Cover Pages: SGML and XML News 2003 Q3

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[September 30, 2003] Draft XACML Profile for Web-Services Addresses Web Services Policy Expression. A version 04 draft of the XACML Profile for Web-Services specification has been produced by members of the OASIS Extensible Access Control Markup Language TC. Also referenced as 'WSPL', the specification "defines a profile of XACML that enables it to be used for describing policy associated with Web service end-points and using them in a successful invocation." Background to the WSPL design is supplied in a Web-Services Policy Language Use Cases and Requirements document, summarized in the version 04 spec: "Access to a standard-conformant Web-service end-point involves a number of aspects, such as: reliable messaging, privacy, authorization, trust, authentication and cryptographic security. Each aspect addresses a number of optional features and parameters, which must be coordinated between communicating end-points if the service invocation is to be successful. The provider and consumer of the service likely have different preferences amongst the available choices of features and parameters. Therefore, a mechanism is required by which end-points may describe the mandatory features of service invocation, optional features that they support and the order of their preference amongst such features. Additionally, a procedure is required for combining and reducing these feature descriptions into a service invocation instance that respects both end-points' requirements. According to the WSPL profile, an XACML <PolicySet> element is associated with a concrete Web-service end-point definition." Appendix A of the specification provides an example from the realm of data-rate allocation; it illustrates the procedure for combining and reducing XACML policies that conform with the WSPL profile using two simple policy instances. [Full context]
[September 29, 2003] OASIS Announces Framework for Web Services Implementation (FWSI) TC. OASIS members have formed a new Framework for Web Services Implementation (FWSI) Technical Committee to produce guidelines that assist system integrators and software vendors in implementing Web Services solutions. The purpose of OASIS FWSI TC is to "facilitate implementation of robust Web Services by defining a practical and extensible methodology consisting of implementation processes and common functional elements that practitioners can adopt to create high quality Web Services systems without re-inventing them for each implementation. It attempts to solve the problem of the slow adoption of Web Services due to lack of methodologies to implement Web Services, and lack of understanding of whether solutions proposed by vendors have the necessary components to reliably implement an application based on Web Services. The TC goals are to: accelerate implementation of Web Services-based systems; improve the performance and robustness of such systems; improve understanding of Web Services implementations; reduce the complexity of such systems and hence reduce the developmental and maintenance efforts; and reduce the risk of implementation. Key deliverables of the TC include a Web Services Implementation Process Specification and a Web Services Functional Elements Specification. Members of the new OASIS FWSI Technical Committee include CommerceNet, IDA, Information Technology Standards Committee of Singapore, RosettaNet, SIMTech, Sun Microsystems, Center for E-Commerce Infrastructure Development (CECID) at the University of Hong Kong, Yellow Dragon, and other OASIS members. The proposed TC Chairs are Dr. LEE Eng Wah, Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology and Mr. Roberto B. PASCUAL, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. The first meeting of the OASIS FWSI TC will be held December 8-92003 at the XML 2003 Conference in Philadelphia. [Full context]
[September 26, 2003] RoMEO and OAI-PMH Teams Develop Rights Solution Using ODRL and Creative Common Licenses. Project RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open Archiving) has completed its first year of operation with funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and has published a rights solution report. A sixth interim Study and the Final Report describe an XML-based system for the expression of rights and permissions governing metadata and resources in institutional repositories. A principal goal of RoMEO, like that of the Creative Commons, is to neutralize the negative effects of (default) copyright law and controlling intermediaries in order to facilitate easy, open access to protected digital works. On this model, consumers do not need to ask permission for use of resources because permission in various forms has already been granted. The RoMEO Project team sought to develop an interoperable set of metadata elements and methods of incorporating the rights elements into document metadata processed by the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The goal is to protect research papers and other digital resources in an open-access environment. The project team has developed an XML metadata notation using the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) and Creative Commons licenses for disclosure of the rights expressions under the OAI-PMH. The markup model covers both individual digital resources and collections of metadata records. A new 'OAI-RIGHTS' Technical Committee has been formed by members of the RoMEO and OAI project teams to further develop the proposals and to publish generic guidelines for disclosing rights expressions. [Full context]
[September 25, 2003] Web Services at Apache Hosts WSRP4J Open Source Project for Remote Portlets. The OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Specification recently approved as an OASIS Standard is now supported by an open source WSRP4J project organized through the Apache Software Foundation. WSRP "definesa standard for interactive, presentation-oriented web services.It simplifies integration of remote applications/content into portals so that portal administrators can pick from a rich choice of services and integrate it in their portal without programming effort. As a result, WSRP becomes the means for content and application providers to provide their services to organizations running portals in a very easily consumable form. One of several projects in the Apache Web Services area, WSRP4J is a technology donated by IBM and designed to facilitate quick adoption of the WSRP standard by content and application providers and portal vendors. WSRP4J provides the WSRP4J Producer, which allows implementing such WSRP compliant services based on a free, open source software stack consisting of Tomcat, Axis and WSRP4J which in turn includes Pluto, the JSR 168 reference implementation. In addition, the WSRP4J project provides a generic proxy portlet written to the Portlet API, the WSRP4J Consumer. The WSRP4J Project provides two different provider components as well as two WSRP consumers. Each of these components can be installed separately and has different prerequisites." [Full context]
[September 22, 2003] OASIS Members Form ebXML Business Process Technical Committee. A new OASIS ebXML Business Process Technical Committee (ebXML BP TC) has been proposed to "continue work on a royalty-free technology representation and model compatible with an underlying generic metamodel for business processes, activities, and collaboration. This business collaboration could occur within or between enterprises. The collaboration may be enforceable, easily manageable, and/or traceable. This representation and model will provide a set of guidelines to define the business process-rules, semantics and syntax for both binary and multi-party collaborations. The representation and model will work within the ebXML architecture (for metamodel and model exchange) and will also support standards-based development and exchange of business process definitions. The OASIS ebXML Business Process TC's effort will address and align with vertical industry needs for business process collaboration and focus on ease of use. The specification can be integrated into and bind with existing or emerging technologies. The TC's work should build upon similar, existing standards wherever possible and align with other relevant standards for feature reuse, bindings, guidelines on how to jointly use the specification with other related standards, and addressing requirements from other related standards. The TC will base its work upon the ebXML Business Process Specification Schema Version 1.01 jointly developed by OASIS and UN/CEFACT, and upon derivative work expected to be donated by co-sponsors and participants." The proposed TC Co-Chairs are Dale Moberg (Cyclone Commerce) and Monica J. Martin (Sun Microsystems). The first meeting of the OASIS ebXML Business Process TC will be held on October 20, 2003 as a teleconference. [Full context]
[September 20, 2003] Standards Organizations Express Concern About Royalty Fees for ISO Codes. W3C, the Unicode Technical Committee, and INCITS (International Committee for Information Technology Standards) have recently published statements of concern about ISO's interpretation of law and policy on the collection of royalty payments for the use of ISO codes. The data elements in question involve several ISO standards that are often referenced in Internet infrastructure specifications and protocols, and code lists that are widely implemented in language-sensitive text processing software. The lists include ISO 639 'Codes for the representation of names of languages', ISO 3166 'Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions', and ISO 4217 'Codes for the representation of currencies and funds'. ISO has clarified that "generally, software developers or commercial resellers requesting permission to embed the data elements contained in an ISO Code in their products for resale will be asked to purchase the Code in electronic format and pay either an annual fee or a one-time fee and any applicable maintenance fees required." The letters from W3C, UTC, and INCITS have appealed to ISO and ANSI for reversal of their interpretation and policy. [Full context]
[September 19, 2003] SnowShore Networks Develops Royalty-Free Media Server Control Markup Language (MSCML). SnowShore Networks has officially announced royalty free licensing terms for implementing technology in the Media Server Control Markup Language (MSCML). MSCML is an XML-based protocol used in conjunction with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to enable the delivery of advanced multimedia conferencing services over IP networks. The protocol was "submitted to the IETF as an Internet Draft in 2002 after a rigorous two year test and evaluation process. It is used to drive the delivery of IP enhanced conferencing to wireline, wireless and broadband networks worldwide. SnowShore also announced the successful deployment of MSCML in both trials and live network environments; it is is currently being used by a number of application developers, media server manufacturers, equipment vendors and service providers, including Z-Tel, IBM, Broadsoft, Bay Packets, Commetrex, Leapstone and Ubiquity Software. Industry watchers and vendors alike view MSCML as the essential protocol for call control between the media server and application server in the IP services architecture. SnowShore communicated to the IETF that it is offering Royalty Free licenses of its intellectual property necessary for implementing the MSCML standard. This inclusive policy provides IP application developers, infrastructure vendors and service providers with the opportunity to bring to market new IP enhanced conferencing and innovative services within the universal framework of SIP and MSCML." [Full context]
[September 18, 2003] OASIS Forms Web Services Composite Application Framework Technical Committee. OASIS members have formed a new WS-CAF Technical Committee to "define a generic and open framework for applications that contain multiple services used in combination (composite applications)." The TC will continue collaborative work on the Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) specification suite recently published by Arjuna Technologies Limited, Fujitsu Software, IONA Technologies PLC, Oracle Corp, and Sun Microsystems. The proposal notes that "composability is a critical aspect of Web Service specifications; the initial TC members expect the work of the WS-CAF TC, particularly WS-Context, to become building blocks for other Web service specifications and standards. Therefore, the resulting specification must be non-overlapping and have demonstrated composability with other Web Service specifications that are being developed in open, recognized standards setting organizations. The WS-CAF TC will work with these organizations to gather requirements input and to define the relationships between their specifications and this TC's work with the goal of promoting convergence, consistent use, and a coherent architecture. The anticiated audience for this work includes: (1) other specification writers that need underlying web service coordination, context and transaction mechanisms; (2) vendors offering web service products; (3) software architects and progammers who design and write distributed applications requiring coordination, context and transaction mechanisms." The WS-CAF TC Convenor is Mark Little (Arjuna Technologies); the proposed TC Chairs are Martin Chapman (Oracle Corporation) and Eric Newcomer (Iona Technologies). The first meeting of the OASIS WS-CAF TC will held October 31, 2003 as a teleconference. [Full context]
[September 17, 2003] New Production-Ready Release of Open Source ebXML Registry. A communiqué from Farrukh Najmi (Sun Microsystems) describes a new production-ready release of ebXML Registry software from the OASIS ebXML Registry Reference Implementation Project (ebxmlrr). As part of the freebXML Initiative, the ebxmlrr project is chartered to deliver a "royalty free, open source, functionally complete reference implementation for the OASIS ebXML Registry specifications as defined by the OASIS ebXML Registry Technical Committee." The 'ebxmlrr 2.1-final1' release also implements most optional features of the version 2.1 ebXML Registry specifications as well as several new features of the latest interim specifications for ebXML Registry version 3. This ebXML Registry implementation provides several new features, including: "(1) Web Content Management capability; (2) Role base access control using XACML access control policies; (3) Locale sensitive Registry Browser; (4) XML based fully configurable Registry Browser; (5) Usability improvements in the Registry Browser; (6) Support for read-only mode when the user is unauthenticated; (7) Web browser integration. The client package of the ebxmlrr project includes a JAXR provider, enabling standard Java API access to the ebXML registry services." The freebXML initiative "aims to foster the development and adoption of ebXML and related technology through software and experience sharing. It has created a centralized web site for the sharing of 'free' ebXML code and applications as well as development and deployment experience, and promotes ebXML as an e-commerce enabling technology. The initiative is sponsored by the Center for E-Commerce Infrastructure Development and the Department of Computer Science & Information Systems at the University of Hong Kong." [Full context]
[September 16, 2003] Updated Specifications for the Web Services Transaction Framework. A revised version of the Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination) specification has been published, together with a new Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction) specification. A third specification Web Services Business Activity (WS-BusinessActivity) is to be released separately to complete the new three-part Web Services Transaction framework from Microsoft, BEA, and IBM. WS-AtomicTransaction "replaces part I of the WS-Transaction specification released in August 2002; the specification titled WS-BusinessActivity will replaces part II of WS-Transaction. WS-Coordination "defines the protocols for creating activities, registering in activities, and transmitting information to disseminate an activity. WS-Coordination provides an extensible framework in which participants can join in activities enabling the coordination of distributed applications." WS-AtomicTransaction "defines the Atomic Transaction coordination type and is appropriate to use when building applications that require a consistent agreement on the outcome of a short-lived distributed activity, where strong isolation is required until the transaction completes." WS-BusinessActivity "defines the Business Activity coordination type. It is appropriate to use when building applications that require a consistent agreement on the coordination of a distributed activity, where strong isolation is not feasible, and application-specific compensating actions are used to coordinate the activity." [Full context]
[September 15, 2003] IBM, Computer Associates, and Talking Blocks Release WS-Manageability Specification. A three-part specification for WS-Manageability has been released for public review by IBM, Computer Associates, and Talking Blocks. The specification has been provided as a submission to the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee (WSDM TC) and to the Web service community in general. The Web Services Manageability: Concepts document clarifies the specification scope and "defines the role of the manager in the Web services architecture and provides practical information on manageability implementation patterns and discovery considerations." The WS-Manageability Specification document introduces the "general concepts of a manageability model in terms of manageability topics, (identification, configuration, state, metrics, and relationships) and the aspects (properties, operations and events) used to define them. These abstract concepts apply to understanding and describing the manageability information and behavior of any IT resource, not just Web services. The authors use these concepts to organize an approach to Web services manageability. The manageability model for Web services endpoint is defined as concrete models in UML using the topics and aspects concepts, without implying any particular implementation or locus of implementation." The WS-Manageability Representation document supplies the interface definitions "based on the model as WSDL 1.1 and GWSDL renderings. These definitions are meant to show how the topics and aspects concepts along with concrete models can influence the development of consistent Web services interfaces for accessing the manageability information of Web services. The interfaces illustrate how the manageability model for Web services can be divided into aspects of topics that apply to all manageable resources and aspects of topics that apply only to the manageability of Web service endpoints." [Full context]
[September 15, 2003] Berkeley Center for Document Engineering (CDE) Promotes XML-Encodable Business Models. A new Center for Document Engineering has been established at UC Berkeley as a focal point for initiatives in XML and model-based approaches for automatable, standards-based business computing. 'Document Engineering' in the CDE model is a "synthesis of information and systems analysis, business process modeling, electronic publishing, and distributed computing." CDE has been founded by the UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) and e-Berkeley Program under the direction of Dr. Robert Glushko and a CDE Advisory Board. The Center's goal is to "invent, evaluate, and promote model-driven technologies and methods that allow business semantics to drive IT systems. The CDE will create, collect, and disseminate XML schemas, software, best practices, and other content for building web services and applications that allow business semantics to drive IT systems and automate business processes. The first initiative of the CDE is the Berkeley Academic Business Language (BABL), an evolving set of models and associated XML schemas for the domain of University education and operations. BABL is based upon the Universal Business Language (UBL). A second major CDE initiative is an XML application platform that uses models like those in BABL to implement enterprise-class applications whose core data-models are encoded in XML. This platform allows developers to represent data models, business rules, workflow specifications, and user interfaces as externalized XML documents, rather than mixing and scattering them throughout application code. This will make it easier for nonprogrammers to design, develop, and maintain forms and workflow-based Internet applications." [Full context]
[September 11, 2003] Sun Announces J2EE V1.4 Support for WS-I Compliant Web Services Applications. Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced the availability Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) version 1.4 source code providing support for the final WS-I Basic Profile and the J2EE programming model for portable Web services applications. The source-code release includes compatibility tests, allowing J2EE licensees to make progress on implementing J2EE 1.4. Sun's support of WS-I interoperability specifications helps relieve the burden upon Java developers to learn "specific Web services specifications or to acquire WS-I interoperability expertise; profile guidelines are included in Java platforms and development toolkits such as the Java Web Services Developer Pack (Java WSDP). To date, Sun has released several versions of its J2EE platform based on early WS-I specifications, such as Java Web Services Developer Pack 1.2 and J2EE 1.4 SDK Beta 2. Once J2EE 1.4 is finalized, Sun will release compatibility tests, source code and a software development toolkit (SDK). With these tools, Java developers can save time and money by working with standard APIs for XML and Web Services, such as JAXP, JAXB, JAX-RPC and JAX-R, instead of proprietary APIs that may change from vendor to vendor. Java and XML technologies allow users to easily develop applications that can be seamlessly deployed across all major operating platforms, including Solaris, Linux and Windows. Java has long been the developer's choice for Web services, and J2EE 1.4 represents a culmination of work by the JCP and the technology industry to deliver the first platform to support the WS-I Basic Profile." [Full context]
[September 11, 2003] Web Services for Remote Portlets Specification Approved as OASIS Standard. OASIS has announced the approval of the Web Services for Remote Portlets Specification Version 1.0 as an OASIS Standard, reflecting the collaborative effort of some twenty-five (25) OASIS member companies. WSRP defines the interface and semantics for a web service standard "that allows for the plug-and-play of content sources (e.g., portlets) with portals and other aggregating web applications. It thereby standardizes the consumption of Web services in portal front ends and the way in which content providers write Web services for portals. Scenarios that motivate WSRP/WSIA functionality include: (1) Portal servers providing portlets as presentation-oriented web services that can be used by aggregation engines; (2) Portal servers consuming presentation-oriented web services provided by portal or nonportal content providers and integrating them into a portal framework. The the description also applies generally to non-portal environments. WSRP allows content to be hosted in the environment most suitable for its execution while still being easily accessed by content aggregators. The standard enables content producers to maintain control over the code that formats the presentation of their content. By reducing the cost for aggregators to access their content, WSRP increases the rate at which content sources may be easily integrated into pages for end-users." [Full context]
[September 09, 2003] OASIS WSS TC Approves Three Web Services Security Specifications for Public Review. The OASIS Web Services Security Technical Committee has announced a unanimous vote to begin the public review of three Web Services Security specifications and associated XML Schemas. The documents were approved as TC Committee Drafts, moving the WSS TC's work one step closer to making WS-Security an OASIS Standard. The 30-day public review period for the WSS TC specifications starts 19-September-2003 and ends 19-October-2003. The Core Web Services Security: SOAP Message Security document "proposes a standard set of SOAP extensions that can be used when building secure Web services to implement message content integrity and confidentiality. It is flexible and is designed to be used as the basis for securing Web services within a wide variety of security models including PKI, Kerberos, and SSL. Specifically, this specification provides support for multiple security token formats, multiple trust domains, multiple signature formats, and multiple encryption technologies." Two XML Schemas are considered part of the WSS Core. The Web Services Security: Username Token Profile document "describes how to use the UsernameToken with the Web Services Security (WSS) specification; more specifically, it describes how a web service consumer can supply a UsernameToken as a means of identifying the requestor by 'username', and optionally using a password, to authenticate that identity to the web service producer." The Web Services Security: X.509 Certificate Token Profile document describes the use of the X.509 authentication framework with the Core WSS specification. An X.509 certificate may be used to validate a public key that may be used to authenticate a WS-Security-enhanced message, or to identify the public key with which a WS-Security-enhanced message has been encrypted." [Full context]
[September 05, 2003] WWW2004: The Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference. A Call for Participation has been issued in connection with The Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2004), to be held May 17-22, 2004 at the New York Sheraton, New York, NY, USA. WWW 2004 is hosted by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in partnership with the IFIP Working Group 6.4 on Internet Applications Engineering and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The Program Committee Co-Chairs include Marc Najork (Microsoft Research) and Craig Wills (Worcester Polytechnic Institute). Since first International WWW Conference in 1994, "this prestigious conference series has provided a public forum for the WWW Consortium (W3C) through the annual W3C track. The technical program will include refereed paper presentations, alternate track presentations, plenary sessions, panels, and poster sessions. Tutorials and workshops will precede the main program, and a Developers Day, devoted to in-depth technical sessions designed specifically for web developers." The deadline for paper submissions closes November 14, 2003; for tutorial/workshop proposals the deadline is October 15, 2003. [Full context]
[September 04, 2003] HP Integrates Industry Grid Standards Across All Enterprise Product Lines. HP Company has announced plans to "further enable its enterprise infrastructure technologies for grid computing" by incorporating support for the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and Globus Toolkit into its product lines. HP already collaborates with government and industry partners in planetary scale grid computing projects. By leveraging open grid standards and industry experience, HP "plans to help customers simplify the use and management of distributed information technology resources, taking advantage heterogeneous environments and interoperability across devices. HP delivers grid-enabled services, solutions, and products to help enterprises better manage and capitalize on change. HP has also announced enterprise consulting within HP Services for grid-based platforms, providing management, deployment, and lifecycle support for grid architectures. The 'grid' concept was formally developed in the 1990s as a shared computing approach that coordinates decentralized resources and uses open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces to deliver high-quality service levels. The grid is designed to render almost anything in IT as a grid service -- whether computers, processing power, data, Web services, storage space, software applications, data files or devices." [Full context]
[September 03, 2003] IPTC Releases Version 3.2 Preview for News Industry Text Format (NITF). A preview version of the NITF 3.2 DTD and documentation has been released by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). The Version 3.2 DTD has support for Ruby, adds the xml:lang attribute to the "common" class, and implements other enhancements. The IPTC membership will vote on the NITF v3.2 changes at the Leipzig Autumn Meeting (October 8-10, 2003). The News Industry Text Format (NITF) is "an XML-based vocabulary designed for the markup and delivery of news content in a variety of ways, including print, wireless devices and the Web. It provides a structural framework for the representation of news, supporting the identification and description of many news story characteristics. Features which can be encoded include: (1) What subjects, organizations, and events the news item covers; (2) When the story was reported, issued, and revised; (3) Why the news item is newsworthy, based on the editor's analysis of the metadata; (4) Where the story was written, where the action took place, and where it may be released; (5) Who owns the copyright to the item and who may republish it." NITF is one of several news-related specifications developed by participating members of the news industry within working parties of the IPTC. A companion enveloping and multimedia standard is NewsML. IPTC is also working on SportsML, ProgramGuideML, and EventsML as specialized vocabularies which may be used with NITF and NewsML core. IPTC membership is drawn from major news agencies, newspaper publishers, news distributors, and vendors worldwide. [Full context]
[September 02, 2003] W3C Device Independence Working Group Publishes Specs for a Universally Accessible Web. The W3C Device Independence Working Group (DIWG) has released three specifications supporting its goal of ensuring that presentation devices can access Web content appropriate for their capabilities. The Device Independence Principles document articulates the Working Group's vision of a device independent Web, describing "device independence principles that can lead towards the achievement of greater device independence for web content and applications." The revised draft on Authoring Challenges for Device Independence "discusses the challenges that authors commonly face when building web content and applications that can be accessed by users via a wide variety of different devices with different capabilities. This document examines the effects on authors and the implications for authoring techniques that assist in the preparation of sites that can support a wide variety of devices and proposes a derived a set of requirements for such techniques." A first public working draft of Glossary of Terms for Device Independence provides a glossary of terms used in other documents produced by the Device Independence Working Group. The WG has been chartered to "study issues related to authoring, adaptation, and presentation of Web content and applications that can be delivered effectively through different access mechanisms." Specifically, the WG is tasked with: (1) collecting requirements for Web access via various kinds of presentation device; (2) reviewing related specifications within and outside of W3C; (3) providing use cases and requirements to related activities within W3C; (4) describing techniques which allow authors to better manage device dependencies; (5) [as needed,] proposing recommendations that will lead to enhanced device independence." [Full context]
[August 29, 2003] BPMI.org Releases Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) Version 1.0. The BPMI Notation Working Group has announced the release of a public draft for the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN Version 1.0). The BPMN specification "provides a graphical notation for expressing business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD). The objective of BPMN is to support process management by both technical users and business users by providing a notation that is intuitive to business users yet able to represent complex process semantics. As an amalgamation of best practices within the business modeling community, BPMN provides a simple, standardized means of communicating process information to other business users, process implementers, customers, and suppliers. BPMN 1.0 allows different XML-based process languages, e.g., Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS v1.1) and Business Process Modeling Language (BPML v1.0), to be visualized using common elements. BPMN is a comprehensive notation and points toward the convergence of open standards for business process management by enabling practitioners to more easily exchange business process models between different business process languages using a standardized graphical notation." [Full context]
[August 28, 2003] W3C Opens Public Discussion Forum on US Patent 5,838,906 and Eolas v. Microsoft. W3C has published a report from Steven R. Bratt (W3C Chief Operating Officer) on the matter of US Patent 5,838,906 and the Eolas v. Microsoft lawsuit. The patent is described as applicable to Java applets, browser plug-ins, ActiveX components, Macromedia Flash, Windows Media Player, and related "embedded program objects." The W3C document reports on a recent meeting of W3C Members and other key commercial and open source software interests, held to "evaluate potential near-term changes that might be implemented in browsers, authoring tools, and Web sites as a result of the court case." A new W3C 'public-web-plugins' list provides a public discussion forum for those concerned with the patent and recent court decisions. Since the patent may "potentially have implications for the World Wide Web in general, including specifications from W3C, the W3C believes that it is important for the Web community to begin now to consider and contribute to the range of technical options available." According to W3C's summary, the relevant patent assigned to The Regents of the University of California and managed by Eolas Technologies Inc. "claims to cover mechanisms for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents, where at least some of the object's data is located external to the document, and there is a control path to the object's implementation to support user interaction with the object. The implementation can be local or distributed across a network, and is automatically invoked based upon type information in the document or associated with the object's data." [Full context]
[August 27, 2003] W3C CSS Working Group Publishes Three Cascading Style Sheets Working Drafts. The W3C CSS Working Group has released three working drafts for the Cascading Style Sheets language "which is widely implemented and is playing an increasingly important role in styling many kinds of XML documents, including XHTML, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), XML, and SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). As described in CSS3 Module: Presentation Levels, presentation levels are integer values attached to elements in a document. They can be used to support slide presentations with transition effects (e.g., progressively revealing a list item by sliding it in from the side) and outline views of documents. The CSS3 Module: Syntax specification "describes the basic structure of CSS style sheets, some of the details of the syntax, and the rules for parsing CSS style sheets. It also describes how stylesheets can be linked to documents and how those links can be media-dependent." The CSS Print Profile is designed for printing from mobile devices where it is not feasible or desirable to install a printer-specific driver, and for situations were some variability between the device's view of the document and the formatting of the output is acceptable to provide a strong basis for rich printing results without a detailed understanding of each individual printer's characteristics. This profile will work in conjunction with XHTML-Print and defines an extension set that provides stronger layout control for the printing of mixed text and images, tables and image collections." The W3C CSS Working Group requests feedback on the working draft specifications. [Full context]
[August 26, 2003] Preliminary Program for ER2003 International Conference on Conceptual Modeling. A provisional program listing has been published for the 22nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, to be held October 13-16, 2003 in Chicago, IL, USA. The Conference will incorporate four workshops on special aspects of conceptual modeling: eCOMO2003: Conceptual Modeling Approaches for e-Business; IWCMQ: International Workshop on Conceptual Modeling Quality; AOIS: Agent-Oriented Information Systems; XSDM 2003: Workshop on XML Schema and Data Management. In addition to the four workshops, the conference will feature two pre-conference tutorials: "Object-Process Methodology and Its Application to the Visual Semantic Web" and "Data Modeling using XML." The four keynote presentations will address concepts central to the Semantic Web and Web Services, including Semantic Web application modeling, the interplay of data quality and data semantics, XML in Enterprise Information Integration, and agent-based workflow systems. "ER" in the conference short title ER2003 reflects the original roots of the conference, which focused on the Entity-Relationship Model. The International Conference on Conceptual Modeling "provides a forum for presenting and discussing current research and applications in which conceptual modeling is the major emphasis. There has been a dramatic impact from trends of increased processing power, storage capacity, network bandwidth, interconnectivity, and mobility of computing devices. As processes and interactions in this environment grow more complex, proper design becomes more important. Conceptual modeling continues to have a vital role in advanced information systems development." The foundational role of conceptual modeling in XML application design is captured by Michael Kay's comment on hierarchical data models: "XML is hierarchical [because] it is optimized for data interchange... this absolutely gives you a design challenge because the models that you get from your data analysis are graphs rather than trees." [Full context]
[August 25, 2003] UBR Operators Council Announces Beta Release of UDDI Business Registry for UDDI Version 3.0. The UDDI Business Registry (UBR) Operators Council has announced the availability of beta nodes for Version 3 of the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration specification. Composed of members from IBM, Microsoft, NTT Communications, and SAP, the UDDI Operators Council operates the UDDI Business Registry, collecting information from UDDI web services implementations and providing feedback to members of the OASIS UDDI Specification Technical Committee. The UDDI specification "enables businesses to quickly, easily, and dynamically find and transact with one another. UDDI enables a business to describe its business and its services, discover other businesses that offer desired services, and integrate with these other businesses." The UBR announcement highlights four key enhancements in the UDDI Business Registry based upon the UDDI Version 3.0 Committee Specification. (1) Support for User-Defined Keys allows users to create human readable values for keys based on the known concept of domain names. Version 3 recommends the usage of a key scheme based on DNS names rather than formatted Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) notation; this allows publishers to establish a key partition from a DNS record and then generate keys based on that partition. (2) In V3 the UDDI Business Registry (UBR) becomes a Root Registry: the UBR will serve as the recognized root registry for globally unique keys, where affiliate registries will be able to reserve UDDI keys. (3) Version 3 also introduces Portable Keys -- the ability to copy keys between registries without being altered, enabling public and private registries to import information from others. (4) Digital Signatures based upon the W3C/IETF Recommendation are now used. The addition of digital signature support for entities in UDDI enables clients to establish the veracity of data registered in the UBR. By allowing UDDI entities to be digitally signed, a new level of data integrity and authenticity is delivered by UDDI; inquirers of a registry can now filter their queries, only requesting data that has in fact been signed." [Full context]
[August 22, 2003] UPnP Forum Releases New Security Specifications for Industry Review. The Universal Plug and Play Forum (UPnP) Security Working Committee has issued a call for industry review of two new XML-based specifications, SecurityConsole: Service Template Specification and DeviceSecurity: Service Template Specification. The working committee invites comments on these level 0.93 specifications, particularly with regard to the robustness of the proposed security solution and to potential security vulnerabilities. The UPnP Forum seeks to develop standards for describing device protocols and XML-based device schemas for the purpose of enabling device-to-device interoperability in a scalable networked environment. The goal of UPnP technology is to make home networking "simple and affordable for users so the connected home experience becomes a mainstream experience for users experience and great opportunity for the industry. UPnP architecture offers pervasive peer-to-peer network connectivity of PCs of all form factors, intelligent appliances, and wireless devices. It leverages Internet standards including IP, TCP, UDP, HTTP, and XML; its contracts are based on wire protocols that are declarative, expressed in XML, and communicated via HTTP. The UPnP description for a device is expressed in XML and includes vendor-specific, manufacturer information like the model name and number, serial number, manufacturer name, URLs to vendor-specific Web sites, etc. The description also includes a list of any embedded devices or services, as well as URLs for control, eventing, and presentation." The draft Device Security Service specification provides the services necessary for strong authentication, authorization, replay prevention, and privacy of UPnP SOAP actions. It describes the actions used in the creation and editing of Access Control Lists (ACLs), while the Security Console specification documents a user interface for administration of access control on security-aware UPnP devices. Both specifications reference W3C/IETF XML Signature as well as the Universal Plug and Play Device Architecture Version 1.0. [Full context]
[August 21, 2003] IETF Network Configuration Working Group Releases Initial NETCONF Draft. The IETF Network Configuration Working Group chartered to "produce a protocol suitable for network configuration" has issued an initial NETCONF Configuration Protocol Working Group Draft. The IETF netconf WG held its first meeting in July 2003 at the 57th IETF meeting in Vienna, Austria and will continue design work at an interim meeting on September 8-10, 2003. The draft NETCONF protocol "defines a simple mechanism through which a network device can be managed. Configuration data, state information, and system notifications can be retrieved. New configuration data can be uploaded and manipulated. The protocol allows the device to expose a full, formal, application programming interface (API). Applications can use this straight-forward API to send and receive full and partial configuration data sets. NETCONF uses a remote procedure call (RPC) paradigm to define a formal API for the network device. A client encodes an RPC in XML and sends it to a server using secure, connection-oriented session. The server responds with a reply encoded in XML. The contents of both the request and the response are fully described in XML DTDs or XML schemas, or both, allowing both parties to recognize the syntax constraints imposed on the exchange. A key aspect of NETCONF is an attempt to allow the functionality of the API to closely mirror the native functionality of the device. This reduces implementation costs and allows timely access to new features. In addition, applications can access both the syntactic and semantic content of the device's native user interface." [Full context]
[August 19, 2003] Web3D Consortium Advances Specifications for 3D Web Applications. Several recent announcements from the Web3D Consortium and its members highlight the progress of the Extensible 3D (X3D) specification and development of commercial software to support 3D authoring and browsing. The standardization milestones and industry momentum point to the emergence of a 3D Web. "X3D is a major upgrade from the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) 97 standard, retaining backwards compatibility with a huge base of available 3D content, but utilizing an open profile/components-based architecture enabling custom-crafted scalable implementations. X3D incorporates numerous advanced 3D techniques including advanced rendering and multi-texturing, Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) Surfaces, GeoSpatial referencing, Humanoid Animation (H-Anim), and IEEE Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) networking." Key X3D specification documents have been approved for ISO FDIS status, and the X3D Task Group has issued an X3D Compressed Binary Encoding Request for Proposals (RFP) for encoding of the abstract functionality described in X3D Abstract Specification. The Task Group "expects to create a format definition that combines progressive geometric compression with XML serialization, encryption and authentication, all in a streamable format by the end of calendar year 2003. The Web3D Consortium has also formed the Extensible Modeling and Simulation Framework (XMSF) Working Group to enable large-scale X3D deployment for simulation using Web Services. The Consortium continues executing a strong strategic partnership with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ensuring the broadest possible X3D interoperability with the growing family of Extensible Markup Language (XML) specifications. X3D is gaining significant commercial momentum with the first commercial-grade X3D browsers, recently announced at SIGGRAPH from a number of companies." [Full context]
[August 19, 2003] W3C Releases Candidate Recommendations for Web Ontology Language (OWL). The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a suite of six Candidate Recommendation specifications defining the Web Ontology Language (OWL). An emerging ontology standard designed to strengthen the Semantic Web foundations, OWL is "a language for defining structured, Web-based ontologies which enable richer integration and interoperability of data across application boundaries. Early adopters of these standards include bioinformatics and medical communities, corporate enterprise and governments. OWL enables a range of descriptive applications including managing web portals, collections management, content-based searches, enabling intelligent agents, web services and ubiquitous computing. OWL is already being used as an open standard for deploying large scale ontologies on the Web." The six Candidate Recommendation documents for OWL are written for different audiences, addressing variable needs in understanding and implementing the OWL language. These include: "(1) a presentation of the use cases and requirements that motivated OWL; (2) an overview document which briefly explains the features of OWL and how they can be used; (3) a comprehensive Guide that walks through the features of OWL with many examples of the use of OWL features; (4) a reference document that provides the details of every OWL feature; (5) a test case document, and test suite, providing over a hundred tests that can be used for making sure that OWL implementations are consistent with the language design; (6) a document presenting the semantics of OWL and details of the mapping from OWL to RDF." Public comment on the OWL CR documents is requested by 20-September-2003. [Full context]
[August 18, 2003] WS-I Releases Basic Profile 1.0a Final Specification for Interoperable Web Services. The Web Services-Interoperability Organization has announced the publication of a final specification for the WS-I Basic Profile Version 1.0a, accompanied by statements of support from more than twenty-five WS-I member companies. The Basic Profile formally approved by the WS-I member community "consists of implementation guidelines on how core Web services specifications should be used together to develop interoperable Web services. The non-proprietary Web services specifications covered by the Basic Profile include SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 2.0, XML 1.0, and W3C XML Schema." The profile identifies and resolves "more than 200 interoperability issues" associated with the use of core Web services specifications referenced in the document. "WS-I is currently developing interoperability guidelines for SOAP with Attachments, and for the Basic Security Profile. These efforts will extend the functionality provided by the Basic Profile and will reference existing specifications." The Microsoft Prescriptive Architecture Group (PAG) has released a 133-page document Building Interoperable Web Services which surveys the contents of the Basic Profile and offers a "definitive guide on how to build and consume WS-I Basic Profile compliant Web services with Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework." [Full context]
[August 08, 2003] IBM Releases Updated Web Services Tool Kit for Mobile Devices. IBM alphaWorks developers have issued a new release of the Web Services Tool Kit for Mobile Devices. Release 2.0.1 provides a preview implementation of the J2ME Web Services Specification (JSR 172) Version 0.9 specification together with support for J2ME, WCE, and SMF environments. C-based Web services has been updated to gSOAP 2.2.3. The IBM Web Services Tool Kit for Mobile Devices provides tools and run-time environments that allow development of applications that use Web Services on small mobile devices, gateway devices, and intelligent controllers. This toolkit's Java Web service run-time environment is supported on the J2ME, WCE, and SMF environments and on the devices PoctketPC, Palm, and BlackBerry. The C Web service run-time environment is supported on the Palm and Symbian. Java-based Web services are supported by two Web service run-time environments: IBM's Technology Preview release of JSR 172 Version 0.9 and kSOAP. KSOAP is an open-source implementation of Web services. Both run-time environments have been optimized to run on small mobile devices and support a subset of the SOAP 1.1 specification. The reasons for supporting only a subset of SOAP 1.1 are the limited amount of memory on these devices and the limited capabilities of the J2ME environment." [Full context]
[August 07, 2003] OASIS Members Form Product Life Cycle Support Technical Committee. Representatives from five OASIS member companies have formed a new Product Life Cycle Support Technical Committee relating to owners/operators of complex products and systems such as aircraft, ships and power plants. The purpose of the PLCS TC is to "establish structured data exchange and sharing capabilities for use by industry to support complex engineered assets throughout their total life cycle. These Data Exchange Sets (DEXs) are based upon ISO 10303 (STEP) Application Protocol 239 (Product Life Cycle Support). The TC proposers have identified more than thirty (30) candidate DEX specifications to meet particular industry needs, and will begin work initially on ten (10): Product Breakdown for Support, Functional Structure and Related Faults, Tasks Linked to Product, Work Schedule, Maintenance Plan, Product as Realized, Task Set, Support Drivers, Failure Feedback, Extended Task Set). The PLCS TC will be responsible for defining, developing, testing and publishing of DEXs, and for liaison with ISO TC 184/SC4. Participants will coordinate these activities with relevant OASIS Technical Committees and promote the use of DEX's across industries and governments world-wide." The TC co-chairs are Howard Mason (BAE Systems) and Jerry Smith (US Defense Information Systems). The first meeting of the PLCS TC will be held September 26, 2003 at the Lockheed Martin Facility in Manassas, Virginia, USA. [Full context]
[August 06, 2003] W3C Releases Public Working Draft for the Ink Markup Language (InkML). Members of the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group have issued a first public working draft for the Ink Markup Language which "serves as the data format for representing ink entered with an electronic pen or stylus. The markup allows for the input and processing of handwriting, gestures, sketches, music and other notational languages in Web-based applications. It provides a common format for the exchange of ink data between components such as handwriting and gesture recognizers, signature verifiers, and other ink-aware modules. InkML supports a complete and accurate representation of hand-drawn ink. For instance, in addition to the pen position over time, InkML allows recording of information about transducer device characteristics and detailed dynamic behavior to support applications such as handwriting recognition and authentication. It offers support for recording additional channels such as pen tilt, or pen tip force, commonly referred to as pressure in manufacturers' documentation. InkML also provides means for extension; by virtue of the XML-based language notation, users may easily add application-specific information to ink files to suit the needs of the application at hand. The Ink Markup Language is designed for use in the W3C Multimodal Interaction Framework as proposed by the W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity. [Full context]
[August 05, 2003] OASIS XML Common Biometric Format Specification (XCBF) Submitted for Approval. The Chair of the OASIS XML Common Biometric Format Technical Committee (XCBF TC) has communicated a request that the TC's Committee Specification version 1.1 be considered for approval as an OASIS Standard. The XML Common Biometric Format specification deals with biometrics in the sense of "automated methods of recognizing a person based on physiological (retina, hand geometry, DNA) or behavioral characteristics; they are used to recognize the identity of an individual, or to verify a claimed identity." The OASIS Committee Specification defines "a common set of secure XML encodings for the patron formats specified in CBEFF, the Common Biometric Exchange File Format (NISTIR 6529). These XML encodings are based on the ASN.1 schema defined in ANSI X9.84 Biometric Information Management and Security. For security purposes, they make use of the Canonical XML Encoding Rules (CXER) for ASN.1 defined in ITU-T Rec. X.693, and rely on the security and processing requirements specified in the X9.96 XML Cryptographic Message Syntax (XCMS) and X9.73 Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) standards." Section 7 provides the XCBF Schema in the form of ASN.1 modules (X9-84-Biometrics Module, X9-84-CMS Module, X9-84-Identifiers Module). Examples for readers and implementors are supplied in Section 8 with the goal of promoting secure, interoperable biometric applications and systems. Voting by the OASIS membership will take place during the latter half of August 2003. [Full context]
[August 05, 2003] Call for Participation in OASIS Asynchronous Service Access Protocol (ASAP) TC. OASIS members are forming a new Asynchronous Service Access Protocol (ASAP) TC to create a very simple extension of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) that enables generic asynchronous web services or long-running web services. The TC activity would build upon previous technical work published in the IETF RFC Simple Workflow Access Protocol (SWAP) and in a derivative Asynchronous Web Services Protocol (AWSP) specification developed by Jeffrey Ricker and Keith Swenson. The ASAP work is designed to address the fact that "not all services are instantaneous. A standard protocol is needed to integrate asynchronous services across the Internet and provide for their interaction. The integration and interactions consist of control and monitoring of the service. The protocol should be lightweight and easy to implement, so that a variety of devices and situations can be covered." The TC proposers believe that "asynchronous capability is not specific to any one problem. Rather, it is needed to one degree or another in a number of problem areas, such as workflow, business process management, e-commerce, data mining, and mobile wireless devices. ASAP strives to provide to a simple common asynchronous capability that can be employed in any number of problem-specific protocols." The proposed ASAP specification would be consistent with the W3C XML Protocol (XMLP) work and SOAP; it would provide a general solution complementary to several related specifications, including those produced by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), the W3C Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Working Group, ebXML Messaging Services TC, OASIS Web Services Business Process Execution Language TC, OASIS Business Transaction Protocol (BTP) TC, and OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSRM) TC. The first meeting of the ASAP TC will be held by teleconference on September 9, 2003. [Full context]
[August 04, 2003] Call for Public Review of Draft Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Specification. The editors of the Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Syntax and Resolution Specification have issued a call for public comment on Working Draft version 07 produced by the OASIS Technical Committee. The XRI TC was chartered to define a URI scheme and a corresponding URN namespace for distributed directory services that enable the identification of resources (including people and organizations) and the sharing of data across domains, enterprises, and applications. The Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) notation "provides a standard means of abstractly identifying a resource independent of any given concrete representation of that resource or, in the case of a completely abstract resource, independent of any representation at all. XRIs are defined similarly to URIs in Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax (RFC 2396) but contain additional syntactical elements and extend the unreserved character set to include characters beyond those allowed in generic URIs. To accommodate applications that expect generic URIs, rules are defined that allow an XRI to be transformed into a conformant URI as defined by RFC 2396. Since a revision of RFC 2396 is currently a work in progress, the XRI scheme also incorporates some simplifications and enhancements to generic URI syntax as proposed in the revised specification (RFC2396bis)." The XRI scheme is formally defined by an ABNF grammar presented in Appendix A. [Full context]
[August 01, 2003] W3C Publishes XForms Version 1.0 as a Proposed Recommendation. The W3C XForms Working Group has released the XForms 1.0 specification as a Proposed Recommendation and welcomes public review through August 29, 2003. XForms is "an XML application that represents the next generation of forms for the Web. By splitting traditional XHTML forms into three parts -- XForms model, instance data, and user interface -- it separates presentation from content, allows reuse, and gives strong typing. This design strategy reduces the number of round-trips to the server, as well as offering device independence and a reduced need for scripting. XForms is not a free-standing document type, but is intended to be integrated into other markup languages, such as XHTML or SVG." An XForms Basic Profile is still being edited and is expected to be published as a separate document. [Full context]
[July 29, 2003] Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) for Transaction Coordination. A draft set of specifications for the Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) has been published by Arjuna Technologies Limited, Fujitsu Software, IONA Technologies PLC, Oracle Corp and Sun Microsystems. WS-CAF is an "open, multi-level framework for standard coordination of long-running business processes across multiple, incompatible transaction processing models and architectures. WS-CAF is compatible with current related specifications and does not require the implementation of a new transaction protocol." WS-CAF addresses the transaction processing information management and sharing problem arising from the multiplicity of architectures that emerge from different transaction types: "some transactions are very simple, such as purchasing a book or transferring funds, and can be processed immediately; other transactions are more complex, such as fulfilling a purchase order or completing an insurance claim, and may take days or even years to process. WS-CAF concepts are based on the assumption that multiple Web services are often placed into various relationships to accomplish a common purpose and therefore at a minimum need a way to share common context (the Activity Domain), and at a maximum need a way to coordinate results (the Coordination Domain) into a single, potentially long-running larger unit of work with predictable results despite failure conditions (the Transaction Domain)." WS-CAF "addresses the underlying issues of Web service context propagation and transaction management with a framework that expands the scope, usability, and reliability of Web services for business process automation across multiple architectures, applications and organizations." The Framework proposal has been published as a collection of three specifications: Web Service Context (WS-CTX), Web Service Coordination Framework (WS-CF), and Web Service Transaction Management (WS-TXM). "The WS-CAF framework can use any transaction protocol in place of, or in addition to, the neutral protocols defined for WS-TXM, such as the OASIS Business Transactions Protocol. The authors plan to donate WS-CAF to a recognized industry standards organization soon under royalty-free licensing terms." [Full context]
[July 25, 2003] New Scalable Vector Graphics 1.2 Working Draft Positions SVG as an Application Platform. New features in the third public working draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2 move SVG well beyond an XML format for graphics, positioning it as an application platform. The new draft, edited by Dean Jackson, specifies SVG version 1.2 as "a modularized language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in XML" and outlines areas of new work under discussion. Some new features include: Rendering Custom Components (RCC); Live Templates (an RCC alternative); dSVG reference (a UI toolkit); filter region extensions; SVGTimer interface (a replacement for setTimeout/Interval); better network data fetching support; Document Simple Model (scripting without the DOM); Tooltips; an experimental draft RelaxNG schema. "Many content developers are using SVG as the graphical user interface to their XML data, either through declarative transformations such as XSLT or through scripting. The current Rendering Custom Components (RCC) proposal focuses primarily on low-level, foundation technology and relies on scripting for all but the most trivial transformations. It may be possible to provide more support for a declarative syntax, similar to, or using parts of, XSLT. A proposed 'Live Templates' alternative seeks to improve SVG's usability as a front-end for fully interactive Web applications." Some members of the WG favor the creation of a "standardized set of user interface controls built into the SVG language. A Dynamic Scalable Vector Graphics (dSVG) proposal is the most advanced user interface library that the SVG Working Group are examining; where the RCC model attempts to provide an extension mechanism for custom XML content, dSVG provides a set of predefined user interface elements, behaviors and controls." [Full context]
[July 22, 2003] RSS 2.0 Specification Published by Berkman Center Under Creative Commons License. The RSS Version 2.0 specification originally developed and maintained by Userland's Dave Winer has been transferred to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and has been republished under the of the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. Under the Attribution/Share Alike license, "The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work; in return, licensees must give the original author credit. The licensor also permits others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the one that governs the licensor's work." RSS ('Really Simple Syndication' or 'RDF Site Summary') has been issued in at least seven versions, by different informally constituted groups. Despite the lack of convergence, RSS is rapidly gaining in popularity as a news syndication format. At the same time, new syndication formats are being proposed, including a front-runner documented on the Intertwingly.net (Pie/Echo/Atom) project wiki. This promising initiative has completed several key specifications as it seeks to "develop a common syntax for syndicating, archiving and editing episodic web sites." [Full context]
[July 21, 2003] HP Contributes Web Services Management Framework Specification to OASIS TC. With support from Ascential Software, BEA Systems, Informatica, IONA, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO Software, and webMethods, HP has announced the publication of a Web Services Management Framework Version 2.0 and plans to contribute the specification set to the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management TC. As published, WSMF contains three loosely coupled specifications that provide the necessary components of a management stack: WSMF-Foundation defines the base framework for management using Web services; WS-Events defines the Web services based event notification mechanism and is used by WSMF-Foundation; WSMF-Web Services Management defines the model for management of Web services. The distribution is available for download, and includes an Overview, three prose specifications in PDF, three XML schemas, and five WSDLs. WSMF "is a logical architecture for the management of resources, including Web services themselves, through Web services. This framework is based on the notion of managed objects and their relationships. A managed object essentially represents a resource and exposes a set of management interfaces through which the underlying resource could be managed. Similarly, relationships among managed objects represent relationships among underlying resources. The framework defines how all IT resources in an adaptive enterprise can expose management information about themselves and how they can be managed. A management interface communicates immediate knowledge about changes in business processes and IT infrastructure whenever application and infrastructure events occur, and it gives companies the choice and flexibility to adopt future innovations and advance the management of their adaptive enterprise." [Full context]
[July 18, 2003] JSR 168 Portlet API Specification 1.0 Released for Public Review. The release of the JSR-000168 Portlet API Specification 1.0 Public Review Draft has been accompanied by announcements for a Sun ONE Studio Portlet Builder beta and a pre-release of Oracle9iAS Portal's WSRP Portal. The JSR-000168 Portlet Specification has been distributed as a PDF Portlet Specification with code and reference in Portlet API Specification Interface Classes and Portlet API Javadoc Documentation. The Portlet Specification defines a proposed standard for the Java portlet API as outlined in the JSR 168 Java Specification Request, designed to "enable interoperability between portlets and portals by defining a set of APIs for Portal computing addressing the areas of aggregation, personalization, presentation and security." A portal in terms of this specification is a web based application that "provides personalization, single sign on, content aggregation from different sources and hosts the presentation layer of Information Systems. Aggregation is the action of integrating content from different sources within a web page. A portal may have sophisticated personalization features to provide customized content to users, and portal pages may have different set of portlets creating content for different users. A portlet is a Java technology based web component, managed by a portlet container, that processes requests and generates dynamic content. Portlets are used by portals as pluggable user interface components that provide a presentation layer to Information Systems." The intended audience for this specification includes "portal server vendors that want to provide portlet engines that conform to this standard, authoring tool developers that want to support web applications that conform to this specification, and experienced portlet authors who want to understand the underlying mechanisms of portlet technology." The Portlet Specification Public Review Draft has been edited by Alejandro Abdelnur (Sun Microsystems) and Stefan Hepper (IBM) with input from the JSR 168 Expert Group. The public review period ends 16-August-2003. [Full context]
[July 16, 2003] Extreme Topics Presented at Extreme Markup Languages Conference 2003. The complete program has been published for Extreme Markup Languages Conference 2003, "There's Nothing So Practical as a Good Theory." Extreme 2003 will be held on August 4 - 8, 2003, once again in Montréal, Québec, Canada. The organizers include B. Tommie Usdin, Deborah A. Lapeyre, Steven R. Newcomb, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, and James David Mason. Extreme is described as "an unabashedly hard-core conference for the technically-oriented members of the information interchange and knowledge representation community. Extreme delegates devote the better part of a week to the unfettered pursuit of better understanding of: markup practice and theory; knowledge access and navigation; formal languages; modeling approaches, markup software development (and bold implementations); information philosophy; and ontologies, taxonomies, and vocabularies." This year the Extreme attendees are serving up the usual quantity of Topic Maps, along with extreme presentations on polemical topics, modal logic, logic grammars, functional programming, validation algorithms, markup semantics, literate XSLTs, schema conformance, controlled vocabularies, RDF graphs, and more. [Full context]
[July 15, 2003] Security Featured in Microsoft Web Services Enhancements Version 2.0 Technology Preview. Microsoft has announced a Technology Preview release for Microsoft Web Services Enhancements Version 2.0. WSE (Web Services Enhancements for Microsoft .NET) is "an add-on to Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework providing developers the latest advanced Web services capabilities to keep pace with the evolving Web services protocol specifications. The technology preview of WSE 2.0 provides early access to new advanced Web services capabilities. New features include a policy framework, enhanced security model, message-oriented programming model, and support for multiple hosting environments. WSE provides a foundation for building applications based on Web services specifications published by Microsoft and industry partners including WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation and WS-Addressing. Token-issuing framework (WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation) provides capabilities that build on WS-Security and define extensions to request and issue security tokens and to manage trust relationships and secure conversations. Roles-based authorization with integration into Windows security enables corporations to leverage their existing Windows domain credentials when accessing Web services or to integrate their own access control engine. Declarative programming model (WS-Policy, WS-SecurityPolicy) enables developers to author policies that operate a runtime component, responsible for processing the SOAP headers in Web services that contain security and routing information and play a role in the validation of incoming and outgoing messages. For example, the runtime can automatically sign and encrypt a message based on the authored policy without the developer having to write code. Message-based object model (WS-Addressing) provides customers with a message-based programming model over TCP and HTTP, allowing them to explore alternative types of SOAP-based applications such as ad hoc peer-to-peer applications." [Full context]
[July 15, 2003] Enhanced Adobe XML Architecture Supports XML/PDF Form Designer and XML Data Package (XDP). Adobe Systems has announced XML/PDF form designer software as part of its enhanced XML-based architecture for creating intelligent electronic documents. "Leveraging the power of PDF for presenting information and XML for processing data, the new form design software will enable organizations to easily design and deploy intelligent forms in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) or in an XML Data Package (XDP). The new XML/PDF form designer software builds on Adobe's XML architecture that supports end-to-end document processes. It provides all the capabilities needed to design forms with precision, including the ability to easily define business logic and incorporate existing or user-defined XML schemas. By enabling form designers to include user-defined XML schemas they can use XML vocabularies specific to particular verticals or cross-industry standards. Forms can be deployed in PDF and then processed as PDF is today, or delivered as an XML Data Package (XDP) to be processed as XML. XDP files are XML files that contain XML form data, XML form templates, PDF documents, and other XML information. They can be easily integrated with enterprise applications via commonly available XML tools and web services." [Full context]
[July 14, 2003] Sleepycat Software Releases Berkeley DB XML Native XML Database. An announcement from Sleepycat Software Inc. describes the general availability of Berkeley DB XML, a data management solution based upon Berkeley DB. Berkeley DB XML "is designed for professional software developers who need a transactional, recoverable data manager for native XML and semi-structured data that is fast, cost-effective, and flexible. The software was validated during a 12-month beta program by more than 5,000 companies, including BEA Systems, Boeing, EDS, Leadscope and TELOS. It provides a high-performance, extremely reliable embedded database engine that stores and manages XML data. Berkeley DB XML stores and retrieves native XML documents, so no conversion to relational or object-oriented models required. It combines XML and non-XML data in a single database, with flexible indexing features that give developers control over query performance and the ability to tune retrieval speed. The Berkeley DB XML software supports XPath 1.0 and other W3C standards for XML and XML Namespaces, accepting UTF-8 encoded documents and XPath expressions. It inherits advanced database features from Berkeley DB, including concurrent access, transactions, recovery, and replication." The source code is available for free download, testing, evaluation and development. [Full context]
[July 14, 2003] OpenGroupware.org Announces Open Source Project for Groupware Server Software. The OpenGroupware.org Project has announced an initial release of open source server software and the formation of an international development community supporting open-protocol groupware server software. The goal is to create "the leading open source groupware server to integrate with the leading open source office suite products and all the leading groupware clients running across all major platforms, and to provide access to all functionality and data through open XML-based interfaces and APIs. The OpenGroupware.org source code initially includes the technology SKYRiX Software AG has been developing for future versions of the SKYRiX groupware server; the source is written in Objective-C and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including XML interfaces. OGo software will enable users to share calendar, address book and e-mail information; they can communicate via instant messaging, share folders, exchange documents, track changes, share a whiteboard, and browse the Web all at the same time -- all upon open Internet standards and without paying or managing cumbersome licensing fees. OGo offers users a free solution for collaboration and document management that, despite being free of charge, will far surpass the quality and level of collaboration found on Windows (through integration of MS Office, Exchange Server and SharePoint). The OGo project is a fully independent open source project, but will interoperate with the OpenOffice.org software and other similarly open clients via open standards." [Full context]
[July 11, 2003] Sun and Waveset Provide Identity Management Solution for PeopleSoft Using SPML. Sun Microsystems, Waveset Technologies, and PeopleSoft have announced an "expansion of the companies' strategic alliance to deliver an integrated, standards-based identity management solution for use with PeopleSoft applications. The integrated solution is expected to provide users with the ability to initiate and manage the lifecycle of workforce identity information from a single portal interface, spanning Human Resource, IT and facilities resources." Featuring automated provisioning processes based upon the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML), this innovative identity management solution "is designed to combine the functionality of the Liberty Alliance-enabled Sun ONE Identity Server, Sun ONE Directory Server, and Waveset Lighthouse to reduce the time it takes to establish or change access rights, privileges and profile data across multiple applications. The first iteration of the solution is designed to enable business process integration between Human Capital Management and IT security/identity management, that will help drive down costs in the on-boarding and off-boarding of employees and to increase workforce productivity." [Full context]
[July 11, 2003] Microsoft Enhances Support for Speech Application Language Tags (SALT). Microsoft has announced several new lines of support for open-standards-based speech technology, including a Speech Server, updated Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK), Microsoft Speech Server Beta Program, Early Adopter Program, and specialized training courses. Based upon the Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) specification, the speech server supports unified telephony and multimodal applications. Its key components include Speech Engine Services (Speech Recognition Engine, Prompt Engine, Text-to-Speech Engine) and Telephony Application Services (SALT Interpreter, Media and Speech Manager, SALT Interpreter Controller). With these technology offerings, "customers can use speech to access information from standard telephones and cell phones as well as GUI-based devices like PDAs, Tablet PCs and smart phones. For connectivity into the enterprise telephony infrastructure and call-control functionality, Intel Corp. and Intervoice Inc. will provide a Telephony Interface Manager (TIM) that supports Microsoft Speech Server. The TIM will provide fast and easy integration of the speech server with the Intel NetStructure communications boards, enabling deployment of robust speech processing applications." [Full context]
[July 09, 2003] IBM Releases Updated Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL) Specification. Updated XML schemas and documentation have been published for IBM's Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL) specification, defining an "interoperability language for exchanging privacy policy in a structured format between applications or enterprises." EPAL Version 1.1 [Release 1.83] is now supported by an open source Privacy Authoring Editor developed by a team of students at North Carolina State University, enabling companies to "author and edit privacy policies using EPAL while allowing for the expression of richer and more complex privacy rules than current standards allow." EPAL is designed as "a formal language to specify fine-grained enterprise privacy policies. It concentrates on the core privacy authorization while abstracting from all deployment details such as data model or user-authentication. The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) specification released by the World Wide Web Consortium in April 2002 supports the communication of privacy policies from business applications to consumer applications. EPAL goes one step further, providing an XML language that enables organizations to enforce P3P policies behind the Web, among applications and databases." The IBM alphaWorks Declarative Privacy Monitoring (DPM) for Tivoli Privacy Manager provides "a Java library that can be used to add privacy policy enforcement to existing J2EE Web Applications"; the distribution includes a technology preview implementation of EPAL. [Full context]
[July 08, 2003] Liberty Alliance Publishes Business Requirements and Guidelines for Identity Federation. The Liberty Alliance Project has released Business Guidelines: Raising the Business Requirements for Wide Scale Identity Federation, described as the first in a series of documents the Alliance is developing to provide global businesses guidance on deploying federated identity solutions. The purpose of the document is to "identify the general business considerations that must be addressed by any organization exchanging identity information beyond company boundaries in today's complex federated identity environment." Four principal business requirements identified as critical to identity federation are highlighted in the Business Guidelines: "(1) Mutual confidence: the processes and tasks business partners must undertake to set minimum quality requirements, certify the other party has met those requirements, and manage the risk of exposure; (2) Risk management: the best practices and procedures business partners must identity to guard themselves from losses due to identity fraud, losses due to the exposure of identity information, and loss of business integrity due to insecure processes or data; (3) Liability assessment: the process for determining in a networked environment what parties will bear which losses, under what circumstances and how to resolve disputes; (4) Compliance: the alignment with agreed-upon standards, policies and procedures and how that compliance is governed, including compliance with local privacy requirements. Liberty Alliance plans to introduce future documents aggregating major business issues and informational sources that will guide federated identity implementations in vertical (i.e., healthcare, financial services), regional (i.e., Japan, Germany) and industry scenarios (i.e., B2B, B2C mobile). The next set of documents is expected to be available by end of 2003." [Full context]
[July 08, 2003] Web Services Federation Language Provides Federated Identity Mapping Mechanisms. BEA, IBM, Microsoft, RSA Security, and VeriSign have released a new Web Services Federation Language (WS-Federation) specification which defines mechanisms "used to enable identity, account, attribute, authentication, and authorization federation across different trust realms. The specification extends the WS-Trust model to allow attributes and pseudonyms to be integrated into the token issuance mechanism to provide federated identity mapping mechanisms. The models defined in WS-Security, WS-Trust, and WS-Policy provide the basis for federation; WS-Federation extends this foundation by describing how these models are combined to enable richer trust realm mechanisms across and within federations." Supporting profiles include: (1) the Passive Requestor Profile, which "describes how the cross trust realm identity, authentication and authorization federation mechanisms defined in WS-Federation can be utilized used by passive requestors such as Web browsers to provide Identity Services (under the HTTP protocol)"; and (2) the Active Requestor Profile, which defines how federation mechanisms are used by active requestors such as SOAP-enabled applications. Because participation in a federation "requires knowledge of metadata such as policies and potentially even WSDLs and schemas for the services within the federation, a variety of specified mechanisms may be used to acquire metadata, as outlined in the WS-Policy and WS-MetadataExchange specifications. WS-MetadataExchange is a set of Web service mechanisms to exchange policies, WSDL, schema and other metadata between two or more parties. WS-MetadataExchange is part of the Web services roadmap for both WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-Federation" and is planned for public release in Summer 2003. [Full context]
[July 08, 2003] RealNetworks Releases Source Code for Synchronized Multimedia (SMIL). RealNetworks Inc. has announced its contribution of SMIL source code to developers in the Helix Community. "With the source code of SMIL 2.0 and the Helix DNA Client, Helix community developers can support display of complex presentations in their products." The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is a W3C Recommendation which "defines an XML-based language that allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL 2.0, an author can describe the temporal behavior of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen." The Helix DNA Client being developed within the Helix community is "a universal playback engine supporting the decode and playback of any data type on any device. It is designed as an open, comprehensive platform that enables playback of digital media products and applications for any format, operating system, or device; it supports any audio or video codec through well-defined file format and decoder APIs." The RealNetworks' cross-platform SMIL source code is available "under a no-cost open source or a royalty-based commercial license to the registered developers of the Helix community; Windows, Mac, and Linux sources are available today." [Full context]
[July 03, 2003] OpenI18N Releases Locale Data Markup Language Specification (LDML) Version 1.0. An announcement from the Common XML Locale Repository Project described the version 1.0 release of the Locale Data Markup Language Specification (LDML), designed to facilitate standardized methods for software globalization. For example, collation rule data can be formally described, allowing two implementations to exchange a specification of collation. LDML is an XML supporting the exchange of structured locale data. A locale "is an id that refers to a set of culturally sensitive preferences that tend to be shared across significant swathes of the world. Traditionally, the data associated with this id provides support for formatting and parsing of dates, times, numbers, and currencies; for the default units of currency; for measurement units, for sort-order (collation), plus translated names for timezones, languages, countries, and scripts. They can also include text boundaries (character, word, line, and sentence), text transformations (including transliterations), and support for other services." The LDML specification has been produced by the Free Standards Group's LADE Workgroup. "The founding members of the workgroup are IBM, Sun and OpenOffice.org. The workgroup is open to additional members, both industry and community. The purpose of this project is to devise a general XML format for the exchange of linguistically and culturally sensitive (locale) information for use in application and system development, and to gather, store, and make available data generated in that format." [Full context]
[July 02, 2003] Microsoft Announces Release of Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003. Announcements from Microsoft describe new features of the Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003, identified as the third major release of Microsoft's metadirectory product. Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 (MIIS) "enables the integration and management of identity information across multiple repositories, systems, and platforms. MIIS augments Active Directory by providing broad interoperability capabilities including: integration with a wide range of identity repositories; provisioning and synchronizing identity information, including password management, across multiple stores; brokering changes to identity information by automatically detecting updates and sharing the changes across systems. In addition to integrating identity information across multiple platforms, MIIS makes identity management easier by automating the process of establishing and eliminating user accounts and enabling self-service password management. As part of its developing identity management strategy, Microsoft is introducing other new offerings for Windows Server 2003 customers at no additional charge, including; (1) Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) enables customers to deploy Active Directory as a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for application-specific data while using their distributed Active Directory infrastructure for user sign-on; (2) Identity Integration Feature Pack for Windows Server Active Directory; (3) support for Directory Services Markup Language (DSML) 2.0, which enables developers to represent directory structural information and directory operations as Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based documents; (4) The Microsoft Identity Management Solution Accelerator, which provides planning and implantation guidance, which helps customers effectively plan and build an identity management infrastructure." [Full context]


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