[June 30, 2004] "Tags for Identifying Languages." By Addison Phillips (Editor, webMethods, Inc.) and Mark Davis (IBM). IETF Network Working Group, Internet Draft. Reference: 'draft-phillips-langtags-04'. June 24, 2004, expires December 23, 2004. 42 pages. "This document describes the structure, content, construction, and semantics of language tags for use in cases where it is desirable to indicate the language used in an information object. It also describes how to register values for use in language tags and a construct for matching such language tags, including user defined extensions for private interchange. This document replaces RFC 3066 (which replaced RFC 1766)... The language tag is composed of one or more parts: A primary language subtag and a (possibly empty) series of subsequent subtags. Subtags are distinguished by their length, position in the subtag sequence, and content, so that each type of subtag can be recognized solely by these features. This makes it possible to construct a parser that can extract and assign some semantic information to the subtags, even if specific subtag values are not recognized. Thus a parser need not have an up-to-date copy of the registered subtag values to perform most searching and matching operations..." Note: Mark Davis said in v04 "we provide for way for programs to really validate IDs by providing a complete list of all valid subtags... The most substantive issue I'd like to get feedback on is that we still allow in this draft subtags of up to 15 long (for readability), whereas RFC 3066 has a maximum of 8. The question is whether that would cause enough of a problem for older parsers that we should pull back to a maximum of 8..." See also editor's draft HTML; ephemeral IETF URL: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-phillips-langtags-04.txt. General references in: (1) the news story: "Tags for Identifying Languages: IESG Issues Last Call Review for IETF BCP"; (2) "Language Identifiers in the Markup Context."

[June 30, 2004] "Managing XML Data: An Abridged Overview." By Juliana Freire (Oregon Health & Science University; WWW) and Michael Benedikt (Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies; WWW). In IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering (CISE) Volume 6, Number 4 (July/August 2004), pages 12-19. "XML's flexibility makes it a natural format for both exchanging and integrating data from diverse data sources. In this survey, the authors give an overview of issues in managing XML data, discuss existing solutions, and outline the current technology's open problems and limitations. The objective is to clarify potential issues that must be considered when building XML-based applicationsin particular, XML solutions' benefits as well as possible pitfalls. The intent is not to give an exhaustive review of XML data-management (XDM) literature, XML standards, or a detailed study of commercial products, but to provide an overview of a representative subset to illustrate how some XDM problems are addressed... While standards have been defined for basic XML technology, they are lacking in XDM. No standards exist for defining either publishing or storage mappings, and database vendors have adopted proprietary solutions for both problems that are often limited (for example, not all mapping schemes can be expressed). Efforts are underway in the research community to find a universal mapping framework that encompasses all mapping strategies. ShreX is free system that provides the first comprehensive solution to the relational storage of XML data: it supports a wide range of XML-to-relational mapping strategies, provides generic query translation and document-shredding capabilities, and works with virtually any RDBMS... Although the research community has designed benchmarks such as XBench and XMark, to date, there has been no comprehensive evaluation and performance study of different XDM tools and systems. Hence, it is not clear currently how the various XDM solutions perform, or how scalable they are. In fact, a recent study of XPath evaluation performance uncovered serious inefficiencies in popular XPath processors... Although existing solutions are evolving, and XML support in commercial products are improving at a fast pace, because XML is so flexible and extensible, we cannot expect to find out-of-the-box XDM solutions for all different applications. Due to the evolving standards, immaturity of the existing tools and the broad scope of the problem, selecting the right system or combination of systems that have the right set of features and meet the performance requirements of a given XML-based application is a nontrivial task. It is thus important that users of this technology be aware of its limitations and avoid known pitfalls..." [abstract/biblio]

[June 30, 2004] "Copyright and Creativity." Editorial and book review by Michael Lesk (Rutgers University). In IEEE Security and Privacy Volume 2, Number 3 (May-June 2004), pages 76-78. "In his new book Free Culture (Penguin Press, 2004), Larry Lessig of Stanford Law School presents an excellent explanation of copyright law's effect on creativity and of large corporations' effect on copyright law. Lessig is well known as the founder of Creative Commons, the opponent of copyright term extension in the 2002 Eldred v. Ashcroft suit before the US Supreme Court, and a leading advocate of a larger public domain. Free Culture covers the history of copyright and its expansion from books to music, pictures, and videos, as well as its extension from 28 to 95 years. The book is remarkable because it presents both a factual argument and proposed solutions. Lessig documents the concentration of media ownership and the expansion of intellectual property's protected area, which work to put increasingly more creative output in the hands of fewer organizations. Even cliché phrases can now 'belong' to somebody: Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has tried to claim control of the words fair and balanced, for example, and Donald Trump wants to trademark you're fired... What can you say if you can't allude to anything that's gone before without stepping on the toes of someone who can afford a bigger lawsuit than you can? [...] There is a great deal more in this book — about the Internet, about history, and about our culture. I recommend it to everyone interested in public policy about copyright, downloading, and the deeper questions of how best to encourage a creative society..." See: (1) the online print version, available free under a Creative Commons license; (2) the online audio version; (3) "Patents and Open Standards." [cache PDF]

[June 30, 2004] "Nokia Backs Eclipse for Building Apps." By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (June 30, 2004). "Nokia has extended its support for Java development by announcing support of the Eclipse platform for developers building applications to run on its phones and devices. The Helsinki, Finland-based mobile communications giant announced support for the open-source development platform Tuesday at the JavaOne Conference... Support for the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) is included in new versions of the Nokia Developers Suite for J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition), version 2.2, and the Nokia Mobile Server Services SDK; the tools are now available for free to members of the Forum Nokia Pro developers program... The Nokia Developer's Suite (NDS) for J2ME provides developers with utilities for creating and deploying MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) 1.0 and MIDP 2.0 applications. It can be used either alone or as an integrated plug-in to Borland Software Corp.'s JBuilder, IBM Corp.'s WebSphere, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Sun ONE Studio, and now Eclipse... Nokia also offers a suite of server-based Java components that now support Eclipse in the Mobile Server Services SDK, which enables the creation of server-side mobile messaging, location presence solutions..." See also: (1) the Nokia announcement; (2) the Eclipse.org website for the Eclipse Foundation.

[June 29, 2004] "Sun's Kitty Hawk Aims High." By Martin LaMonica. In CNET News.com (June 29, 2004). "Sun Microsystems detailed this week a plan called Project Kitty Hawk to redesign its back-end corporate Java software to be more modular and cost-effective. At the JavaOne conference Monday, the company said it will rework its Java Enterprise System server software suite and Java Studio programming tools to simplify the process of building a services-oriented architecture, or SOA, a modular system design meant to reduce the cost of running computing systems. With a SOA, developers design applications so they can reuse a single 'service,' such as a product price check, for different applications. The changes to Sun's software, which Sun will be rolling out over the next two years, will be coupled with consulting services, including a 'SOA Readiness Assessment' program. Sun said the product enhancements of Project Kitty Hawk will make it easier for software developers to write Web services applications using Java. For example, a product under development, code-named Project Disco, will give programmers a visual tool for assembling applications using a Web services language called Business Process Execution Language for automating business processes, according to people familiar with Sun's plans. Project Kitty Hawk will let developers 'find, assemble and deliver applications based on a services-oriented architecture using Java Web services,' said Joe Keller, Sun's vice president of marketing for Java Web services and developer tools. For example, Keller said Sun will introduce modeling based on the unified modeling language in the second version of Java Studio Enterprise, which will go into beta testing this summer and be available by the end of the year..." See details in the announcement: "Sun Launches Comprehensive Services-Oriented Architecture Initiative. Vision Leverages Company's Java Web Services Leadership and Helps Customers Address SOA Requirements Today. New Services Offering for SOA Readiness Assessment Now Available."

[June 29, 2004] "McNealy: Sun, Microsoft To Unveil Phase One of Partnership in Late Summer. Directory Interoperability for Single Sign-On Will Be Tackled First." By Elizabeth Montalbano. In CRN (June 29, 2004). "Sun and Microsoft plan to detail Phase One of their historic partnership in late summer, Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy said Tuesday at JavaOne. The first phase of the partnership will be to 'solve single sign-on' and facilitate interoperability between the LDAP model of the directory and identity management products in Sun's Java Enterprise System and Microsoft ActiveDirectory, McNealy told attendees in his morning keynote at Sun's annual Java developer confab in San Francisco. Once Sun and Microsoft make their software interoperable, 'users can log into the network once without having to remember multiple passwords and have their authentication travel across software infrastructure from both Sun and Microsoft,' McNealy said. Applications that run on both systems also can take advantage of the same infrastructure for network identity. 'This should make for more efficient consumer and enterprise use,' he said. Enabling single sign-on for users across multiple Web sites, particularly for e-commerce users, has been a tricky issue. Sun and a group of partner companies initiated and supported the Liberty Alliance, which leverages the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) specification to enable single sign-on, while Microsoft for a time planned its own project, HailStorm, to collect user information and authenticate users across multiple sites. But users were uncomfortable with the idea of Microsoft owning all of their personal information, so HailStorm didn't fly as expected..." See: (1) "Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)"; (2) "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization."

[June 28, 2004] "Apple's RSS Embrace Could Bolster Adoption." By Matt Hicks. In eWEEK (June 28, 2004). "By giving its blessing to XML syndication, Apple is joining the trend of browser makers embracing Web news feeds and potentially bringing the technology to the masses. Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs on Monday previewed the company's next version of its Web browser, dubbed Safari RSS. RSS refers to the acronym for Really Simple Syndication, the major format for XML syndication. Apple's Web browser is neither the first nor the only one to support syndication feeds. Opera Software ASA introduced RSS support with its latest browser, Opera 7.50, released in May, and the Mozilla Foundation is planning a feature to bookmark feeds with its Firefox 1.0 release later this year. Safari RSS is scheduled to be available with Apple's next Mac OS X release, code-named Tiger, planned for the first half of 2005... Microsoft's Internet Explorer, with 94 percent market share, has no support for reading or aggregating RSS feeds, and company officials declined to discuss whether it is planning any future support. But the Redmond, Wash., company previously has indicated that Longhorn will include RSS aggregation. 'Ultimately, what matters is what Microsoft does with Internet Explorer,' said Dave Winer, the co-author of RSS, who expect Microsoft to eventually include RSS support in a range of products... Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple is using RSS as a blanket term for both various versions of the RSS format as well as the rival format, Atom, all of which it plans to support. Opera also is supporting various versions of RSS from 0.90 and higher, according to its Web site. Mozilla plans to support multiple versions of RSS and Atom... The browser makers are all taking various approaches to incorporating feeds into the browser. Opera, of Oslo, Norway, has added RSS support within its mail application, handling feeds like e-mail messages. The browser also can detect pages with feeds, and users can click a site's XML icon to automatically subscribe. Mozilla, based in Mountain View, Calif., plans to include its news feed support with the beta release of Firefox 1.0 in about six weeks, Goodger said. The new feature will let users save and organize feeds within the browser's bookmarks, which will display an updated list of feed items. Firefox also will display an icon or prompt to indicate that a Web page has an available feed, Goodger said..." General references in: (1) "RDF Site Summary" | "Really Simple Syndication" (RSS)"; (2) "Atom Publishing Format and Protocol."

[June 28, 2004] "Analysis of Interacting BPEL Web Services." By Xiang Fu, Tevfik Bultan, and Jianwen Su (Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA). Pages 621-630 (with 27 references) in Proceedings of the Thirteenth World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2004) held in New York City, May 17-22, 2004. "This paper presents a set of tools and techniques for analyzing interactions of composite web services which are specified in BPEL and communicate through asynchronous XML messages. We model the interactions of composite web services as conversations, the global sequence of messages exchanged by the web services. As opposed to earlier work, our tool-set handles rich data manipulation via XPath expressions. This allows us to verify designs at a more detailed level and check properties about message content. We present a framework where BPEL specifications of web services are translated to an intermediate representation, followed by the translation of the intermediate representation to a verification language. As an intermediate representation we use guarded automata augmented with unbounded queues for incoming messages, where the guards are expressed as XPath expressions. As the target verification language we use Promela, input language of the model checker SPIN. Since SPIN model checker is a finite-state verification tool we can only achieve partial verification by xing the sizes of the input queues in the translation. We propose the concept of synchronizability to address this problem. We show that if a composite web service is synchronizable, then its conversation set remains same when asynchronous communication is replaced with synchronous communication..." General references in "Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)."

[June 27, 2004] "Consensus Reached on EPC Gen 2." By Mark Roberti. In RFID Journal (June 24, 2004). "The Freedom and Global proposals for EPCglobal's UHF Gen 2 specification have been merged into a single submission, paving the way for a new EPC standard. The path to a consensus began in Chicago last week. Members of EPCglobal's Hardware Action Group, which is overseeing the process of creating a Gen 2 standard, held a two-day meeting, arranged by Zebra Technologies, at the Hotel Sofitel. At that meeting were representatives from companies supporting one or the other of the proposed specifications that were being considered for adoption. Backing the Global proposal were representatives from Intermec, Philips Semiconductors, Texas Instruments and 10 other companies; promoting the Freedom proposal were representatives from Alien Technology, Atmel and Matrics. Zebra was officially part of the Global proposal but also supported the Freedom proposal, which is why it played a role insetting up the meeting... After several long, intense meetings, leading RFID vendors supporting two rival proposals for a second-generation UHF Electronic Product Code standard have agreed to a consensus proposal. The agreement paves the way for EPCglobal, the nonprofit organization commercializing EPC technology, to create a global standard for tracking goods in the supply chain with UHF RFID tags carrying EPCs. One of the key sticking points between the two groups was their differing approaches to intellectual property (IP). The companies backing the Global proposal were insisting that companies contributing their IP to the specification should be compensated on a reasonable and nondiscriminatory basis. The backers of the Freedom proposal were saying they would contribute their IP to their specification royalty-free and they wanted others supporting their specification to do the same, which was unacceptable to Intermec and other members of the Global team. With both sides agreeing to remove the IP issue from the standards-establishing process, the teams began hashing through the technical differences between the two proposals...EPCglobal will issue a last-call working draft of the standard, and EPCglobal subscribers will have a chance to comment on the draft. Prototype tags and readers will be evaluated, and then in October, EPCglobal's board will formally ratify the draft and it will become a standard..." General references in: (1) "Physical Markup Language (PML) for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)"; (2) "Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Resources and Readings."

[June 27, 2004] "A First Look at the Kowari Triplestore." By Paul Ford. From XML.com (June 23, 2004). "Kowari is an open-sourced (Mozilla Public License) triplestore optimized for RDF storage, created by Tucana Technologies, and written entirely in Java 1.4.2. It began its life as the storage component of the Tucana Knowledge Server (TKS), Tucana's proprietary knowledge management suite, and remains under active development by Tucana. The 40+ meg download, and includes a host of open-sourced Java components (including Apache's SOAP implementation, the Jetty web server, and the Lucene search engine), a better name might be 'platypus'. In fairness, a 'Lite' version of the software is also available, at about 14 megs, which includes two *.jar files, one to run the server, and the other to run a console. This simplicity of installation and operation is quite welcome. Most of the available open-sourced triplestores currently require either compilation, or the installation of a relational database like PostgreSQL for persistence, or are reliant on a host programming language like Perl or Python. In contrast, Kowari's installation is a snap if your machine has Java 1.4 installed — download, unpack, and run. On launch, Kowari sets up a web server, on port 8080 (the port number can be configured), which contains a number of useful resources. A key component in Kowari's bag is a simple console app that allows for direct interaction with the server using Tucana's own SQL-like query language, iTQL. While most applications will end up calling the database via an external program, this easy install allows you to quickly get a feel for the product, and provides an easy way to perform common DBA-like tasks... Kowari is not for everyone: the architecture of the application is clearly focused on the server, and developers looking for an embeddable RDF store for desktop apps will likely want to look elsewhere, unless they are willing to add several megs to their applications. Kowari's dependence on Java is another possible sticking point for those developing tools using other frameworks. Documentation is brief and unfinished, but what's there is useful for the adventurous. Perhaps the most important caveat, however, is that Kowari lacks a security model. Tucana clearly expects security-minded customers to look into TKS, which provides full network-based authentication as part of its package..."

[June 27, 2004] "Eclipse to Pollinate BEA's Beehive." By By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (June 27, 2004). "Although BEA Systems Inc. will not formally join the Eclipse Foundation, the company is moving closer to supporting the organization and its goals. At the JavaOne conference here this week, BEA, of San Jose, Calif., will announce a new Eclipse Foundation project called Pollinate that will feature Eclipse support for BEA's Beehive technology, which is the open-source version of BEA's WebLogic Workshop Java IDE (integrated development environment) framework... Pollinate is an open-source incubator project to create an Eclipse-based development environment and tool set that will integrate with Beehive, which BEA submitted to the Apache Foundation. Beehive is an open-source framework for building SOA (service-oriented architecture) and enterprise Java applications. Eclipse provides the development environment and Beehive provides the underlying application framework and run-time... When the Pollinate project is complete, Eclipse developers will be able to plug Pollinate components into Eclipse and bypass a lot of the complexity of Java development. A beta version of the Eclipse Pollinate software will be available later this year..." [According to the BEA Dev2Dev website description: "Beehive is an open-source software project designed to deliver a cross-container, ease-of-use programming model and application framework for J2EE- and SOA-based applications. Beehive includes support for JSR 175 metadata annotations, the Java controls framework for creating and consuming J2EE components, a simplified Web services programming framework, and the Struts-based Java Page Flow technology for creating Web-based user interfaces and applications. Project Beehive will run on Apache Tomcat, the reference implementation for Java Servlet engines. Beehive can help multitudes of Tomcat customers scale their applications by easily connecting to industry-leading infrastructures such as BEA WebLogic Platform. BEA WebLogic Server is the only J2EE-compliant server on which Beehive runs. However, we anticipate additional ports of Beehive will be created through the open-source development process. Beehive be open-sourced under the Apache License v2.0."]

[June 26, 2004] "Two Web Services Specs Advance: OASIS Moves Forward on Standards for Security, Building Systems." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (June 24, 2004). "OASIS moved forward on two fronts in Web services standardization this week, ratifying a proposal for gauging security vulnerabilities and forming a panel to advance a standard for the building management industry. Members approved Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL) Version 1.0 as an official OASIS Standard. AVDL provides a method for exchanging information about security vulnerabilities within Web services and Web applications, according to OASIS. OASIS also unveiled plans to advance oBIX (Open Building Information Xchange), with the formation of an oBIX Technical Committee to define a standard method to enable mechanical and electrical systems in facilities to communicate with enterprise applications. The oBIX technology would be applicable to systems such as heating, venting, and air conditioning; elevators; laboratory equipment; life/safety systems; and closed circuit television monitoring. Web services would be used to enhance the effectiveness of building control systems..." See: (1) "Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL) Becomes an OASIS Standard" (2) "OASIS Forms Open Building Information Exchange (oBIX) Technical Committee."

[June 25, 2004] "Towards the Self-Annotating Web." By Philipp Cimiano and Siegfried Handschuh (Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany); Steffen Staab (Ontoprise GmbH). Pages 462-471 (with 28 references) in Proceedings of the Thirteenth World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2004) held in New York City, May 17-22, 2004. "The success of the Semantic Web depends on the availability of ontologies as well as on the proliferation of web pages annotated with metadata conforming to these ontologies. Thus, a crucial question is where to acquire these metadata. In this paper we propose PANKOW (Pattern-based Annotation through Knowledge on the Web), a method which employs an unsupervised, pattern-based approach to categorize instances with regard to an ontology. The approach is evaluated against the manual annotations of two human subjects. The approach is implemented in OntoMat, an annotation tool for the Semantic Web and shows very promising results... The approach is novel, combining the idea of using linguistic patterns to identify certain ontological relations as well as the idea of using the Web as a big corpus to overcome data sparseness problems. It is unsupervised as it does not rely on any training data annotated by hand and it is pattern-based in the sense that it makes use of linguistically motivated regular expressions to identify instance concept relations in text. The driving principle behind PANKOW is one of disambiguation by maximal evidence in the sense that for a given instance it proposes the concept with the maximal evidence derived from Web statistics. The approach thus bootstraps semantic annotations as it queries the Web for relevant explicit natural language descriptions of appropriate ontological relations... [Our approach] overcomes the burden of laborious manual annotation and it does not require the manual definition of an information extraction system or its training based on manually provided examples. It uses the implicit wisdom contained in the Web to propose annotations derived from counting Google hits of instantiated linguistic patterns. The results produced are comparable to state-of-the-art systems, whereas our approach is comparatively simple, effortless and intuitive to use to annotate the Web..."

[June 25, 2004] "Microsoft Submits Merged Sender ID E-mail Spec." By Gregg Keizer. From TechWeb News (June 25, 2004). "Microsoft finished blending its e-mail sender authentication scheme with the competing Sender Policy Framework (SPF) standard, and submitted the new specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for consideration. Last month, Microsoft announced that it had come to an agreement with Meng Weng Wong, the creator of SPF, to merge his specification with the Redmond, Wash.-based developer's lesser-known rival, dubbed Caller ID for E-mail. The new specification, called Sender ID, proposes that organizations publish information about their outgoing e-mail servers, particularly IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, in the Domain Name System (DNS) in XML. If adopted, Sender ID would serve as an e-mail authentication system that verifies the message actually originated with the purported address. 'Over half of the e-mail targeting our Hotmail customers today come from spoofed domains,' said Ryan Hamlin, general manager of Microsoft's anti-spam group. 'We are committed to taking this trick away from spammers.' All e-mail authentication schemes under consideration — including Yahoo's DomainKeys, which has also been submitted to the IETF — aim to shut down the use of spoofed, or forged, addresses, used by spammers to disguise the origin of junk mail. Spoofed addresses are also used by phishing scams, which pose as e-mail from legitimate organizations such as banks and credit card companies. Sender ID and DomainKeys both hope to put an end to spoofing by confirming the sender's actual domain, and thus boost the effectiveness of spam filters..." See other details in the news story: "IETF Releases Anti-Spam Sender ID Internet Draft Specification."

[June 24, 2004] "B2B Integration over the Internet with XML: RosettaNet Successes and Challenges." By Suresh Damodaran (Chief Technologist, RosettaNet, On loan from Sterling Commerce). Pages 188-195 (with 8 references) in Proceedings of the Thirteenth World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2004) held in New York City, May 17-22, 2004. "This paper provides an overview of RosettaNet technical standards and discusses the lessons learned from the standardization efforts, in particular, what works and what doesn't. This paper also describes the effort to increase automation of B2B software integration, and thereby to reduce cost... RosettaNet has brought standardization of business processes to the XML-based business information exchange over the Internet. The original goal of this standardization has been to reduce cost while allowing disparate trading partners to conduct electronic commerce in a mutually understood way — both syntactically and semantically. RosettaNet is continuing to further the goal of reducing the cost of implementation and execution of these business processes. As discussed in this paper, making the specification of the business processes more machine interpretable results in fewer manual hours spent in reading and interpreting RosettaNet PIPs. Increased automation further reduces errors and related costs. RosettaNet is currently working on the challenges to making the execution of the business processes more efficient. The goal of making automated B2B integration affordable and accessible to large numbers of small and medium-sized businesses is being addressed by the definition of a services framework, and by standardizing even more aspects of B2B integration..." General references in "RosettaNet." [cache]

[June 19, 2004] "Microsoft Research DRM Talk." By Cory Doctorow (Electronic Frontier Foundation). June 17, 2004. Text dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative Commons public domain dedication. This talk was originally given to Microsoft's Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004. "Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr! I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM. I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London... Here's what I'm here to convince you of: (1) That DRM systems don't work; (2) That DRM systems are bad for society; (3) that DRM systems are bad for business; (4) That DRM systems are bad for artists; (5) That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT... At the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group meetings where the Broadcast Flag was hammered out, the studios' position was, 'We'll take anyone's DRM except Microsoft's and Philips'.' When I met with UK broadcast wonks about the European version of the Broadcast Flag underway at the Digital Video Broadcasters' forum, they told me, 'Well, it's different in Europe: mostly they're worried that some American company like Microsoft will get their claws into European television.' American film studios didn't want the Japanese electronics companies to get a piece of the movie pie, so they fought the VCR. Today, everyone who makes movies agrees that they don't want to let you guys get between them and their customers. Sony didn't get permission. Neither should you. Go build the record player that can play everyone's records. Because if you don't do it, someone else will..." General references in "XML and Digital Rights Management (DRM)." Source: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt.

[June 16, 2004] "Going Mobile With SVG: Standards." By Antoine Quint. From XML.com (June 16, 2004). "While SVG 1.2 is heading soon to the W3C Last Call phase, SVG Mobile has been a focus point for the mobile industry lately... The requirements documents for SVG Tiny 1.1 were created more than two years ago. In these two years, mobile phones have progressed a great deal in computing power, color depth and size of displays and are thus expected by consumers and service providers alike to offer richer graphics experience. In that spirit, the W3C SVG Working Group took the opportunity to use the new work being done on SVG 1.2 to update the SVG Tiny profile... the number one feature that was stripped was scripting. SVG Tiny 1.2 remedies that issue and allows for scripting using a new subset of the SVG DOM called the MicroDOM. This subset was designed with the processing and memory constraints of mobile phones, avoiding the usage of strings la Core DOM and focusing on typed access as the SVG DOM offers, although in a much simplified manner. The graphics capabilities of SVG Tiny 1.2 were also beefed up, and simple linear and radial gradients as well as fill and stroke opacity are all supported now. But SVG Tiny 1.2 doesn't just add features from the SVG 1.1 days, but also picks from new SVG 1.2 features. For instance, text-wrapping is now available for rectangular regions, as are non-scaling strokes. New multimedia capabilities of recent phones also made possible the inclusion in SVG Tiny 1.2 of the <audio> element for playback of sound synchronized in the SMIL timing model of SVG, while support for the <video> element is being discussed too. The notion of pages from SVG 1.2 are also leveraged in SVG Tiny 1.2 for creating scenes in animation... I would like to highlight the success that Mobile SVG has encountered in adoption by other standards bodies. The first organization to embrace Mobile SVG was 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) where all the leading mobile vendors gather to define the new generation industry standards in that area. 3GPP selected Mobile SVG as the mandatory vector graphics media format in MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and PSS (Packet-Switched Streaming Service) in their Release 5 version. For both these specs, SVG Tiny 1.1 is required and SVG Basic 1.1 is optional, allowing for higher-end mobile devices to get the most out of SVG. 3GPP has also been watching recent Mobile SVG 1.2 developments closely, and we can expect new versions of both these specs to rely on Mobile SVG 1.2 profiles. Another organization has recently been conducting work showing more signs of Mobile SVG's widening appeal. The Java Community Process (JCP) have created a Java Specifications Request (JSR) expert group lead by Nokia and Sun working on creating a standard SVG Tiny Java API for J2ME. The JSR-226 expert group has been advancing steadily during the last 12 months and the current draft is in Public Review so it's time for you to go check it out and send your feedback. We can expect from this work at JCP that SVG Tiny will soon be a core component of the J2ME platform, thus promoting further usage of Mobile SVG..."

[June 16, 2004] "The Hill's Property Rights Showdown." By Declan McCullagh. In CNET News.com (June 16, 2004). "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is under siege. For the first time since it was enacted in 1998, the DMCA has become the target of a large and growing number of critics seeking to defang the controversial law. The legislation says Americans aren't permitted to circumvent encryption guarding certain digital media products — even if the purpose is to make a backup copy of a computer program or DVD. On Tuesday, a new group called the Personal Technology Freedom Coalition is planning a press conference to reiterate its members' support for a proposal to repeal the portion of the DMCA that has drawn the most condemnation. Its organizers already have met with representatives of about 20 congressional offices, and they say the coalition includes key tech companies like Intel, Sun Microsystems, Gateway, and Philips Consumer Electronics North America. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., introduced a bill called the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (HR 107). It would allow the circumvention of copy protection as long as no piracy is taking place. Boucher: 'Our intellectual-property laws have always been intentionally porous, and the porous nature of those laws, accommodating, for example, the Fair Use Doctrine, has enabled the society to have a right to use intellectual property in certain circumstances without having to obtain the permission in advance of the owner of the copyright... Many companies that primarily produce intellectual property oppose this [reform] measure. So does the Business Software Alliance, which is dominated by Microsoft. It is, some believe, sort of Microsoft's alternative voice in the nation's capital. The passage of the DMCA was the crown jewel of the legislative efforts of the content-creating community of the last two decades, because it was a dramatically blunt instrument. It criminalizes conduct that most people would believe should be innocent, such as circumventing technical protection in order to exercise a fair-use right..."

[June 16, 2004] "Extending Metadata Recognition: The Java Programming Language Metadata Facility (JSR 175) for J2SE 1.5 Foments Discussion at the ServerSide Symposium 2004." By Kito Mann. In JavaPro Magazine (June 16, 2004). "I attended Ted Neward's discussion on custom attributes in Java. Attributes are currently being developed as Java Specification Request (JSR) 175 and will be part of J2SE 1.5 ('Tiger'), which is scheduled for release later this year. Neward made a point of saying that all of this information hasn't yet been finalized, so take the contents herein with a grain of salt... Neward started the discussion by pointing out some early hacks in the Java language that could have been handled with attributes, most notably serialization [but we ended] end up with marker interfaces and about a million XML documents for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), Java Data Objects (JDO), servlets, Java Management Extensions (JMX), Remote Method Invocation (RMI), and so on. JavaDoc comments are helpful too, especially for code generation (witness XDoclet), but they aren't included in bytecode, so they can't be interpreted at runtime or after compilation. The solution then is to allow us to support arbitrary annotations — metadata —for our classes, fields, methods, and so on. Metadata doesn't replace tools like XDoclet that generate code based on JavaDoc comments; rather, it's a feature that a future version of these tools might use instead of JavaDoc comments. In many ways, they formalize and extend some of the current usage of JavaDoc comments. Annotations are implemented as special classes that look like interfaces, and consequently have no implementation. Their goal is to provide additional information about your code, and that's it. Once you've defined an annotation, you can use it to declare additional information about your code at many different levels (package, type, field, method, parameter, and so on). You can also control when the annotations are available (source only, class file, or runtime), and whether or not they will be documented One key point is that JSR 175 defines how annotations work, not the specific annotations one can use. As time rolls on, the community will weave attributes throughout existing and future pieces of the Java platform, which is already evident in the proposed path of EJB 3.0. (EJB 3.0 uses attributes instead of deployment descriptors and interfaces), and the JCP is already developing annotations for Web services with JSR 181. There's no doubt that metadata is going to be a great addition to the Java platform, and that it will make life a lot more easier for everyday development, especially since it can vastly reduce the number of XML files we need to manage. Annotations will also be the mechanism of choice for Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) frameworks..." See also: (1) "JSR 175: A Metadata Facility for the Java Programming Language"; (2) the author's JavaServer Faces FAQ document.

[June 16, 2004] "application/saml+xml Media Type Registration." By Jeff Hodges (Sun Microsystems). IETF Network Working Group. Internet Draft. Reference: 'draft-hodges-saml-mediatype-00'. June 13, 2004, expires December 12, 2004. "The SAML specification sets, SAML V1.0 and SAML V1.1, are work products of the OASIS Security Services Technical Committee (SSTC). The SAML specifications define XML-based constructs with which one may make, and convey, security assertions. For example, one can assert that an authentication event pertaining to some subject has occured and convey said assertion to a relying party. This document defines a MIME media type 'application/saml+xml' for use with the XML serialization of SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) assertions, or other SAML-defined objects..." General references in "Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)."

[June 16, 2004] "The Atom Link Model." By Mark Pilgrim. From XML.com (June 16, 2004). "Atom is an emerging XML vocabulary and protocol for syndication and editing. Atom has a coherent linking model to express a number of different types of links. Atom borrows heavily from the 'link' markup element in HTML, although they are not identical. A central concept of Atom is the concept of the alternate link, sometimes called the 'permanent link' or 'permalink'. Every Atom feed, and every entry within every feed, must have an alternate link that points to the permanent location of that feed or entry. The terminology of calling it an 'alternate' link is borrowed from the HTML 'link' element, the specification of which states that an alternate link 'designates a substitute version for the document in which the link occurs'. At the feed level, the alternate link points to the home page of the site that the feed is syndicating. At the entry level, the alternate link points to the 'permalink' of that entry in some other format — most often HTML, although it can be any content type. This article explores several of the most common link types that are already deployed in Atom feeds today... Comment feeds: Many weblogs, community sites, and general purpose sites allow visitors to post comments on individual articles. This intersects Atom in two related ways. In Atom, a comment is represented like any other entry, and many publishers now generate comment feeds for individual articles. To make these per-article comment feeds easier to find and subscribe to, Atom has a link tag to point to an entry's associated comment feed..." General references in "Atom Publishing Format and Protocol."

[June 16, 2004] "Virtuoso Can Synchronize XML Data." By Yvonne L. Lee. In Software Development Times (June 15, 2004). "Database access vendor OpenLink Software Inc. has updated its Virtuoso 'universal server' by adding XML data syndication and the ability to synchronize with mobile devices. Virtuoso combines Web, database and application servers along with XML storage. As CEO and founder Kingsley Idehen described it, the product originated from the company's work providing ODBC, JDBC and ADO database connectivity drivers. 'We thought since we can already homogenize SQL data, why don't we use that same capability to present those data sources as XML documents?' he said. The new XML data synchronization in Virtuoso 3.5 makes it possible for organizations to create RSS data feeds. One use for this would be to create catalogs to which customers could subscribe, Idehen said. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is an increasingly popular format for publishing XML information over the Internet..." See the announcement: "OpenLink Releases Universal Server Platform. Virtuoso 3.5 Enables Organizations to Cost-Effectively Develop, Integrate, and Deploy SOA and Event-Driven Solutions."

[June 10, 2004] "Federation Acceleration." By Dan Farber. In ZDNet Tech Update (June 08, 2004). "Federated identity is beginning to gain some traction among corporations, according to a survey conducted by Ping Identity, a provider of federated identity management solutions and the founding sponsor of SourceID, an open source community focused on federation efforts, such as SAML, Liberty Alliance and WS-Federation. The survey, gleaned from nearly 100 responses by registered downloaders of SourceID, showed a strong increase of federations in production, rising from 1 percent to 7 percent between the first and second quarters of this year. Over 50 percent of those surveyed thought they would engage in between 1 and 3 federations within the next 24 months. Only 6 percent surveyed anticipated participation in more than 10 federations in the same period. Ease-of-integration and vendor interoperability were cited as the most important characteristics of federation products, with single-sign on (SSO) amongst partners cited as the primary use case desired. Currently, SAML 1.1 is the dominant protocol used for federation. Vendors have announced support for the Liberty Alliance Liberty ID-FF 1.1, but few are shipping in a substantial way, according to Eric Norlin, senior vice president of marketing at Ping Identity. The survey indicated that interest in SAML 2.0 and WS Federation will begin to ramp up significantly in the latter part of 2004 and continue throughout 2005..."

[June 09, 2004] "Google Mulls RSS Support." By Stefanie Olsen and Evan Hansen. In CNET News.com (June 09, 2004). "Google is considering renewing support for the popular RSS Web publishing format in some services. Along with rival Atom, RSS is a leading candidate to form the basis of an industry standard for a new style of Web publishing that lets readers easily compile news headlines on the fly. Were Google to support both RSS and Atom equally, it might help ease growing pains for a swiftly rising movement of Web publishing. It would also restore Google to the status of a neutral party in the midst of a bitter fight between backers of RSS and Atom, who have been divided since last summer when critics of RSS banded together to create the alternative format. Since then, many blog sites and individuals have rallied behind Atom... Google is central to the debate because of its mounting influence in the online community and within Web publishing circles as the owner of Blogger. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which is gearing up for a $2.7 billion initial public offering later this year, recently redesigned Blogger with simplified features to help newbie Web surfers publish regular accounts of their lives online, a move to appeal to wider audiences. Google also has plans to introduce a raft of community services, including e-mail discussion groups (Google Groups 2), free Web-based e-mail and search personalization tools, which could eventually tap the syndication format... A slew of feed readers or news aggregators has emerged to take advantage of the technology and spur consumer demand. Newsgator, for example, lets people subscribe to various Web logs and news sites and have the feeds delivered to their e-mail via a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, at a cost of $29. Topix.net lets people parse news into 150,000 different categories, even down to a ZIP code, and create their own information site. Pluck recently released a set of browser add-ons for Microsoft's Internet Explorer with an RSS reader. Many news readers support both RSS and Atom, although some support only one or the other. Despite the fissure, RSS has been gaining allegiance among many computer makers and online publishers. In recent weeks, Time magazine, Reuters, Variety.com and Smartmoney.com have started supporting the format, syndicating their headlines to news aggregators and individuals..." See also: (1) "RDF Site Summary" | "Really Simple Syndication" (RSS)." "Atom Publishing Format and Protocol"; (2) "Atom Publishing Format and Protocol."

[June 01, 2004] "Rights Expression Languages: A Report for the Library of Congress." By Karen Coyle. Commissioned by the US Library of Congress, Network Development and MARC Standards Office. Published February 2004. 53 pages. See the background and introduction provided by Sally H. McCallum. "Rights expression languages (RELs) are part of the technology of digital rights management. Both are recent technologies and still in their formative stages. The first RELs were developed in the late 1990's and none can be considered to be fully deployed at this date (2004). This report provides an analysis of a representative sample of RELs that vary from relatively simple expressions of rights holders' preferences to highly complex components of a trusted systems environment. The four featured RELs are: CreativeCommons, METSRights, Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), and MPEG-21, Part 5 (MPEG-21/5). The paper develops categories to aid in the analysis of the RELs. The goals and purposes of the RELs are characterized as: (1) expression of copyright, (2) expression of contract or license agreements, (3) control over access and/or use. An understanding of these different purposes can be used to explain many of the differences between these and other RELs. In particular, the degree to which RELs are intended to be machine-actionable is a determinant in the kinds of rights that can be expressed in the REL. A machine-actionable REL must use very precise language and can nearly guarantee compliance with the terms of the machine-readable license. This REL cannot, however, support social or legal concepts like "fair use." On the other hand, broader and less precise RELs must rely on agreement and trust for enforcement, which means that there is a risk that some unauthorized use of the digital resource could occur... The main purpose of this paper is to expose the underlying goals and assumptions of a range of existing rights expression languages, and to establish a taxonomy that will allow us to evaluate RELs in relation to sets of requirements. This taxonomy may also aid in the further development of languages that serve specific or general needs." The author notes in the section 'Business Models of Rights Expression Languages' that the RELs analyzed are "significantly different from each other in terms of their business models — that is, in terms of how they themselves can be licensed and used." Three of the four RELs studied have no license requirements for use: Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), Creative Commons, and METSRights (METSR). They are open specifications, delivered patent-free by their designers, and are freely downloadable on the Internet. MPEG-21/5 must be purchased from ISO; it is based upon the legally encumbered (patented) XrML(TM) from ContentGuard, recently acquired by Time Warner and Microsoft. General references in "XML and Digital Rights Management (DRM)." [cache]

[June 01, 2004] "Sun Consolidates ID Management Systems." By Jim Wagner. From Internetnews.com (June 01, 2004). "Sun Microsystems has launched three identity management applications that combine its existing product line with technology it acquired from WaveSet in November 2003. The new lines are part of a major product and service announcement that Sun launched Tuesday, which also shines a spotlight on its ID Management systems that have been gaining traction around the globe. Java-based System Identity Manager, System Access Manager and System Directory Server Enterprise Edition will be generally available on July 1st for enterprises looking to incorporate ID management. The technology is used to allow employees, partners and customers access to the company intranet using any number of methods (wireless phone, PC, etc.), securely and allowing access only to pre-determined areas. So, for example, an employee might have rights to several back-end databases and applications for processing orders but a customer or partner would only have access to, say, the front-end order processing application or portal. Officials at the Santa Clara, Calif., software and hardware company are looking to gain market traction with its three products, which are the combination of eight separate Sun and WaveSet applications. They include: (1) Identity Manager provisions and manages individual user accounts, whether the end user is accessing the network by email, phone, device or PC. It also synchronizes user accounts. (2) System Access Manager provides the support for entering the network using the federated ID standards of the Liberty Alliance and Security Assertion Markup Language 1.1 specifications. (3) System Directory Server — the database repository for all the identity policies and information, featuring load-balancing, security and integration with the Microsoft Active Directory..." See the announcement: "Sun Doubles Down on Identity Management Innovations and Alliances Underscore Commitment to Take Lead in Growing $4 Billion Market."

[May 05, 2004] "Web Services Find Way to Devices." By Joris Evers (IDG News Service). In Computerworld Hong Kong (May 05, 2004). "Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Lexmark International Inc. and Ricoh Co. Ltd. on Tuesday detailed new Web services technology designed to make it easier for users to connect devices such as printers, digital cameras and digital music players over a network. The companies at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) officially announced a Devices Profile for Web services, which describes how devices should use Web services protocols. The announcement builds on WS-Discovery, a Web services specification that Microsoft, Intel, Canon Inc. and BEA Systems Inc. introduced in February. WS-Discovery describes a way for devices to find and connect to Web services. The plan to use Web services to connect peripherals to computers is a change from the current use of Web services as a technology to connect business software across corporate networks or the Internet. At WinHEC in Seattle, Microsoft announced a Network Connected Device Driver Development Kit (DDK) for the technology and said Canon and Hewlett-Packard Co. will showcase printers supporting Web services protocols at the event. Devices that use the new technology will automatically be discovered when connected to a home or company network and can subsequently be installed using the Windows plug and play subsystem as if connected directly to a PC... UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) 1.x used today is not enterprise ready, according to [Microsoft's] Allchin. Microsoft and the other developers of the Devices Profile plan to propose it to the UPnP Forum for consideration as the basis for the UPnP 2.0 Device Architecture before the end of the year... Assuming all goes well with the process of getting approval by the UPnP Forum, the first devices using the technology could be out in the 2006 or 2007 timeframe, said Stephen Whalley, technology enabling manager at Intel..." See details in the news story: "Microsoft Releases Devices Profile for Web Services Specification."

[May 04, 2004] "Portlet Standard Predicament: With Two Portlet Access Visions and No Single Standard to Bridge the Gap, the Choice Is Less Than Certain." By Alan Zeichick. In InfoWorld (April 30, 2004). "Two new industry specifications may standardize the logical separation of portal applications (aka portlets) from the portal servers that use their services. The benefits of such a separation are clear, but the choice of whether to adopt the Java Community Process' JSR (Java Specification Request) 168 or OASIS's WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) is less certain. Why separate portlets from portal servers? The most obvious and short-term benefits come from improved scalability. In the traditional portal model, portlets ran on the same J2EE application server as the portal server, interacting via simple J2EE interprocess communication. However, as portal use grew, moving the portlet to another piece of hardware and accessing it remotely reduced processor utilization on the portal server. Also, departments within a business often want to write and maintain their own portlets — something that's hard to accomplish across cultural and technology boundaries if portlets must be deployed to a centralized 'glass house' portal server, but it is easy to do if portlets are hosted separately. It's only recently that industry consortia began defining standard interfaces and communications protocols for running portlets remotely. But the two top specs, JSR 168 and WSRP, are more competitive than complementary. WSRP was designed not only to allow remote portlet-to-portal communication via XML-based Web services but also to accommodate cross-platform portlets. Thus, a J2EE-based portal server could interoperate with a portlet running on a .Net machine as long as it exposes its functionality via WSRP-compliant Web services. The rich WSRP specification defines the communications protocol as well as standardized behavior language for portal-to-portlet transactions, and it uses WS-Security to add encryption and authentication to portlet-portal transactions. WSRP is also extensible and defines a method of extending the behavior language... By contrast, JSR 168's scope is more limited. It does not support cross-platform communications, Web services, or vendor-specific extensions — and it is more likely to ensure broad interoperability, at least within J2EE-based portlets. JSR 168 is defined as a set of extensions to the Java servlets APIs (javax.servlet.portlet), which is easier to implement than WSRP; JSR 168 is already found on most J2EE-based portlets..." See other references in: (1) "Portlet Open Source Trading (POST) Site for JSR 168 and WSRP Portlets"; (2) "Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP)."

[May 04, 2004] "Diving Into Portals' Distinguishing Characteristics." By Mike Heck (InfoWorld Test Center). In InfoWorld (April 30, 2004). ['More than a single access point to enterprise data sources, portals are evolving into the Web application framework of the future.'] "Portals are no longer just jazzed-up intranets. Now that many applications are Web-enabled, portals are becoming the enterprise desktop and replacing the familiar browser. Dive below the surface, and you'll find a portal's distinguishing characteristics: Rich functions that enable swift information exchange for employees, partners, and consumers... A basic portal won't automatically lessen information overkill; that takes support for strong identity management along with role-based customization and personalization. If this support is executed properly, users log in once and interact with information tailored to their jobs, whether that data is fed from a legacy database, content- or document-management system, another portal, or a new Internet-based application. Moreover, portals are redefining the way new applications are created, deployed, and managed. At the core of this movement you'll find Web services and related open standards. Microsoft .Net, Sun's Java System, WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) and a number of Java Portlet Specifications JSR (Java Specification Request - 168, 170, 188, and 207) may help disparate systems freely interact. This openness and modularity provides the option of purchasing third-party portlets for specific functions... The top portal solutions will run on common J2EE app servers, such as IBM WebSphere or BEA WebLogic, or .Net, or both. Here's what differentiates otherwise closely matched products: whether a portal runs best on a vendor's own platform and how well it truly integrates with existing enterprise systems, such as directory and security. There are three portal formats. One favors a tightly integrated APS (application platform suite) approach. Here, the application server, integration framework, and portal are combined into one platform. BEA, Oracle, Sun, Microsoft, and IBM follow this model. With the APS approach, developers can more easily leverage existing databases and reuse business logic. However, you can get locked in to a particular vendor's method of deploying applications or server management. An alternate method, fusing diverse systems through the portal application, is the path Vignette and Plumtree follow. With this method, you may sacrifice some ability to manage applications throughout their life for the freedom to choose the best application server and other components to meet specific needs. Lastly, ERP vendors such as SAP provide portal access to their own application along with some additional integration capabilities..." See also the "Checklist for Enterprise Portals: Eight Features Your Portal Shouldn't be Without." Other references in "Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP)."

[May 04, 2004] "Microsoft Announces Updated Developer Preview Code for Longhorn at WinHEC 2004." By Paula Rooney. In CRN (May 04, 2004). "At its annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2004 in Seattle, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced updated developer preview code for the Longhorn version of Windows that will enable device manufacturers to begin development of native Longhorn device drivers... Microsoft also detailed new Web services technology and a Web services specification designed to make it easier for a variety of PC and network-attached devices, such as Palm devices and Microsoft SmartPhones, to work together. Microsoft, Intel, Ricoh and Lexmark, for example, unveiled the Devices Profile for Web Services specification that describes how devices can support Web services. At the show, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard demonstrated an HP printer connecting to a Windows-based PC using the new Web services discovery protocol. Canon and HP showcased printers supporting these protocols at WinHEC. The Devices Profile will be proposed to the UPnP Forum for consideration as the basis for the UPnP 2.0 Device Architecture..." See details in the news story: "Microsoft Releases Devices Profile for Web Services Specification."

[May 04, 2004] "The Conference Policy Control Protocol (CPCP)." By Hisham Khartabil and Petri Koskelainen (Nokia). IETF Centralized Conferencing Working Group [XCON], Internet Draft. Reference: 'draft-ietf-xcon-cpcp-xcap-00'. April 19, 2004, expires October 18, 2004. 32 pages. The Centralized Conferencing Working Group is part of the IETF Transport Area. "This document describes the Conference Policy Control Protocol (CPCP). It specifies an Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema that enumerates the conference policy data elements that enable a user to define a conference policy. It also defines an XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP) application usage that is needed to store and manipulate a conference policy." Background: "SIP conferencing framework defines the mechanisms for multi-party centralized conferencing in a SIP environment. Existing SIP mechanisms allow users, for example, to join and leave a conference. A centralized serve, called focus, can expel and invite users, and may have proprietary access control lists and user privilege definitions. However, in many cases it is useful to have a standardised conference policy elements such as access control lists and a standardised protocol means to manipulate them. The requirements for such protocol are defined in ['Requirements for conference policy control protocol']. This document provides an XML Schema that enumerates the conference policy data elements that enable a user to define a conference policy. It also defines an XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP) application usage that is needed to store and manipulate a conference policy. Other mechanisms, such as web page or voice response system can also be used to manipulate conference policy data... XCAP has many advantages in its use for conference policy control protocol. It is a HTTP 1.1 based protocol that allows clients to read, write, modify and delete application data stored in XML format at a server. XCAP maps XML document elements and attributes to HTTP URIs that can be directly accessed by HTTP. One application area which has already adopted XCAP is the manipulation of event lists..." See also: (1) "IETF Publishes Internet Drafts for XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP)"; (2) "IETF SIMPLE Specifications Support Presence-Based IM, Video, and Voice"; (3) IETF Centralized Conferencing (XCON) Working Group Charter."

[May 04, 2004] "Statement to W3C Compound Document Committee." By Eliot Kimber (Innodata Isogen) and Michael Priestley (IBM). Posted 2004-05-03 to the OASIS DITA TC document repository, and proposed as a statement "on behalf of the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture Technical Committee." Excerpt: "The subject of compound documents is of primary interest to the DITA Technical Committee. The Darwin Information Typing Architecture defines a set of techniques for using XML in order to enable the effective and efficient development of re-usable information components, primarily in the context of technical documentation, informative Web sites, and similar types of structured, topically-focused information for consumption by humans. This activity naturally involves the combination, whether syntactically or semantically, of elements from different name spaces and governed by different schemas... As we understand the scope of the W3C Compound Document Workshop, it is focused primarily on issues surrounding XML documents that have elements from different name spaces (and thus implicitly, different schemas) and what that means. Within this scope there are a number of important use cases that must be considered, including the implications for processors that must make sense of compound documents, how communities of interest can define and impose constraints on what combinations are allowed, and how to do controlled specialization of element types in a way that does not, for example, require the creation of overarching XSD schemas that define the specializations as part of the base element type definitions. DITA has a part to play in each of these areas: (1) Our specialization-based processing architecture lets both standard and customized transforms work with unknown document types based on their ancestry. (2) Our DTD/schema integration rules provide a framework in which communities can define their own combinations of markup without breaking interoperability or processing infrastructure. (3) Our specialization scheme separates out the definition of new markup into modules that can be consistently and predictably integrated with other DITA modules... We observe that the term 'compound document' is often used to refer not to single instances that combine elements from different name spaces but systems of independent documents linked together in order to define a single unit of processing, delivery, or management (i.e., hyperdocuments explicilty created and processed as a single unit of processing, as opposed to ad-hyperdocuments created through the creation of uncoordinated linking actions). Both the XLink and XInclude specifications define mechanisms for creating this type of compound document, as does the current DITA specification (through its map mechanism). This sense of compound document is largely orthogonal to the question of combining elements from different schemas: most existing systems that create this type of compound document do so in the context of a single document type. We urge the W3C to clarify its use of the term 'compound document' to clearly distinguish at least these two senses in order to establish a clear and unambiguous standard vocabulary by which we, as a community, can communicate efficiently and effectively on this important and challenging subjects..." See: (1) W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents, June 1-2, 2004; (2) "Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)."[cache]

[May 04, 2004] "Six Strategies for Grid Application Enablement, Part 1: Overview." By David Kra (Executive Consulting IT Architect, IBM). From IBM developerWorks (April 27, 2004). ['This article, first in a series, defines six strategies for grid application enablement. It explains the characteristics of applications suitable for these strategies and the benefits to organizations that run these applications. Subsequent articles will explain how to enable applications using strategy 1 through strategy 5 with as little effort as possible.'] "There are six strategies for grid enablement. They start with simply running in a grid and end with fully exploiting the grid. It's very important to note that by merely running in a grid, your customer gains value and you gain revenue and industry leadership. Also, by letting the grid provide facilities that are currently in your offering (such as file movement and scheduling), you might be able to reduce the non-core-competency code from your product without a loss of function. Over time, there will be an unavoidable requirement for grid enablement: your application must be accessible as a Web service. For example, your application must have its Session Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) components exposed as Web services, or it must have a Web services artifact (a wrapper, an interface, a facade, a veneer, or whatever you want to call it) that can invoke the existing code. Available tooling helps accomplish that. As grid standards are built into the appropriate Web services specification, Web service enablement becomes increasingly important. Service-oriented architectures and Web services are becoming the substrate on which strategic grid environments are based... Strategy 1: Batch Anywhere; Strategy 2: Independent Concurrent Batch; Strategy 3: Parallel Batch; Strategy 4: Service; Strategy 5: Parallel Services; Strategy 6 :Tightly Coupled Parallel Programs. These strategies can be grouped into three stages for implementation: (1) Run — Strategies 1 and 2, and the simplest form of Strategy 3, focus on the ability of an application to run in a grid. (2) Adapt — The more complex form of Strategy 3 as well as Strategies 4 and 5 significantly adapt the function and value of the business application by enabling it to use a grid without requiring many changes that are specific to grid middleware. The same application could be structured to run in a non-grid environment. (3) Exploit — Applications at Strategy 6 exploit the grid or cluster infrastructure for their operation because they were written from the start with a grid in mind. Strategy 6 applications cannot finish in a timely and successful manner without running in a grid..."

[May 03, 2004] "OASIS Frees Universal Business Language for General Use." By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (May 03, 2004). "E-business standards consortium OASIS announced that the Universal Business Language (UBL) 1.0 specification has been approved as an OASIS draft and is now available for general use. Jon Bosak, a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems Inc. and chairman of the OASIS UBL technical committee, said UBL 1.0, which OASIS released for general use over the weekend, represents six years of development in building a standard XML business syntax. Bosak said business is built on the use of standard, legally binding documents and that UBL is an effort to bring those documents — such as purchase orders, shipping notices and invoices —online. UBL schemas plug into traditional business legal and records management practices, and they fill the 'payload' slot in XML-based, business-to-business frameworks... Bosak said he sees broader implications for the XML EDI framework enabled by UBL and ebXML that extend beyond B2B relationships and into interactions such as those between governments and their citizens, retailers and consumers, and tenants and landlords, because those relationships depend on the same features required for B2B. UBL 1.0 provides a library of XML schemas for components such as Address, Item and Payment, and other schemas such as Order and Invoice are constructed from the UBL library components. Meanwhile, UBL schemas come with such supporting materials as Unified Modeling Language class diagrams, spreadsheet models, sample instances and formatting specifications..." See: (1) details in the news story "Universal Business Language (UBL) 1.0 Approved as an OASIS Committee Draft"; (2) general references in "Universal Business Language (UBL)."

[May 03, 2004] "Universal Biz Language Ready for Web Services." By Clint Boulton. From InternetNews.com (May 03, 2004). "E-commerce standards across the globe could start to align now that standards body OASIS has approved for public use a description language for XML-based purchase orders, invoices and shipping notices. After six years in development, the Universal Business Language Version 1.0 is now available in draft form for users to freely test the specification, according to an OASIS document published Friday. UBL, which aims to provide a universal syntax for business documents, is geared to work within a larger standard business framework such as ISO 15000 (ebXML). Messaging exchange languages such as UBL and ebXML define how enterprises can conduct business across the globe, knocking down barriers associated with distance and language with e-commerce facilitated by Web services... The UBL v1.0 library features XML schemas for eight business document types designed for standard order-to-invoice trading, and support for the customization of UBL in specific trading scenarios. The commercial draft release contains modularized common XML schemas, including Business Information Entities (BIEs), which are assembled into document models such as Order and Invoice, as well as reusable data type schemas, a metadata schema, and thirteen code list schemas..." See: (1) details in the news story "Universal Business Language (UBL) 1.0 Approved as an OASIS Committee Draft"; (2) general references in "Universal Business Language (UBL)."