $32. The General Services Administration expects to save the government about $20 million annually on about 500,000 transactions by revamping the Federal Procurement Data System. GSA late last month awarded Global Computer Enterprises (GCE) a five-year, $24.3 million contract for the upgrade. The deal includes incentive clauses to extend the contract if the Gaithersburg, Md., systems integrator performs well. GCE has tapped Business Objects Inc. of San Jose, Calif., IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp. as subcontractors. GSA evaluated 44 proposals and found GCE's to be the best value, said David Drabkin, GSA deputy associate administrator for acquisition policy. Drabkin was not on the source selection team but reviewed finalists' proposals. 'GCE didn't just talk about what they could do -- they showed us in a prototype,' Drabkin said. 'They also offered us a negative incentive if they didn't meet the Oct. 1 deadline. These two things were pretty significant.' He said the small business offered GSA $100,000 if it failed to get the new system up and running by October 1 [2003]. Under the GCE proposal, GSA will own the data and the company will retain ownership of the hardware and software... The high cost of maintaining the current system, developed in 1979 and updated in 1996, comes from the manual labor agencies and data center staffs must do, he said. Agencies send batch files of procurement information to a feeder system, where data entry personnel further format it. Then data center employees check for errors and enter it into the repository. To reduce costs, GCE will develop and implement a repository system that uses Web services and Extensible Markup Language to connect to agency legacy systems and transfer data, company president Ray Muslimani said... The upgraded system will provide specific information about purchases between $2,500 and $25,000. The current system gives only summarized reports about those buys... Muslimani said the developers must educate agencies about the new system. GCE will publish a directory of Web services codes and XML schemas that will show agencies how to integrate their systems with GSA's..." See the announcement: "Global Computer Enterprises Wins E-Government Contract from GSA. FPDS-NG Will Collect Procurement Data From Across the Federal Government in Real-Time."

• [May 30, 2003] "The HumanML Initiative: Enabling Internet Communication in a Global Market." By Russell Ruggiero. From WSReview.com (May 29, 2003). "Human markup language (HumanML) is a specification being developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). OASIS is a nonprofit consortium that advances electronic business by promoting open, collaborative development of interoperability specifications. In basic terms, HumanML has been designed to represent human characteristics through XML, and is focused on enhancing the fidelity of human communication. While the goals of HumanML may seem ambitious, the vision is very well timed for the dramatic changes currently taking place, such as the explosive Internet growth of the non-Western world. During the next ten years, accurate information exchange between people of different cultures and origins will be a growing concern pertaining to Internet communication. Accordingly, there will be a need for emerging technologies such as HumanML that will improve global communication while advancing the Internet to a higher level. HumanML is an always-evolving standard XML vocabulary designed to represent human characteristics through XML, while at the same time enhancing the fidelity of human communication... The Human Language Primary Base Specification 1.0 finished its 30-day public review December 12, 2002 and is being used to build sample implementations to support its case for approval as an OASIS Standard when it can field three member companies whose documented use can be submitted with the specification for formal approval voting... HumanML describes the XML and resource description framework (RDF) Schema specifications being developed by a designated technical committee at OASIS that contains sets of modules that frame and embed contextual human characteristics. Other significant efforts within the scope of the HumanML Technical Committee, which address the overall concerns of representing and amalgamating human information within data include: Alternative Schema Constraint Mechanisms; Human Physical Characteristics Description; Virtual Reality/Artificial Intelligence; Conflict Resolution applications; Messaging; Object Models; Repository Systems; Style... HumanML may be utilized in government and private projects to help improve information exchange between people of dissimilar cultures and origins. Case in point: HumanML could be used to assist government and private sectors in the Iraq reconstruction effort by enabling interested parties to gain a better understanding of one another, which will ultimately lead to improved information exchange. Thus, it may help to mitigate the incidence of misrepresentation while improving the overall efficiency of the reconstruction effort. In addition, the emergence of HumanML is particularly well- timed and positioned for the anticipated growth of non- Western Internet users in the new millennium. Simply put, HumanML can help bring down many of the current global communication barriers by acting as a bridge that allows people to express themselves in a more cohesive and coherent manner..."

• [May 29, 2003] "OASIS to Develop Common Security Language." By Paul Roberts (IDG News Service). In InfoWorld (May 29, 2003). "A new committee at the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is laying the groundwork for a new classification system to describe Web security vulnerabilities. The OASIS Web Application Security (WAS) Technical Committee will be responsible for developing an XML (Extensible Markup Language) schema that describes Web security conditions and provides guidelines for classifying and rating the risk level of application vulnerabilities... The new OASIS WAS standards will be similar to the list of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) that is used to standardize the description of network level vulnerabilities, said Wes Wasson, vice president of marketing at Netcontinuum in Santa Clara, Calif. Unlike the CVE list, however, WAS descriptions will tackle the thornier issue of describing application vulnerabilities that could be exploited using multiple avenues of attack, Wasson said. The announcement Wednesday follows the formation in April of a related technical committee to develop an XML definition for exchanging information on security vulnerabilities between network applications. The OASIS Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL) Technical Committee is intended to develop standards to deploy heterogenous but interoperable security technology relying on a standardized description of vulnerabilities. The work of the WAS Technical Committee will track closely with that of the AVDL Technical Committee, which will make sure diverse security products can work with the common vulnerability descriptions developed by the WAS group, Wasson said... OWASP plans to submit its Vulnerability Description Language (VulnXML), an open-standard data format for describing Web application security vulnerabilities, to the new committee, OASIS said. That standard should be quickly adopted by the OASIS WAS Technical Committee as its schema for describing attacks, Wasson said. That completed, the Committee will need to focus on the harder task of developing an infrastructure for responding to new vulnerabilities that are discovered. That infrastructure, like the one currently in place for the CVE list, will involve processes for collecting information about new vulnerabilities from companies and security researchers, developing descriptions for those vulnerabilities, then making that information public via a Web site such as the CVE site, which is managed by the nonprofit MITRE..." See details in: (1) the news story of May 13, 2003, "OASIS Members Form Web Application Security Technical Committee"; (2) the press release " "OASIS Works to Establish Classification Standards for Web Security Vulnerabilities." General references in "Application Security".

• [May 27, 2003] "XMPP vs SIMPLE: The Race For Messaging Standards." By Cathleen Moore. In InfoWorld (May 27, 2003). ['As IM bounds ahead in the enterprise, a behind-the-scenes battle is taking place between competing IETF standards.'] "There's a race on for the future of the enterprise messaging system. The contestants are backing competing protocols for IM and presence awareness. Which standard takes home the prize may depend less on technical merits than on brute force. At the head of the competition are SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) and the open-source, XML-based XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). Both are currently being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). SIMPLE backers extol the broad media possibilities of a SIP-based signaling protocol with natural affinities for voice, video, and conferencing. XMPP proponents, on the other hand, tout an XML-based data transport technology that is built to manage IM and presence. SIMPLE is a set of extensions to the established SIP protocol that initiate, set up, and manage a range of media sessions, including voice and video. SIMPLE extensions define SIP signaling methods to handle the transport of data and presence. SIMPLE's designers set out to develop a system that represented the communications state as broadly as possible, supporting presence not just for PC messaging applications but also for devices such as phones and PDAs, says Jonathan Rosenberg, chief scientist at Parsippany, N.J.-based dynamicsoft and co-author of SIP and SIMPLE. 'We realized a long time ago that presence and IM [are] just another facet of communications, and that is what SIP is all about. IM is just like voice and video; it is another aspect of real-time, person-to-person communications,' Rosenberg says. SIMPLE's capability of unifying voice, video, and data messaging appealed greatly to Microsoft, according to Ed Simnett, lead product manager of RTC (Real Time Communications) Server at the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. According to observers, one potential problem with SIMPLE is that it is a paging protocol meant to perform signaling but not to carry anything else... Because of the inherent limitations of SIP and because many SIMPLE extensions are still under construction, the existing implementations of the protocol from Microsoft and IBM have included proprietary extensions. Furthermore, SIMPLE is missing core IM-related functionality such as contact lists and group chat capabilities, according to observers. Another potential pitfall with SIMPLE is that SIP uses both TCP and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) as transport layers. TCP includes congestion control, whereas UDP does not, thereby opening the door for packet loss during times of network congestion... Meanwhile, proponents of XMPP contend that an XML-based data-transport technology is better suited than a signaling technology to handle IM and presence. According to its designers, one major benefit of XMPP is that it can be extended across disparate applications and systems because of its XML base..." See: (1) "Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)"; (2) IETF SIMPLE Working Group; (3) the related news story "IETF Publishes Internet Drafts for XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP)."

• [May 27, 2003] "XML Transactions for Web Services, Part 3." By Faheem Khan. From O'Reilly WebServices.xml.com (May 27, 2003). ['Part 3 in a series explaining XML-based transactions. Faheem Khan describes Business Activities, the next layer up from atomic transactions, which encaspsulates long-lived collections of transactions.'] "In the first article of this series I introduced the idea of XML-based transactions. In the second article, I described an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) scenario which was meant to demonstrate XML messaging in an Atomic Transaction (AT). I demonstrated how the sales module of a PC assembler interacts with inventory, database, assembly line management and accounts modules to fulfill a bookOrder method invocation request. In this third and final article of the series, I'll discuss another type of XML transaction, the Business Activity (BA). The BA specification is included in the same WS-Transaction document that includes the AT specification. I will extend the AT discussion of the second article to establish a case for BA and demonstrate how BA enables XML-based transactions to cross the boundaries of an enterprise and allows humans to interact with software modules and participate in real world business tasks... Both AT and BA represent coordinated activities. AT is an all-or-nothing activity, while BA is flexible. I have demonstrated the use of BA on a higher level to divide the entire business logic as a hierarchy of small and easier to manage tasks. [And] I have shown how you can represent the smallest unit of a coordinated activity as an AT..."

• [May 27, 2003] "Caching XML Web Services for Mobility." By Douglas Terry (Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley Lab) and Venugopalan Ramasubramanian (Cornell University). In ACM Queue Volume 1, Number 3 (May 2003), pages 71-78. ['Disconnected operations will likely be a problem for wireless environments for some time to come. Can local HTTP caching provide a way around such outages?'] "One of the key requirements for the success of Web services is universal availability. Web services tend to be accessed at all times and in all places. People use a wide range of devices including desktops, laptops, handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs), and smartphones that are connected to the Internet using very different kinds of networks, such as wireless LAN (802.11b), cellphone network (WAP), broadband network (cable modem), telephone network (28.8-kbps modem), or local area network (Ethernet). Occasional to frequent disconnections and unreliable bandwidth characterize many of these networks. The availability of Web services is thus a significant concern to consumers using mobile devices and working in different kinds of wireless and wired networks... A good solution would be applicable to all Web services and would involve interposing storage and computation transparently in the communication path of the client and the server without modifications to Web-service implementations on the client or the server... To study the suitability of caching to support disconnected operation on Web services, we conducted an experiment in which a caching proxy was placed between Microsoft's .NET My Services and the sample clients that ship with these services. The .NET My Services were chosen for this experiment because, although they are not commercial services, they were publicly available at the time of the study, well documented, and are representative of non-trivial XML Web services that support both query and update operations... Extensions to the WSDL standard are needed to customize proxy-based or application-embedded cache managers based on the semantics of specific Web services. Additional information placed in a Web service's WSDL description could indicate which operations are updates and which are cacheable, thereby increasing the effectiveness of caching schemes. For example, one might annotate the WSDL operation elements, which are used to specify the request and response formats for each operation exported by a Web service. Such annotations extend the description of the Web service's interface. These annotations would not affect tools that automatically generate Web-service clients from WSDL specifications, but are simply used to adjust the behavior of cache managers. Annotations can be added to the WSDL description without requiring any modifications to the implementation of the Web service. These annotations could either be published by the service provider or by a third-party provider reasonably aware of the semantics of the Web service. The full set of WSDL extensions needed to facilitate caching remains to be explored and standardized. Extended WSDL specs would allow client-side caches to provide better cache consistency and, hence, a more satisfying mobile user experience. The designers of future Web services should produce extended WSDL specifications that allow effective caching on both mobile and stationary devices for both disconnected operation and increased performance. Development tools driven by WSDL specs could then aid in the construction of mobile applications, a notoriously difficult endeavor. The ultimate goal is to provide seamless offline-online transitions for users of mobile applications that use emerging Web services..."

• [May 27, 2003] "XMLSec 1.0 Helps Ensure Multi-Platform WS-Security." By Vance McCarthy. In Integration Developer News (May 27, 2003). Developers "have one more assurance that they will be able to implement WS-Security across multiple platforms. The XML Security Library, an Open Source implementation of W3C's XML Digital Signature and XML Encryption (the core components of WS-Security), has released its major 1.0 release to developers. It includes support for multiple crypto engines, as well as OpenSSL, GnuTLS and NSS. The release of XMLSec 1.0 comes as the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) has launched a Basic Security Working Group to ensure that WS-Security implementations will operate across multiple and diverse platforms -- .Net, Java and legacy systems... The XML Security Library is based on an Open Source C library implementation. The 1.0 release, directed by Aleksey Sanin, includes multiple crypto engines support (with 'out of the box' support for OpenSSL, GnuTLS and NSS); simplified and cleaned internal structure and API; several performance and memory usage improvements; and new or updated documentation (tutorial, API reference manual and examples)... Developers can also obtain an XML Security Library XML Signature Interoperability Report that describes how XMLSec works with OpenSSL, GnuTLS and NSS..." See also the FAQ document.

• [May 27, 2003] "Q&A: Walter Hamscher, XBRL International." By Erin Joyce. From InternetNews.com (May 23, 2003). Interview. "You could say that PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant Walter Hamscher began his work with the XML standards consortium XBRL International more than a few years ago while he was working on his PhD in computer science at MIT. He was working with artificial intelligence and needed some data to feed the programs, but was frustrated by the lack of quality in formatting of the financial data available to him. Years later he would help write the first version of XBRL, or extensible business reporting language, which is a subset of XML, the fundamental building block behind the Web services movement to standardize and enable machines to share and interpret data. As the organization explains, XBRL uses XML data tags to describe financial information for public and private companies and other organizations. XBRL International and other standards bodies work together to produce specifications and taxonomies that anyone can license for use in applications. XBRL is also available to license royalty-free worldwide from XBRL International. These days, Hamscher spends every waking hour talking, walking, breathing and preaching his message about how XBRL will revolutionize not only how we use and share financial data, but how that data will improve how money makes the world go round... [He says:] 'XBRL International has over 200 members around the world working on XBRL, which is an XML standard that is meant to facilitate the transfer of financial information along the business information supply chain. The idea is by creating a common framework, a common XML standard, you can accelerate the flow of information to investors and other users... XBRL creates a common language in which a data point like a customer number or employee ID, or amount or currency, are always called the same thing and so an app that needs to consume that (data) will know what to do with that... With XBRL general ledger standards, for example, there are well over 50 different data items in order to capture what are called journal entries in an accounting system. A journal entry might be, say, a $1,000 credit to an account... In the U.S., we have a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) taxonomy, which is what we call a whole collection of concepts encoded in XBRL, with well over 1,000 different data items. It's a very large task, something that's been in development for over two years, but it's nearing completion. Right now, there's really not a piece of software that can go and extract the revenue recognition policy of one company at a given point, and then go and get the corresponding policy at another point. There is no reliable way to do that. XBRL makes that possible. The reason that's important is because so much of what goes on in financial reporting isn't really about the numbers, but about the explanation that sits behind the numbers. If I tell you I have receivables of $1 million, you might ask, well, is that $999,999 from one customer? That's a very important question in order to understand the real value of those receivables. So the development of XBRL is a base language on which these richer taxonomies of terms are then built. There are dozens of these taxonomies under development or already published. In Japan, for example, the (main) stock exchange is now accepting financial information in XBRL format, and they have a taxonomy that represents Japanese accounting standards. At the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), they're developing a taxonomy for bank reporting, Britain's version of the IRS has one for British tax filings, and so on. Then we have the largest of the taxonomies, the US GAAP taxonomies and what are called the international accounting standards (IAS), which are basically the accounting standards used by the rest of the world other than the US. It has its own very large taxonomies. The point is that XBRL is a base language with an emerging large number of taxonomies built in XBRL in order to capture different accounting standards, just like the IT industry has its own, such as RosettaNet'..." General references in "Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)."

• [May 27, 2003] "XML Data Management: Information Modeling with XML. Book Excerpt Offers Guidelines for Achieving Good Grammar and Style." By Chris Brandin (Chief technology officer, NeoCore). From IBM developerWorks, XML zone. May 27, 2003. ['An excerpt from Chapter 1 of the book XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems, co-edited by developerWorks editor Akmal Chaudhri. Addison-Wesley Professional; ISBN 0-201-84452-4.'] "When XML first came into use, it was seen primarily as a data interchange standard. Since then it has come to be used for more and more things -- even serving as the core for development and deployment platforms such as Microsoft's .NET. Increasingly, XML has become the means to model components of information systems, and those components automatically construct themselves around what has been expressed in XML. This represents the real potential of XML -- the ability to model the behavior of an entire application in XML once, instead of repeatedly in different ways for each component of an application program. As long as XML was used as a container for data managed by legacy systems, it was sufficient to consider only syntax when building documents. Now that XML is being used to do more than simply express data, it is important to consider grammar and style as well. Obviously, proper syntax is necessary for parsers to be able to accept XML documents at all. Good grammar insures that once XML information has been assimilated, it can be effectively interpreted without an inordinate need for specific (and redundant) domain knowledge on the part of application programs. Good style insures good application performance, especially when it comes to storing, retrieving, and managing information. Proper XML syntax is well understood and documented, so that topic will not be discussed here. This chapter does not discuss how to build XML schemas or DTDs, as they are also well documented elsewhere. This chapter is intended as a practical guide to achieving good grammar and style when modeling information in XML -- which translates to building flexible applications that perform well with minimal programming effort. Grammar is often regarded as being either right or wrong. True, there are 'wrong' grammatical practices; but past that, there is good grammar and bad grammar -- and everything in between. Arguably, there is no such thing as wrong style, only a continuum between the good and the bad... One of the most promising things about XML, and the new breed of tools built on it, is that we can build applications that are driven by a single information model rather than multiple data models accommodating each application function. We can change the behavior and functionality of application programs by changing the underlying XML rather than by changing code. Additionally, we can optimize performance by changing the way information is expressed. Even in environments not fully leveraging XML as a central information model, it is important to design good XML for the sake of readability and maintainability. Building good applications efficiently requires that we learn not only to use XML correctly, but that we learn also to use it well..."

• [May 27, 2003] "Introducing XUL - The Net's Biggest Secret: Part 1." By Harry Fuecks. From SitePoint (May 21, 2003). Part 1 of a 3-part series. ['What if I was to tell you that you can write your own version of Word using something like HTML and JavaScript? What if I added that you could run on your hard disk or launch it directly from your Web server and use it to update your site's content? It sounds a little far fetched, I know, but it's right here, right now -- and it calls itself "Zool".'] " In one of the Internet's quieter corners, mozilla.org, a revolution has been taking place. A new XML format, called XUL (Extensible User Interface Language), pronounced Zool is on the way to re-shaping what we know about both the Internet, and desktop applications. A bold claim perhaps -- but once you've finished reading this, you may just find yourself agreeing. The conceptual leap that's taken place at Mozilla is to think beyond the Web browser as simply being a tool for viewing Web pages, and instead, to look at it as a framework -- a runtime environment for executing applications, just as you might run programs in the Java and .NET runtime environments... What's fascinating about XUL and its sister technology, XPCom (Cross Platform Component Object Model), is that they have all the hallmarks of .NET and Java: (1) a library of 'widgets' for building applications -- as with .NET WinForms and Java's Swing; (2) separation of presentation logic from application logic, the presentation logic being handled by JavaScript; (3) support for XML messaging protocols like SOAP and XML-RPC; (4) support multiple languages for building 'code behind' components including C++, Python and Ruby, with Perl in progress -- though, sadly, no PHP yet; (5) truly cross platform; anywhere you can run Mozilla, you can run your XUL/XPCom applications. But it doesn't stop there -- writing an application in XUL is like writing a Web page with DHTML, except that your XUL application will work, while your DHTML might.... XUL provides a markup that will be easy for anyone with HTML experience to pick up, and has all the advantages of a text-based markup language, such as being able to generate it 'on the fly' with PHP. Better yet, XUL allows for the use of existing technologies, such as CSS, to modify the look and feel of your XUL applications, and SVG, to add some visual flair. You can also mix HTML with XUL -- you can put together hybrid pages, to, for example, bring a boring HTML page to life with some XUL widgets... All you need in order to run XUL applications, is to have Mozilla installed, right? Well, almost. There are a number of projects that aim to bring XUL to other runtimes and environments, such as Mozilla's Blackwood Project, Luxor XUL, jXUL and XULUX, all of which bring XUL to Java in some manner. It's also possible to Embed Gecko, which could bring XUL to devices like mobile phones and PDAs..." With source code. See also Part 2. General references in: (1) "Extensible User Interface Language (XUL)"; (2) "XML Markup Languages for User Interface Definition."

• [May 27, 2003] "WSDL Tales From The Trenches, Part 1." By Johan Peeters. From O'Reilly WebServices.xml.com (May 27, 2003). ['Web services are still in their infancy as a technology, and there's relatively little practical experience available to draw on. Johan Peeters describes best practices and common errors he has discovered while deploying web services in the field.'] "Recently I retrofitted WSDL to a set of existing web services. A customer had a server running and there was a client implementation. The client and server team had been working closely together and now the time had come for another client implementation by a development team on the other side of the globe. A clear specification of the services was needed, and that's what WSDL is for. So I set out to make explicit what was previously implicit. It turned out to be an instructive experience, reaffirming some good old software engineering practices and uncovering a new set of problems specific to web services, WSDL, and XML Schema. There were clearly some design flaws at the outset which were hard to pinpoint. It is likely that these mistakes would not have been made if the designers had formally written down their service definitions in WSDL. So this is the core message of the series: write WSDL up front, do not generate it as an afterthought, as is often suggested by vendors... This series will not provide an overview of WSDL; it also assumes familiarity with W3C XML Schema. This first article in the series considers what sound software engineering practice and distributed computing experience offer to web service design. I review some of the important design decisions that a web service designer must make and offer some advice to guide the process. The rest of the series is about how to represent the design. In the second article I shine a light in some of the dark corners of the WSDL 1.1 specification, leaving out data type definitions, which are the subject of the third article. I look at WXS it from the perspective of someone who uses it to specify the data which will be sent across the web service interface. ... Ideally, when designing web services, you should not have to worry about implementation issues. The whole point of design is that you look at the system at a high level of abstraction, not allowing the implementation complexities to befuddle you. But you can make all the right design choices and the design will be useless if the tool chains that are going to be used do not support the constructs in your WSDL. I strongly recommend prototyping the design specification as a reality check. This edge is still raw..." See also Part 2. General references:

• [May 27, 2003] "All Consuming Web Services." By Erik Benson. From O'Reilly WebServices.xml.com (May 27, 2003). ['Erik Benson describes his work on All Consuming, a web application built on top of the free services offered by weblogs.com, blo.gs, Google, and Amazon. It's an interesting example of the value that can be created by combining multiple web service components from completely independent sources.'] "By taking small steps, first consuming information from multiple web services, and then exposing newly processed information via your own web services, we can begin to build complex applications in our spare time, with very few resources required up front. All Consuming is one such application that's built on top of free services offered by weblogs.com, blo.gs, Google, and Amazon; it offers an interesting slice of the book life that exists on the Web and in the world. None of these services were built with All Consuming in mind, and yet each one plays a crucial role in supporting All Consuming, and benefits from doing so... All Consuming, inspired by Paul Bausch's work with Book Watch, is a site dedicated to providing interesting book lists. I wanted to know what people on the Web were reading without explicitly asking them. I didn't want to know what people were buying, necessarily, nor what editors thought they should be reading, but what people were actually reading, actually talking about, and actually engaged by... Here's how All Consuming works. Every hour a Perl script checks Weblogs.com's Recently Updated list for the weblogs that were updated during the last hour. Since the Recently Updated list is available in XML, the script is able to separate the information that it needs from the information it doesn't need very easily. The information it needs is simply a list of URLs, each of which the script then visits and reads. When reading each site that it visits, it looks for text that matches a certain pattern that signifies a link to Amazon, Book Sense, Barnes & Noble, or even All Consuming. It doesn't matter to the script which site you link to, since they all use ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) as book IDs in their URLs. Upon finding a link it recognizes, it saves the ISBN along with an excerpt of the paragraph or so of text that the link appeared in... The data is out there, stored digitally on weblogs and other sites all over the Internet, just waiting to be looked at. The data is accessible via standard HTML markup and web services like SOAP and XML, making it easily processed and interpreted by simple machines and scripts that anyone can write. Finally, the data is interesting: it gives us a glimpse of the patterns and trends that emerge out of the collective activity of the entire group, bypassing the traditional necessity of trusting a few voices to represent the many. It is truly a model for distributed idea generation and interpretation which is only beginning to be tapped. All Consuming is a tiny filter on top of this vast collection of group activity, aimed solely at finding connections between weblogs and books, but I look forward to the day when hundreds of other views of the data are available to consume and build upon..."

• [May 27, 2003] "Adobe Ships New Acrobat Versions." By David Becker. From CNET News.com (May 27, 2003). "Software maker Adobe Systems released on Tuesday new versions of its Acrobat electronic-publishing software. As previously reported, version 6 of Acrobat splits the software into several versions, targeting different classes of publishing professionals and regular office workers. The new Acrobat Elements is a light-duty version of the software that's intended to let ordinary office workers easily convert documents into Adobe's widespread Portable Document Format (PDF). Adobe, which had mainly dealt with boxed software, will only sell Acrobat Elements to businesses under volume licensing plans for at least 1,000 licenses, priced at $29 per license. Acrobat Professional is a high-end version of the software for engineers, architects and others who need to produce PDF files from complex documents created with applications such as AutoCAD drafting software. Acrobat Professional sells for $449, or $149 for those upgrading from a previous edition of Acrobat. Acrobat Standard is the basic version of the software, upgraded to include new functions -- based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) -- that turn PDF files into interactive forms that can exchange data with corporate databases. Acrobat Standard sells for $299, or $99 for the upgrade version... Although the Reader software for viewing PDF files is one of the most widely distributed applications in computing, Adobe has only recently begun to try to capitalize on its position. The company last year launched new products that make PDF a presentation layer for viewing and sharing corporate data, and it forged alliances with enterprise software leaders such as SAP to better integrate PDF with existing business processes..." See references in "Adobe Announces XML Architecture for Document Creation, Collaboration, and Process Management."

• [May 26, 2003] "XML Matters: Kicking Back with RELAX NG, Part 3. Compact Syntax and XML Syntax." By David Mertz, Ph.D. (Facilitator, Gnosis Software, Inc). From IBM developerWorks, XML zone. May 14, 2003. See also Part 1 and Part 2 in the series 'Kicking Back with RELAX NG'. ['The RELAX NG compact syntax provides a much less verbose, and easier to read, format for describing the same semantic constraints as RELAX NG XML syntax. This installment looks at tools for working with and transforming between the two syntax forms.'] "Readers of my earlier installments on RELAX NG will have noticed that I chose to provide many of my examples using compact syntax rather than XML syntax. Both formats are semantically equivalent, but the compact syntax is, in my opinion, far easier to read and write. Moreover, readers of this column in general will have a sense of how little enamored I am of the notion that everything vaguely related to XML technologies must itself use an XML format. XSLT is a prominent example of this XML-everywhere tendency and its pitfalls -- but that is a rant for a different column. Later in this article, I will discuss the format of the RELAX NG compact syntax in more detail than the prior installments allowed... On the downside, since the RELAX NG compact syntax is newer -- and not 100% settled at its edges -- tool support for this syntax is less complete than for the XML syntax. For example, even though the Java tool trang supports conversion between compact and XML syntax, the associated tool jing will only validate against XML syntax schemas. Obviously, it is not overly difficult to generate the XML syntax RELAX NG schema to use for validation, but direct usage of the compact syntax schema would be more convenient. Likewise, the Python tools xvif and 4xml validate only against XML syntax schemas. To help remedy the gaps in direct support for compact syntax, I have produced a Python tool for parsing RELAX NG compact schemas, and for outputting them to XML format. While my rnc2rng tool only does what trang does, Eric van der Vlist and Uche Ogbuji have expressed their interest in including rnc2rng in xvif and 4xml, respectively. Ideally, in the near future direct validation against compact syntax schemas will be included in these tools... In some corner cases, rnc2rng differs from trang. For example, both tools force an annotation to occur inside a root element in XML syntax, even if the annotation line occurs before the root element in the compact syntax. Since well-formed XML documents are single-rooted, this is a necessity. But trang also moves comments in a similar manner, while rnc2rng does not. At a minimum, the two tools use whitespace in a slightly different manner. Most likely, a few other variations exist, but ideally none that are semantically important..." Article also in PDF format. See the column listing for other articles in 'XML Matters'. General references in "RELAX NG."

• [May 26, 2003] "Government to Set Up ebXML-RosettaNet Link." By Kim Joon-bae. In Korea IT Times (May 20, 2003). "Two next-generation international e-commerce standards, 'ebXML' and 'RosettaNet,' will soon become interoperable, allowing the nation to take a leading role in linking the two mainstay standards on the global level. The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy said on May 18, 2003 that it would make concerted efforts with the Korea Institute for Electronic Commerce, an organization leading ebXML development, and RosettaNet Korea to develop an adapter used to link the two standards. The decision came after a meeting organized by RosettaNet Korea and attended by MOCIE and KIEC, and the project will become a part of the 'RosettaNet-ebXML link plan' proposed by RosettaNet. Once the adapter is completed, firms in the electronics and electrics industries using RosettaNet will be able to engage in e-commerce activities with firms poised to adopt ebXML, which is in a final development stage before commercial use. Given the fact that ebXML is a global e-commerce standard and RosettaNet has established a foothold as an industry standard at home, interoperability between the two standards will contribute significantly to boosting the nation's role in link on the global level... The ministry's decision is expected to give sense of stability to firms using RosettaNet by enabling interoperability with the fast-spreading international standard ebXML. It will also likely serve as a catalyst for adoption of ebXML in the electronics and electrics industries. The government has been providing full support for adoption of ebXML even before a commercial launch, citing its general-purpose use across a full variety of industries... 'Interoperability will not lead to immediate effects since ebXML is still in a development stage, but the decision carries significance in that the government has begun to provide support for RosettaNet, which is fast spreading into the electronics and electrics areas,' said Prof. Kim Sun-ho at Myungji University..." General references in: (1) "RosettaNet"; (2) "Electronic Business XML Initiative (ebXML)."

• [May 26, 2003] "APIs, Protocols, And Rogue Plumbers. Who Should Unclog the Web Pipes to Keep Information Flowing?" By Jon Udell. In InfoWorld (May 23, 2003). "My local bank is switching from one online bill-payment system to another. I'm looking forward to the new system, which will be an improvement on the current one, but I wasn't expecting this: IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR CURRENT BILL PAYMENT CUSTOMERS: When we switch to this new system you will be required to re-enter the payee data you have set up under our current system.... Integrating two Web-based systems, if only by brute force, is not only necessary but possible. If I can log in to both systems and drive them interactively, I can write a script to join them programmatically. Every Web application can be tortured into behaving like a Web service, even when its creator never intended it to... Web services exist so we won't have to unclog the pipes this way any more. HTML screen-scraping just feels like the dirty job it always was. The technical superiority of the Web services approach is well understood, but I don't think we fully grasp the political impact...The political hot potato here is a software tool that implements a private API. Use of the API is contingent on access to the tool because, well, that's how we've always done things. But not for much longer, I hope. The inexorable logic of Web services sets aside APIs in favor of protocols. XML messages flowing through the pipes enact those protocols. Anyone with authorized access to that plumbing will be able to monitor and inject messages quite easily, and everyone will know that's true..."

• [May 26, 2003] "XHTML is the Most Important XML Vocabulary." By Kendall Grant Clark. From XML.com (May 21, 2003). "Taking the long view of recent technology, XHTML may be the most important XML vocabulary ever created. What I mean is not that XHTML will be the most widely deployed XML vocabulary, though if we take the long view, it could be. What I mean is that XHTML puts XML's reputation -- and, by extension, the W3C's reputation -- on the line to a greater degree than any other XML vocabulary... A reasonably computer-literate person can still learn to create XHTML 1.1 documents with reasonable effort and within a reasonable time. Even if it takes a week of evenings to become comfortable with the main features of XHTML, that's a small investment to make for a relatively big return. The Web's success, then, is due in part to the simplicity and generality of HTML. The ongoing success of the Web will be in part a function of maintaining a positive balance between how difficult and how empowering it is to learn XHTML. Some form of HTML, eventually XHTML, will always be the most common type of Web content; people will keep writing it by hand, building user interfaces with it, trying, succeeding, failing to scrape useful information from it, and so on. Any part of the Web's infrastructure with such a long future life cycle deserves careful, attentive, community shepherding... The May 2003 draft "displays evidence that community feedback can make a difference to the development of a specification... Perhaps the most welcome development, particularly from the perspective of XML-DEV geeks, is the appearance of a normative RELAX NG schema for XHTML 2.0. This development is welcome because it signals a growing acceptance of RELAX NG -- a non-W3C schema specification language -- within the working groups of the W3C. It is also welcome because XHTML is among the most document-centric of all XML vocabularies, and having RELAX NG's fittingness for such vocabularies on display is a good thing... I am very pleased to report that the latest XHTML 2.0 draft contains a provision for a caption element, which may reside within either table or object elements. I applaud this rational, simplifying, and long overdue addition. There is more than enough evidence of the utility and need for exactly this sort of addition. XHTML 2.0 is headed in the right direction, even if you're among those who think that, for example, the style attribute should die a horrible death. Sometimes W3C working groups do not have much of an active user community with which to have dialog about its work. But in those lucky cases where there is such a community, working groups do well to pay careful attention to what they want and say. This general rule is even more important in the case of XHTML. Despite the widespread pessimism about XHTML's deployment, it is far, far too important to be left in the hands of a working group alone..." Note: A fifth public Working Draft of XHTML 2.0 has been published: XHTML 2.0, W3C Working Draft 6-May-2003. This version includes (Appendix B) an early implementation of XHTML 2.0 in RELAX NG.

• [May 26, 2003] "XHTML 2.0." W3C Working Draft 6-May-2003. Edited by Jonny Axelsson (Opera Software), Beth Epperson (Netscape/AOL), Masayasu Ishikawa (W3C), Shane McCarron (Applied Testing and Technology), Ann Navarro (WebGeek, Inc), and Steven Pemberton (CWI - HTML Working Group Chair). Latest version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2. See also the diff-marked version, single XHTML file, PDF, and XHTML in ZIP archive. "XHTML 2 is a general purpose markup language designed for representing documents for a wide range of purposes across the World Wide Web. To this end it does not attempt to be all things to all people, supplying every possible markup idiom, but to supply a generally useful set of elements. It provides the possibility of extension using the span and div elements in combination with stylesheets... XHTML 2 is a member of the XHTML Family of markup languages. It is an XHTML Host Language as defined in XHTML Modularization. As such, it is made up of a set of XHTML Modules that together describe the elements and attributes of the language, and their content model. XHTML 2 updates many of the modules defined in XHTML Modularization 1.0, and includes the updated versions of all those modules and their semantics. XHTML 2 also uses modules from Ruby, XML Events, and XForms. The modules defined in this specification are largely extensions of the modules defined in XHTML Modularization 1.0. This specification also defines the semantics of the modules it includes. So, that means that unlike earlier versions of XHTML that relied upon the semantics defined in HTML 4, all of the semantics for XHTML 2 are defined either in this specification or in the specifications that it normatively references. Even though the XHTML 2 modules are defined in this specification, they are available for use in other XHTML family markup languages. Over time, it is possible that the modules defined in this specification will migrate into the XHTML Modularization specification... This document is the fifth public Working Draft of this specification. It should in no way be considered stable, and should not be normatively referenced for any purposes whatsoever. This version includes an early implementation of XHTML 2.0 in RELAX NG, but does not include the implementations in DTD or XML Schema form. Those will be included in subsequent versions, once the content of this language stabilizes. This version also does not address the issues revolving around the use of XLINK by XHTML 2. Those issues are being worked independent of the evolution of this specification. Those issues should, of course, be resolved as quickly as possible, and the resolution will be reflected in a future draft. Finally, the working group has started to resolve many of the issues that have been submitted by the public. If your particular issue has not yet been addressed, please be patient - there are many issues, and some are more complex than others..." General references in "XHTML and 'XML-Based' HTML Modules."

• [May 26, 2003] "The XML.com Interview: Steven Pemberton." By Russell Dyer. From XML.com (May 21, 2003). "At the top of the HTML hierarchy stands Steven Pemberton, chair of the HTML working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A lover of language, a writer, and an editor, as well as an organizer and a leader in the web community, he has had both subtle and profound influences over the Web, not only in HTML standards, but in concepts that permeate the Web. He has been at the center of the forces that have been guiding the Web for over a decade... I asked Pemberton for his thoughts about the future of HTML: 'XHTML is now being implemented, and implemented well, in many different browsers, and popping up in lots of unexpected places like cellular telephones, televisions, refrigerators and printers. In some ways an impediment to the full adoption of XHTML is IE (Microsoft Internet Explorer), since its HTML and XML engines are not well integrated. However, there there are some things coming up that make me think IE will evolve into a shell that won't be doing much processing itself. It'll just be a way of combining different markup languages via plugins,' says Pemberton. As for the Web itself, he says, 'I think that we're only at the early stages of the development of the Web. In a sense, it has disappointed me that it has gone so slowly, but I've learned to live with that slow movement. I believe there are some advantages to it in that people are reviewing these things and we're getting a lot of community buy-in of what's being done.' With leaders like Steven Pemberton, I agree that we are probably in the early stages of the Web and can expect to see spectacular developments in time..."

• [May 24, 2003] "Demystifying XML in Microsoft Office 2003." By Tim Hickernell, John Brand, Mike Gotta, David Yockelson, Andy Warzecha, and Steve Kleynhans (META Group). META Group News Analysis. May 15, 2003. "As part of its upcoming Microsoft Office 2003 release, Microsoft has announced various XML enhancements to Office applications as well as a new XML document and lightweight forms authoring tool called InfoPath (formally XDocs). These enhancements, along with the InfoPath application, will be bundled only with the Enterprise Edition of Office 2003 Professional, but InfoPath will also be available as a standalone product. Because sales of Office 2003 are largely a moot point, following the success of Microsoft's new licensing programs in 2002 (approximately two-thirds of companies have Office on maintenance), and these new enhancements are available only in this "pre-sold" enterprise version, we do not view XML enhancements to Office 2003 as an attempt by Microsoft to boost sales of Office 2003. Rather, the changes will prepare the Office suite ahead of time for inevitable XML enhancements in upcoming Microsoft server product releases, specifically under the Yukon, Jupiter, and Longhorn code names... Custom schemas and data can then be saved in XML or written to other applications via Web services or Microsoft's ADO. If additional context is desired, the full form or document structure can be appended in a Microsoft Office XML format (e.g., InfoPath XML, WordML, SpreadsheetML). In fact, XML formats for Office binaries exist in the current version of Office, but they have been misconstrued as XML interchange formats, which has contributed to the confusion about what the real role of XML in Office Microsoft is. With few XML-enabled enterprise applications deployed that can exploit the XML enhancements to Office 2003, and an expected slow enterprise deployment of Office 2003, we believe the inclusion of these features in Office 2003 is more about Microsoft preparing Office for a future role as an XML-capable front end to any back-office system (Microsoft and non-Microsoft) than about adding immediate value. To date, Microsoft's demonstrations of XML in Office 2003 have lacked sufficient focus to demonstrate ROI and, at times, even suggest that InfoPath forms and documents should be used as replacement user interfaces for existing enterprise applications (e.g., CRM, ERP) without regard to existing investment in and customization of these systems..." General references in "Microsoft Office 11 and InfoPath [XDocs]." [alt URL]

• [May 24, 2003] "Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios." W3C Working Draft 16-May-2003. Edited by Kentaroh Noji (IBM), Martin J. Dürst (W3C), Addison Phillips (webMethods), Takao Suzuki (Microsoft), and Tex Texin (XenCraft). Latest version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-i18n-scenarios. Also available in non-normative XML format. " Produced by the Web Services Internationalization Task Force of the W3C Internationalization Working Group, as part of the W3C Internationalization Activity. "The goal of the Web Services Internationalization Task Force is to ensure that Web Services have robust support for global use, including all of the world's languages and cultures... this document examines the different ways that language, culture, and related issues interact with Web Services architecture and technology. Ultimately this will allow us to develop standards and best practices for those interested in implementing internationalized Web Services. We may also discover latent international considerations in the various Web Services standards and propose solutions to the responsible groups working in these areas. Web Services provide a world-wide distributed environment that uses XML based messaging for access to distributed objects, application integration, data/information exchange, presentation aggregation, and other rich machine-to-machine interaction. The global reach of the Internet requires support for the international creation, publication and discovery of Web Services. Although the technologies and protocols used in Web Services (such as HTTP - RFC2616, XML, XML Schema, and so forth) are generally quite mature as 'international-ready' technologies, Web Services may require additional perspective in order to provide the best internationalized performance, because they represent a way of accessing distributed logic via a URI. As a result, this document attempts to describe the different scenarios in which international use of Web Services may require care on the part of the implementer or user or to demonstrate potential issues with Web Services technology. This document describes the followings scenarios: (1) Locale neutral vs. locale-sensitive XML messages and data exchange; (2) Interaction between Web services and the underlying software system's international functionality; (3) Message processing in Web Services, e.g., SOAP Fault messages etc..." See "Markup and Multilingualism."

• [May 23, 2003] "DB2 Information Integrator Goes Live." By IT Analysis Staff. In The Register (May 21, 2003). IBM has "published the packaging and pricing of DB2 Information Integrator. The basic concept is predicated upon a federated database approach in which multiple heterogeneous databases appear to the user as if they were a single database. However, Information Integrator is not limited to accessing relational data sources - it can also access XML, flat files, Microsoft Excel, ODBC, Web and other content stores, although updates and replication are limited to relational sources in the first release. Thus the full capabilities of DataJoiner have not been implemented in this release, although beta testing has shown improved performance compared to that product... you can query data wherever it resides, as if it was at a single location, with a single view across all the relevant data sources. The product supports queries by caching query tables across federated sources, while the optimiser will validate the SQL used against the source database and will automatically compensate if the relevant syntax is not supported on the remote database. Other features of the federation capabilities of the product include the ability to publish the results of a query to a message queue and to compose, transform and validate XML documents. In terms of updates, replication and Information Integrator acts as a replication server, initially supporting Oracle, Informix, Microsoft, Sybase and Teradata databases, as well as DB2. Functions are flexible with support for both one to many and many-to-one topologies, table-based or transaction-based data movement (which may be dependent on whether you have batch or online requirements), and latency which may be scheduled, interval-based or continuous. Perhaps the most notable feature of the beta trial has been the reports of increased developer productivity. This is partly because there is less hand coding required and, more particularly, because SQL queries do not have to be decomposed to act across the various databases involved... The big question is whether the market will warm to the concept of the federated database, which is enabled through DB2 Information Integrator. Microsoft notionally embraces the concept but it has done little to implement it, while Oracle's approach runs directly counter to federalism, with the company espousing consolidation (centralisation) instead. Thus IBM has to market federation on its own..." See the reference following.

• [May 23, 2003] "IBM DB2 Information Integrator V8.1". IBM Software Announcement Letter. May 20, 2003. 19 pages. Referenced from the IBM DB2 Information Integration website. "IBM DB2 Information Integrator V8.1 is a new product from IBM that provides the foundation for a strategic information integration framework that helps customers to access, manipulate, and integrate diverse and distributed information in real time. This new product enables businesses to abstract a common data model across data and content sources and to access and manipulate them as though they were a single source. DB2 Information Integrator V8.1 supports the predominantly read-access scenarios common to enterprise-wide reporting, knowledge management, business intelligence, portal infrastructures, and customer relationship management. To address customer requirements, this product is offered in five editions... DB2 Information Integrator V8.1 is primarily targeted at the application development community familiar with relational database application development. Applications that use SQL or tools that generate SQL (for example, integrated development environments, reporting and analytical tools) can now access, integrate, and manipulate distributed and diverse data through a federated data server. This product is most appropriate for projects whose primary data sources are relational data augmented by other XML, Web, or content sources. With the Federated Data Server, administrators can configure data source access and define integrated views across diverse and distributed data... Configuration is simplified by built-in functions that help the administrator discover relevant data sources and metadata. XML schema can be automatically mapped into relational schema... Applications can query integrated views across diverse and distributed data sources as if they were a single database: (1) The query is expressed using standard SQL statements. (2) Text search semantics can be used within the query. A fast, versatile, and intelligent full text search capability is provided across relational data sources, including data sources that either don't support native text search or don't provide a broad range of text search capability. Numerous search operations are supported (such as Boolean, wildcard, free-text, fuzzy search, proximity search for words within the same sentence or paragraph, or search within XML documents). The query can produce standard SQL answer sets or XML documents. XML documents can be generated from the federated source data to facilitate interchange or automatically validated against DTDs or XML schemas (3) SQL expressions can be used to transform the data for business analysis or data exchange. XML documents can be transformed using XSL for flexible presentation. Any Web service can be converted into a function call and used as a transformation. For example, a Web service that provides currency conversion can be used inline within the SQL expression. (4) Results can be made available to the rest of the organization by publishing them to a WebSphere MQ message queue using built-in functions (5) The federated server uses cost-based distributed query optimization to select the best access paths for higher query performance. It leverages intelligence about optimizing access to the data sources provided by the data source wrapper, by database statistics, and optionally by the administrator...." [cache PDF]

• [May 23, 2003] "Microsoft Supporting UNeDocs Through Microsoft Office InfoPath. Smart Client For On-Line And Off-Line Processing of XML Forms." By Zdenek Jiricek (Public Sector Manager, Microsoft Eastern Europe). May 15, 2003. PDF from the 13 slides. From a presentation given at the May 2003 UNeDocs Seminar on electronic trade documents, held during the United Nations Forum on Trade Facilitation. "The Forum welcomed the efforts of the UNECE to develop and implement accessible tools and solutions for administrations and the trade community around the world." Jiricek identified current problems for trading: "(1) Data entry into various client apps multiple times [different client for different applications; unnecessary re-typing and data entry errors]; (2) Custom forms hard to use, inflexible, costly to maintain [Lacking rich editing experience; Static forms limit ability to provide required information; Difficult to modify existing forms and adjust processes]; (3) Hard to reuse data across business processes [Requires significant development work]... InfoPath benefits for UNeDocs: (1) Gather information more efficiently and accurately [Validation: via scripting or web services; Conditional formatting capabilities; Easy to implement digital signing, e.g., UPU web service]; (2) Manage information more flexibly [On-line, Off-line, and e-mail support; Visual creating / modification of forms; Dynamic forms w/ locking, creating optional fields]; (3) Take advantage of existing IT investments and knowledge [Web based solution deployment, supports any XML schema; Familiar Microsoft Office user experience]; (4) Share information across business processes [Connects to XML Web services; Can connect to multiple biz processes via MS BizTalk Server]..." (adapted excerpt) Canonical source .PPT, ZIP. See related information in "UNeDocs and InfoPath" in the news story "Microsoft and ACORD Use InfoPath for Linking Insurance Forms to XML Web Services." General references in "Microsoft Office 11 and InfoPath [XDocs]."

• [May 23, 2003] "UN XML Project Gets Microsoft Support. Aims to Make Electronic Exchange of Business Documents Between Companies Cheaper." By Joris Evers. In InfoWorld (May 16, 2003). "A United Nations project that uses XML to give small and medium-size companies an alternative to paper forms when doing business across borders has won support from Microsoft. The Redmond, Wash., software maker at a UN conference in Geneva on Thursday demonstrated how the product of the XML project called UNeDocs would work in Microsoft's InfoPath application... UNeDocs, or United Nations extensions for aligned electronic trade documents, was started in 2002 by the UN's Economic Commission for Europe. The aim is to use XML to create an electronic equivalent for paper trade documents based on existing EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) standards, according to the UNeDocs Web site. EDI is expensive and use has generally been reserved for large enterprises. XML is going to make electronic exchange of business documents between companies cheaper with tools like InfoPath to support it, said Bobby Moore, product manager for InfoPath at Microsoft. The UN estimates that paper-based trade procedures cost about 10 percent of the value of exchanged goods. In 2000 that would have been 10 percent of $5.5 trillion in international trade, according to the UNeDocs Web site. The UN is drafting the XML electronic trade documents to create documents that can be understood and accepted internationally. Many of the alternatives that have been created by private parties are country or sector-specific, according to the UNeDocs Web site. In addition to the trade documents, the UNeDocs team also created online services for UNeDocs users. One service allows users to get the latest international trade, currency and country codes, for example. Another service converts a UNeDocs XML document into a document that can be viewed through a standard Web Browser. InfoPath is a new Microsoft information gathering application that can save data natively in XML. It is part of Microsoft's Office 2003 suite of productivity applications, which is currently in beta and planned to be commercially available in the second half of the year, Microsoft has said..." See related information in "UNeDocs and InfoPath" in the news story "Microsoft and ACORD Use InfoPath for Linking Insurance Forms to XML Web Services."

• [May 21, 2003] "W3C Makes Patent Ban Final." By Paul Festa and Lisa M. Bowman. In CNET News.com (May 21, 2003). "The Web's leading standards body on Tuesday finalized a patent policy banning the use of most royalty-bearing technology in its technical recommendations, an issue that sparked a clash between open-source advocates and software makers. The Royalty-Free Patent Policy, announced by the Patent Policy Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has changed little from a draft released eight weeks ago. In shutting fee-bearing patents out of standards development in all but exceptional cases, it marks a compromise between open-source advocates and proprietary software companies. Patents have been a flashpoint in a battle between the open-source community and proprietary software companies. Some proprietary software makers cash in on large patent portfolios by requiring licensing fees and may be reluctant to give away the rights to intellectual property after investing time and money creating the technology. On the other hand, many in the open-source community believe patents impede the development process and can clog the adoption of standards... Bruce Perens, a prominent patent foe and a participant in the W3C's deliberations, applauded the move, while warning that the consortium had left its process vulnerable to 'submarine' patents. 'It's not bulletproof,' Perens said in an interview with CNET News.com Wednesday. 'But it's an improvement.' Perens -- a cofounder of the Open Source Initiative who recently received a $50,000 grant to fund his antipatent activism -- said that while the W3C patent policy represented a victory for patent-free standards and the open-source software development projects that rely on them, it also left the standards-setting process vulnerable in many ways. One such threat is the so-called submarine patent, which is a patent filed, but not granted, at the time a W3C technical recommendation is under construction. '(Patent holders) don't tell anyone about (the patent), and it becomes granted, and then it's the first time we can see it,' Perens said. 'We will try to watch out for people's patents. But patent searches are rarely conclusive, because patents are so poorly descriptive.' The major variable in the patent-policy process, according to Perens, is identifying when royalty-encumbered technology has been 'knowlingly,' or intentionally, submitted for standards consideration by a company. The W3C working group member representing that company may be ignorant of the royalty -- or may be kept ignorant by design... IBM, in the awkward position of being between the wealth of its patent portfolio and the demands of open-source developers on whom it relies, declined to say how it had voted on the proposal. But an IBM representative said the company supported the finished policy. 'IBM believes that the resulting patent policy is well-developed and defined, and is appropriate to attend to the needs of Web infrastructure vendors and users alike,' representative Scott Cook wrote in an e-mail interview..." See: (1) details in "W3C Approves Patent Policy Supporting Development of Royalty-Free Web Standards"; (2) general references in "Patents and Open Standards."

• [May 21, 2003] "BEA Gains Ally in Battle With IBM." By Martin LaMonica. In CNET News.com (May 21, 2003). "Software maker BEA Systems on Wednesday got a boost in its ongoing application server battle with IBM through a bundling deal with Hewlett-Packard. HP said it will install BEA's WebLogic Java application server software on all of its hardware servers. Application server software is used to build and run custom business applications, such as corporate Web sites or order management systems. Through the deal, BEA will gain the distribution channel of HP's hardware systems, which could help the software maker ward off competition from IBM. Big Blue took the lead in the Java application server market away from BEA in 2002, according to research firm Gartner Dataquest. Analysts say IBM has an advantage over its rivals because it can bundle its own WebSphere Java software with its hardware servers at a discount. By becoming the default Java application server on HP hardware, BEA greatly expands its distribution on servers ranging from low-cost Linux machines to high-end HP NonStop systems. The latest bundling arrangement extends an existing partnership between HP and BEA, through which HP sells WebLogic with its Unix servers. Under the deal announced Wednesday, HP will also deliver WebLogic with its ProLiant Linux servers and its AlphaServers servers that run the OpenVMS operating system. In June, HP will bundle WebLogic with its HP NonStop servers as well. HP and BEA will provide post-sales support for WebLogic on all HP's server hardware, as well..."

• [May 21, 2003] "W3C Announces Royalty-Free Patent Policy." By Edd Dumbill. From xmlhack.com (May 21, 2003). "In a significant step to protect the freedom to implement Web standards the W3C has announced the publication of its patent policy. After long debate, the royalty-free policy has been implemented as a result of widespread consensus. In his Director's Decision -- the first time that such a decision has been made public outside of the W3C -- Tim Berners-Lee writes: 'The Policy affirms and strengthens the basic business model that has driven innovation on the Web from its inception. The availability of an interoperable, unencumbered Web infrastructure provides an expanding foundation for innovative applications, profitable commerce, and the free flow of information and ideas on a commercial and non-commercial basis.' The effect of the patent policy is that all who participate in developing a W3C Recommendation must agree to license patents that block interoperability on a royalty-free basis. Certain patent claims may be excluded from the royalty-free commitment by members -- after considerable deliberation, and with substantial consensus among those involved and the W3C membership. These must also be disclosed early in the development process so they do not jeopardize a specification once it is developed. Patent disclosures are required from W3C members, and requested of anyone who sees the technical drafts and has actual knowledge of patents which affect a specification. Tim Berners-Lee announced the release of this patent policy during his keynote address at WWW2003, and was met with applause from the audience... In a press conference given at WWW2003, Daniel Weitzner of the W3C described how the new patent policy finally formalizes what used to be the implictly accepted principle that web technology should be freely implementable. That implicit understanding was challenged five years ago, said Weitzner, particularly in the Platform for Privacy Preferences Working Group, which was held up for a year by patent-related uncertainty. The patent policy is designed to prevent these problems recurring, including as it does processes for resolving patent-related issues..." See: (1) details in "W3C Approves Patent Policy Supporting Development of Royalty-Free Web Standards"; (2) general references in "Patents and Open Standards."

• [May 20, 2003] "The Center of the Universe." By Ken North. In Intelligent Enterprise Volume 6, Number 9 (May 31, 2003). ['XML, Web services, analytics, and other hot technologies have the leading relational DBMS providers working overtime to remain the best choice for managing all of your data. Here's a look at what IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are doing.'] "Whatever form software takes in the next decade, databases will continue as the primary tool for managing data. DBMSs from rivals IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle will provide persistent data management for Web services, embedded applications, Web stores, grid services, and other software. But SQL DBMS products will increasingly be judged on how well they support traditional tasks (such as transaction processing) while evolving to provide new capabilities (such as integrated business analytics). The latest releases of data management software from the big three vendors unite SQL with multidimensional and document-centric (XML) data and grid computing. Whether an organization follows a best-of-breed approach or taps a single vendor to build an IT infrastructure, problems can arise with interoperability, data aggregation, and data and application integration. That's why XML, XML-based messaging, XML-enabled databases, and Web services have become increasingly important. But XML is only one of the fields on which the database software giants are competing. Although there are now fewer SQL database vendors than a decade ago, competition remains fierce among IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. Each company tries to gain an edge over the others by complementing their database platforms with broad-spectrum software offerings such as vertical market applications and developer tools. The DBMS products from each of these vendors provide parallel processing, extensible servers, online analytic processing (OLAP), tight integration with messaging software, and support for XML and Web services. The products diverge when it comes to programming database server plug-ins, querying multidimensional data sets, persisting message queues, orchestrating the flow of Web services, and processing audio, video, and other rich data types. This overview of the different strategies vendors are following sheds light on their plans for developing technologies to extend the SQL DBMS to handle business intelligence (BI), XML, Web services, and grid requirements..." See also Ken North's interviews with: [1] Rob High and Nelson Mattos of IBM; [2] Andrew Mendelsohn of Oracle; [3] Jim Gray and Michael Rys of Microsoft. General references in "XML and Databases."

• [May 20, 2003] "Data As It Happens." By Mark Madsen. In Intelligent Enterprise Volume 6, Number 9 (May 31, 2003). ['Data in real time, all the time, is what many enterprises want. To make it happen, IT needs to get the big picture -- and not burn out on one-off solutions for single applications.] "You can deliver data in real time from one application to another without too much effort. It's far more challenging to create a real-time data-delivery infrastructure that allows an enterprise to easily integrate applications on a repeatable basis, and yet is also flexible enough to accommodate change. Unfortunately, IT has historically built or bought applications based on what specific business units required. While the systems often deliver the functionality the business units wanted, a great deal of time is spent tying together the menagerie of systems. Integration starts to take up a greater and greater share of IT's budget... The best way to begin sorting out something as complex as integration infrastructure is to work through some conceptually simple models and use them as analogies. Once you settle on a general model and its components, you're closer to selecting the technologies for implementation... An interconnection model, or topology, is the highest-level model abstraction, offering a view of how systems will connect with each other. This topological view is important because it articulates how developers think about the organization's integration problems, and gives everyone a critical communication tool for discussions with business management... I here discuss three conceptual models. Remember, conceptual model selection isn't about fitting the model with a particular set of applications and technology, which is unlikely to be perfect anyway. The goal is to settle on a model that best fits the objectives of your organization. (1) In the point-to-point topology conceptual model, one application locates and requests data from another and sends it directly to that application; (2) In the information pipeline (or 'bus') model, all applications connect to a bus, which is common pipeline with a standard interface that dictates communication syntax and protocol; (3) In the hub-and-spoke model, data flows from applications at the ends of the spokes into a central hub, where it's routed out to applications that request it... Conceptual and interaction models are the top levels of the architecture. While they describe the design principles and the services provided to an application, they say nothing about the components of the architecture needed to support those services. Infrastructure components are elements from which you build your real-time data architecture. By understanding these, you can make intelligent choices about what technology to use and whether to buy products or build the infrastructure components..." See also "Business Process Management: The Future of Real-Time Data Integration?" -- how business process management fits into the evolution of real-time data integration.

• [May 20, 2003] "Microsoft Unwraps New Visio Tool. Office Visio 2003 Improves Users' Access to Server-Based Business Data." By Ed Scannell. In InfoWorld (May 20, 2003). "Microsoft has unveiled a new version of its Visio diagramming tool that aims to enable corporate users to take better advantage of traditional Office desktop applications and also connect desktop users with server-based line-of-business data. The newly named Microsoft Office Visio 2003, which will be a more integral part of Microsoft's Office System, will be aimed not just at the product's core technical users but at IT professionals and business users looking to use data more effectively and reduce the 'manual labor' involved in pulling together information from multiple sources. 'With this release we want to broaden the usage among business users by communicating more clearly to them what the value proposition is. We think it can convince some people to widen its usage and make it a more relevant tool for the enterprise,' said Jason Bunge, Visio's product manager based in Redmond, Wash. Microsoft has four goals with Visio 2003, according to Bunge, including getting customers to use it more as a smart client in order to consume and deliver Web services, as a process management tool that can quickly document and map out how users conduct business, to better leverage a number of IT assets and investments, and to achieve greater worker productivity. For example, whereas an HR manager might use the existing product to create and view a straight-forward organizational chart to determine an employee's position and title, with the new version managers can access server-based data, such as who is leaving the company and when, view salaries and performances of individuals, and compare that with real-time data. 'Through Web services and XML people can now take an org chart and tie it to back-end systems and pull up last month's review scores for a certain division, and maybe color code them so you can see quickly who are the strongest and weakest performers,' Bunge said. As one example of Visio being able to better leverage Office applications, Bunge said users could access a timeline within Microsoft Project and then share it with anyone on their team inside or outside the company or present a progress report to senior management..." See the announcement "Microsoft Office Visio 2003 to Provide Customers With New Tools to Visualize Their Business. Customers and Partners Excited About the Possibilities Microsoft Office Visio 2003 Offers as a Smart Client to Capture Data in Real Time and Enable Organizations to Be More Productive."

• [May 20, 2003] "DARPA Pads Semantic Web Contract." By Michael Singer. From Internet.com News (May 20, 2003). "Web software developer Teknowledge Tuesday said it has won an extended government contract to help build an evolving version of the World Wide Web that centers on the meaning of words. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm said the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has added $634,057 to its now $1.7 million budget to help build the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML). The contract is centered on developing an Agent Semantic Communication Service, which lets users access relevant data through an XML framework. DARPA calls it the 'Semantic Web'. For example, when you tell a person something, he can combine the new fact with an old one and tell you something new. When you tell a computer something in XML, it may be able to tell you something new in response, but only because of some other software it has that's not part of the XML spec. DARPA is using the new language to create a program that assigns similar semantics to a 'subProperty' tag. DARPA, which was responsible for funding much of the development of the Internet we know today, has been working on the DAML spec since August 2000 as a way to augment the Web and improve data mining. Currently, the agency is working with the W3C through a various working groups to implement it. Teknowledge says the open source framework will be one of the tools that drives the Semantic Web from research vision to practical reality... The technology is steeped in Teknoledge's Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) and the company says it has mapped it to over 100,000 word senses in the WordNet natural language lexicon. The company says its research helps give technical users a comprehensive language for asking precise questions. 'Our software allows users to get answers to questions that have been precisely defined, rather than just a sampling of documents that contain relevant keywords, as in most current Web searches,' said Teknowledge Director of Knowledge Systems Adam Pease. 'We can also perform inference during search that allows users to get answers that are not literally on the Web, but must be inferred by the computer software.' Pease said the next step in this process is to provide a simplified language to support non-technical end users..." General references in: (1) "DARPA Agent Mark Up Language (DAML)" and (2) "Markup Languages and Semantics."

• [May 20, 2003] "Web Services Security and More, Part 2: The Global XML Web Services Architecture (GXA)." By Joseph M. Chiusano (Booz Allen Hamilton). From Developer.com (May 20, 2003). In Part 1 Chiusano provided highlights from the majority of the GXA specifications that were released up to (and including) December 2002 [WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-PolicyAssertions, WS-PolicyAttachment, WS-Trust, WS-Routing, WS-Referral, WS-Transaction]. In Part 2 the author covers the remaining GXA specifications: (1) WS-SecureConversation, which builds on WS-Security to allow the establishment of a security context for a message exchange; (2) WS-Inspection, the Web Services Inspection Language which allows a site to be inspected for service offerings regardless of the format of the description documents for these service offerings; (3) WS-ReliableMessaging for reliable message delivery; (4) WS-Addressing, which defines a transport-neutral mechanism for identifying Web service endpoints and securing end-to-end endpoint identification in messages. "GXA is an application-level protocol framework built on top of XML and SOAP that provides a consistent model for building infrastructure-level protocols for Web services and applications. By doing so, GXA 'fills the gap' in the current Web services stack. The GXA specifications can be grouped in seven main 'concentrations': security, policy/trust, routing, coordination, federation, inspection, and messaging... GXA is poised to play a major role in advancing the adoption of Web services through its robust specification of mechanisms for Web services such as security, policy, coordination, federation, and routing. More specifications will be forthcoming for areas such as privacy, federation, and authorization..."

• [May 20, 2003] "Business Process with BPEL4WS: Learning BPEL4WS, Part 8. Using Switch, Pick, and Compensate." By Rania Khalaf and Nirmal Mukhi (Software Engineers, IBM TJ Watson Research Center). From IBM developerWorks, Web services. May 2003. ['This article illustrates the use of three more BPEL activities: switch, pick, and compensate. In addition to showing how you can branch on conditionals using <switch>, we show how you can use <pick> to branch based on incoming messages or timeouts. A simple explicit compensation example is also presented to show how committed actions may later be undone.'] "In the previous articles we took a simple flow that can invoke one Web service, and added another partner, control logic through links and conditions, data manipulation using assignment, nested activities and scopes, and finally correlation sets and fault handlers. In this article, we take our loan approval example and present three different scenarios showing the use of the compound activities <switch> and <pick>, as well as a simple compensation handler... In these scenarios, we have brought together most of the main concepts of BPEL4WS. As the last tutorial-type article in this series, it provides you with a better feel for how to bring activities together to create simple as well as complex processes. Feel free to do what we have done here to further your understanding of the language: take the resulting .bpel file and play around with the syntax to try out the different constructs in the language and see how they affect the flow of control as well as the complexity of what you would like to express in your Web services compositions. You can use the Eclipse editor available with BPWS4J on alphaWorks (see Resources), and graphically substitute an activity for another or change its properties without having to worry about the rest of the process. For example, you can take a nested activity and request that it be wrapped in a scope and then add handlers to it..." [Note: this article refers to BPEL4WS v1.0, not to v1.1.] Article also available in PDF format. See the previous parts in the series. General references in "Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)."

• [May 20, 2003] "OEBPS: The Universal Consumer eBook Format?" By Jon Noring. In eBookWeb (May 19, 2003). ['In the article, I outline seven requirements a universal consumer ebook format must fulfill (one of which is compatibility with an XML-based publishing workflow), and show that OEBPS adequately fulfills those requirements. The XML conformance of OEBPS certainly plays a fundamental role in the attractiveness of OEBPS as a universal ebook format, as noted several times in the article. Your thoughts and criticisms are welcome.'] "Looking at the ebook landscape today, I am troubled by the large and growing number of essentially incompatible, proprietary consumer ebook formats and associated ebook reading applications and hardware... Publishers, both large and small, are now overwhelmed by the need to supply their content to end-users in these formats, many of which do not integrate well into their publishing workflow... Likewise, end-users are equally confused by the myriad formats, and chagrined by the incompatibility between them, making it more difficult to use multiple devices, OS, and reading software of their choice. End-users clearly do not wish to be tied to any one hardware or software platform for the ebooks they purchase -- they want their ebooks to be optimally readable on the systems of their choice, now and into the future... Is a single, universal consumer ebook format possible, one which meets nearly all the needs of both publishers and end-users? This article presents a vision for such a universal consumer ebook format, to outline the important requirements, and demonstrate that, yes, there now exists just such a format meeting these requirements: The Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS)... The OEBPS Specification is maintained by the Open eBook Forum, a non-profit and independent ebook standards and trade organization representing a large number of companies and organizations with quite diverse (and oftentimes competing) interests in the ebook universe... The OEBPS Specification specifies a coherent, ebook-optimized framework for organizing XML documents containing book content into a powerful ebook representation of the work... The word framework is especially important, because without an overarching framework it is not possible to adequately represent the richness and specific intricacies of book publications using a simple collection of independent hypertext-linked XML documents. Three distinct quantities in the OEBPS universe must be defined: OEBPS Publication, OEBPS Package, and OEBPS Document. An OEBPS Publication is the complete set of files comprising an ebook publication conforming to the OEBPS Specification. An OEBPS Publication must include one OEBPS Package document (which is an XML document, not part of the book content itself, describing the Publication's organizational framework), and at least one OEBPS Document (which is an XML document containing part or all of the book's actual content.) Other auxiliary files, such as images, style sheets, etc., may also be present in the OEBPS Publication..." See "Open Ebook Initiative."

• [May 20, 2003] "W3C Readies New Tech Patent Policy. It Hopes to Stop Vendors' Patent Claims from Slowing Web Standards Work." By Carol Sliwa. In Computerworld (May 19, 2003). "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is poised to unveil a formal policy for dealing with technology patents that have the potential to block the development of interoperable Web standards. Tim Berners-Lee, director of the Cambridge, Mass.-based W3C, said a decision on the patent policy is due to be announced 'very shortly,' now that the organization's management team has reviewed feedback collected during a public comment period that ended April 30, 2003... A W3C working group has spent more than three years developing a precisely defined patent policy to replace the 'minimalistic' and 'very loose' provisions that currently require members who know of patent claims relevant to ongoing standards work to disclose them, said Daniel Weitzner, chairman of W3C's patent policy working group. Weitzner said the policy drafted by the working group reflects the 'overwhelming goal' of producing standards that can be implemented royalty-free. But the group also included an exception provision that will make it possible for members to consider alternate licensing terms when it's deemed impossible to meet the royalty-free goal, he said... The need to establish a formal policy became apparent as some patent holders started to assert claims to technology being used as part of proposed Web standards. One notable case involved a claim from Seattle-based Intermind Corp., now known as OneName Corp., that the W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences might infringe on a patent it held. More recently, the W3C's patent policy became a hot topic of discussion among some W3C members who have speculated why IBM, Microsoft Corp. and other vendors have been submitting some key Web services standards proposals to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) instead of the W3C... Weitzner said the exception provision 'was an effort to address the concerns of a number of members.' He added that the proposed exception procedure was designed to be hard to use 'because the working group didn't want it to be used often'..." See: (1) details in "W3C Approves Patent Policy Supporting Development of Royalty-Free Web Standards"; (2) general references in "Patents and Open Standards."

• [May 20, 2003] "OASIS OKs UDDI 2. Next Up, An Expanded 3.0 Vers