Last modified: December 31, 2003

News

SGML and XML News October - December 2003

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[December 31, 2003] W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee to Be Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Announcements from Buckingham Palace and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) proclaim that Queen Elizabeth II will make Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director, a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). "The rank of Knight Commander is the second most senior rank of the Order of the British Empire, one of the Orders of Chivalry awarded. Tim Berners-Lee, 48, a British citizen who lives in the United States, is being knighted in recognition of his services to the global development of the Internet through the invention of the World Wide Web." Berners-Lee responded: "This is an honor which applies to the whole Web development community, and to the inventors and developers of the Internet, whose work made the Web possible. I accept this as an endorsement of the spirit of the Web; of building it in a decentralized way; of making best efforts to keep it open and fair; and of ensuring its fundamental technologies are available to all for broad use and innovation, and without having to pay licensing fees. By recognizing the Web in such a significant way, it also makes clear the responsibility its creators and users share. Information technology changes the world, and as a result, its practitioners cannot be disconnected from its technical and societal impacts. Rather, we share a responsibility to make this work for the common good, and to take into account the diverse populations it serves." [Full context]
[December 31, 2003] Proposed Calendar Server Extensions for WebDAV (CalDAV). IETF has announced the publication of an initial working draft for Calendar Server Extensions for WebDAV (CalDAV). The CalDAV draft been submitted to the IETF CALSCH working group for consideration of the mechanisms designed to enable interoperable calendar access over WebDAV. The draft specification was commissioned at the Fall 2003 Minneapolis meeting of the IETF Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group Working Group and is intended as an exploration of the advantages of using WebDAV as well as a proposal for one way to model calendaring data, with some ideas for how to specify the features that go beyond WebDAV." Under the initial proposal, a CalDAV server would need to support WebDAV Level 1 and 2, WebDAV ACL, DASL (DAV Searching and Locating), and HTTP/SASL; WebDAV DeltaV support would be optional. The document describes certain features that are required for modern enterprise-level calendar systems are not present in HTTP or WebDAV, including fanout (server supports fanning out scheduling requests on behalf of the client), recurrance (support for recurring appointments are common in calendaring applications), and notifications (optimal way for the server to contact the client). "A CalDav repository, or server, is a calendaring-aware engine combined with a WebDAV repository. The CalDAV server or repository is the canonical location for calendar data, state information and semantics. The CalDAV server has significant responsibility to ensure that the data is consistent and compliant. Clients may submit requests to change data or download data. Clients may store the calendar offline and attempt to synchronize when reconnected, but changes to the repository occurring in between are not considered to be automatically disposable and clients should consider the repository to be the first authority on state. HTTP Etags and other tools help this work." [Full context]
[December 29, 2003] LREC Post-Conference Workshop on XML-Based Richly Annotated Corpora. A Call for Papers has been issued in connection with an announcement for the Workshop on XML-Based Richly Annotated Corpora, to be held May 29, 2004 in Lisbon, Portugal as a post-conference event following the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). LREC 2004 is organized by the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) in cooperation with several other associations, consortia, and international organizations. The Annotated Corpora Workshop organizers recognize that "XML has become a de facto standard for the representation of corpus resources: it is being used for representing speech and text corpora, multimodal and multimedial corpora, as well as, in particular, integrated corpora which combine different modalities. XML-based representations make it easier to work with richly annotated corpora, which include annotations from different levels of linguistic description or from different modalities. A number of tools have also become available, over the last few years, for creating, managing, annotating, querying such corpora and for their statistical exploration. The workshop aims at bringing together XML experts, both theorists and practitioners, as well as linguists and natural interactivity researchers working on the definition of corpus architectures, annotation and resource exchange schemes and on tools for the use of multilevel and/or multi-layer annotated corpora. It will provide a forum for the definition of requirements for corpus representations and pertaining tools, discussing at the same time case studies from linguistics and natural interactivity research." [Full context]
[December 19, 2003] FISD XML Messaging Specification for Real Time Streaming XML-Encoded Market Data. The Software and Information Industry Association's Financial Information Services Division has released a beta version of FISD's XML Messaging Specification: fisdMessage Reference Guide, together with Appendices and Enumerations. The fisdMessage specification defines a standards-based way of delivering XML content like Market Data Definition Language (MDDL) information between a data provider and consumer. The fisdMessage specification is the realization of a standards-based realtime streaming data feed; it defines an industry-standard data feed protocol for transmitting statically formed content. The proper implementation of an fisdMessage enabled data feed thus allows a consumer to accept encoded XML content from any fisdMessage enabled provider. It is intended that applications (via toolkits) that implement this protocol faithfully, consistent with XML processing guidelines, will enable senders to distribute high-volumes of content changes in the lowest possible bandwidth while maintaining the ability to add content without breaking processing applications. This document uses the Market Data Definition Language (MDDL) to illustrate examples and demonstrate the functionality. MDDL is a specification based on the XML standard to enable interchange of data necessary to account for, to analyze, and to trade instruments of the world's financial markets." [Full context]
[December 17, 2003] W3C Publishes First Working Draft for Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.1. W3C has released an initial public working draft for Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.1, updating the W3C XSL Version 1.0 Recommendation published on October 15, 2001. This specification and a companion Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.1 Requirements document have been produced as part of the W3C XML Activity by the XSL Working Group. The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is "a language for expressing stylesheets. Given a class of arbitrarily structured XML documents or data files, designers use an XSL stylesheet to express their intentions about how that structured content should be presented; that is, how the source content should be styled, laid out, and paginated onto some presentation medium, such as a window in a Web browser or a hand-held device, or a set of physical pages in a catalog, report, pamphlet, or book. New functionality has been added in XSL Version 1.1 to support change marks, indexes, multiple flows, and bookmarks. Existing functionality has been extended in the areas of graphics scaling, 'markers' and their retrieval in tables to support e.g., partial sums, and page number referencing. A number of errata changes have been incorporated into the text. This document is expected to be taken through the W3C Recommendation track process. Since first becoming a W3C Recommendation, XSL 1.0 has enjoyed widespread support. However, the user community has expressed requirements that have encouraged various implementations to provide extensions to the language. These extensions -- especially those implemented by more than one implementation -- are clear candidates for standardization so as to maximize interoperability. The XSL Working Group has surveyed and analyzed various existing extensions, user requirements, and features intentionally cut from XSL 1.0 due to lack of time. Using the results of this research, the Working Group is developing the XSL 1.1 version that incorporates current errata and includes a subset of relatively simple and upward compatible additions to XSL." [Full context]
[December 16, 2003] New DMTF Server Management Working Group to Evolve CIM Specification. An announcement from the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) describes the formation of a new DMTF Server Management Working Group formed by Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Oracle, OSA Technologies, Sun Microsystems, and several other technology companies. The goal of the Server Management Working Group is to "define a platform independent, industry standard management architecture instantiated through wire level protocols built upon IP based technologies. The focus of the WG is management of server system hardware; this includes interactions with the operating system that are necessary to assist in hardware management." The architectural model will "extend the Common Information Model (CIM) schema to represent new server system topologies; it will define the syntax and semantics of a Command Line Interface (CLI) protocol, leveraging the CIM/XML protocol and identifying enhancements as necessary. The group will define profiles for different server system topologies in order to support base-level compliance, and will document an architectural model for understanding the semantic behavior of server management components." Initial deliverables identified for July 2004 include a lightweight command line interface specification, lightweight CIMOM and supported CIM operations specification, and standard server system topology profiles. Phase 2 deliverables for December 2004 include a compliance specification, test cases for interoperability, and interoperability testing data. Liaison relationships are expected to be formed with relevant OASIS TCs, the Storage Management Initiative (SNIA), W3C Working Groups, and the Service Availability Forum. [Full context]
[December 16, 2003] RIXML.org Releases Investment Research Standard RIXML Version 2.1. The RIXML.org consortium of buy- and sell-side financial industry leaders has announced the Version 2.1 release of its RIXML specification, including the RIXML XML Schema and RIXML Users Guide: Data Dictionary Report. The RIXML investment research standard is designed "to provide extensive capabilities to be able to tag any piece of research content, in any form or media, with enough meta-data information for consumers to search, sort and filter through publisher research and quickly provide highly relevant information to their decision makers." RIXML Version 2.1 "adjusts the standard by incorporating taxonomies to address ratings for both equity and fixed income markets. The new User Guide outlines the approach taken in creating the RIXML standard and explains some fundamental concepts such as XML, object modeling, schemas, etc. Diagrams of the RIXML object model are included as are definitions for the elements and attributes. The RIXML XML Schema formally represents the relationships and components as defined by the object model." Members of the RIXML.org consortium include Asset Managers, Investment Banks, and several Associate Members. These financial industry leaders have joined forces to develop an open, global XML-based RIXML standard for the tagging and delivery of investment research. Its goal is to define an open protocol that will improve the process of categorizing, aggregating, comparing, sorting, searching, and distributing global financial research data. RIXML.org has recently enhanced its public web site to include a "new interactive demo and educational section that demonstrates and describes how RIXML works. Additionally, the new site will enable member firms and industry participants to sign up for email updates, view a calendar of past and upcoming industry events, and access membership information." [Full context]
[December 15, 2003] RELAX NG XML Schema Language Published as an ISO Standard (DSDL Part 2). A posting from James Clark announces the publication of the RELAX NG specification as an ISO standard, being Part 2 'Regular-Grammar-Based Validation' of the multi-part ISO 19575 Document Schema Definition Language (DSDL). In Clark's vision, the RELAX NG schema language is "based firmly on the labelled-tree abstraction," distinguished from other XML schema languages by what it leaves out; in RELAX NG, the syntax and minimal labelled-tree abstraction implicit in that syntax are at the center of XML processing." According to the DSDL Part 2 abstract, ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003 "specifies RELAX NG, a schema language for XML. A RELAX NG schema specifies a pattern for the structure and content of an XML document. The pattern is specified by using a regular tree grammar. A RELAX NG schema is itself an XML document. ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003 specifies (1) when an XML document is a correct RELAX NG schema and (2) when an XML document is valid with respect to a correct RELAX NG schema." RELAX NG is supported by a growing collection of software tools, including validators, conversion utilities, code generators, and XML editors. ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003 is Part 2 of a planned ten-part ISO standard which will include "Rule-Based Validation: Schematron" (Part 3) as well. The goal of ISO SC34/WG1 (Document Description and Processing Languages, Information Description) in developing Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) is "to create a framework within which multiple validation tasks of different types can be applied to an XML document in order to achieve more complete validation results than just the application of a single technology." [Full context]
[December 12, 2003] Metadata Envelope for IETF MMUSIC Internet Media Guides (IMG). A draft document Metadata Framework for Internet Media Guides: Metadata Envelope has been submitted to the IETF MMUSIC Working Group, together with an XML Schema for the IMG transfer envelope. The IETF Multiparty Multimedia Session Control Working Group was chartered to "develop protocols to support Internet teleconferencing and multimedia communications, focusing upon revisions of current protocols in the light of implementation experience and additional demands that have arisen from other WGs (such as AVT, SIP,SIPPING, and MEGACO), and upon delivery mechanisms for IMGs, generalizing its work on session announcement and discovery protocols (SAP, RTSP, SIP)." An Internet Media Guide (IMG) is "a collection of multimedia session descriptions expressed using Metadata Envelopeor similar session description format used to describe a collection of multimedia sessions. The purpose of the IMG metadata is to provide machine- and human-readable information describing the files, resources and multimedia programs available for streaming or downloading via multicast or unicast. IMG metadata is encapsulated into an IMG transfer envelope before it is passed to an IMG transport protocol, such as MUPPET. The purpose of the transfer envelope is to provide independence of metadata formats from transport protocols, and to enable versioning, updating and expiring of transmitted metadata." Appendix A of the MMUSIC WG's Session Description and Capability Negotiation (SDPng) draft provides the formal syntax specifications in the form of an SDPng Base DTD and SDPng XML-Schema Specification. The SDPng protocol addresses multiparty multimedia conferences, being intended for two-way negotiation and unidirectional delivery; its XML Schema will be extended to harmonize with the XML Schema for the IMG Transfer Envelope. [Full context]
[December 09, 2003] W3C TAG Publishes Last Call Working Draft for Architecture of the World Wide Web. W3C's Technical Architecture Group (TAG) has released a Last Call Working Draft for the Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition. The Working Draft is edited by Ian Jacobs, with contributions from Tim Berners-Lee, Tim Bray, Dan Connolly, Paul Cotton, Roy Fielding, Chris Lilley, David Orchard, Norman Walsh, and Stuart Williams. The document "is written for Web developers, implementers, content authors and publishers. It describes the properties that are desired of the Web and the design choices that have been made to achieve them. The architecture document promotes re-use of existing standards when suitable, and gives guidance on how to innovate in a manner consistent with the Web architecture." Three architectural bases of the Web are discussed: Identification (resources identified by URI), Interaction (protocols defining the syntax and semantics of messages exchanged by agents over a network; web agents communicating information about the state of a resource through the exchange of representations), and Formats (representations built from a non-exclusive set of data formats, used separately or in combination)." Public review and comment on the Working Draft are invited through the last call period ending March 05, 2004. [Full context]
[December 05, 2003] HR-XML Consortium Approves Assessments Specification for Skills Evaluation. The Assessments 1.0 specification recently approved by the membership of the HR-XML Consortium features six new XML Schemas supporting order requests to providers of assessment and testing services, and the return of assessment status and results. An assessment in this context "can encompass a wide variety of tests, screenings, and instruments. Assessments can include tests of both hard skills (technical abilities acquired through training and education) and/or soft skills (a diverse range of abilities or personal characteristics such as customer orientation, analytical thinking, leadership skills, team-building skills, listening skills, and diplomacy). The Assessment Order specification is sufficiently generalized to be useful in a wide variety of scenarios. The HR-XML Assessment Workgroup is planning future releases of the standard that will support additional options, such as the discovery of available assessment instruments based on the particular competencies an employer may want to assess." This collection of XML Schemas is the latest suite in a series of related modular specifications designed to "spare employers and vendors the risk and expense of having to negotiate and agree upon data interchange mechanisms on an ad-hoc basis." HR-XML is an independent, non-profit consortium "dedicated to enabling e-commerce and inter-company exchange of human resources data worldwide. Its work centers on the development and promotion of standardized XML vocabularies for HR, with current efforts are focused on standards for staffing and recruiting, compensation and benefits, training and work force management. The Consortium has produced a library of more than 75 interdependent XML schemas defining data elements for particular HR transactions, as well as options and constraints governing the use of those elements." [Full context]
[December 04, 2003] IBM Submits EPAL Version 1.2 Privacy Specification to W3C. W3C has acknowledged receipt of IBM's Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL) Version 1.2 as a Member Submission request. The specification includes two parts: a prose description of syntax and semantics, with formal definition of the EPAL syntax presented in an XML Schema. The EPAL technical specification defines a "formal language for writing enterprise privacy policies to govern data handling practices in IT systems according to fine-grained positive and negative authorization rights. It concentrates on the core privacy authorization while abstracting data models and user-authentication from all deployment details such as data model or user-authentication. EPAL is thus an interoperability language for exchanging privacy policy in a structured format between applications or enterprises, supporting the ability to encode an enterprise's privacy-related data-handling policies and practices and providing a language that can be imported and enforced by a privacy-enforcement systems. The goal of EPAL is: (1) to enable organizations to be demonstrably compliant with their stated policies; (2) to reduce overhead and the cost of configuring and enforcing data handling policies; and (3) to leverage existing standards and technologies. Whereas the W3C Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) Recommendation defines a global terminology that can be used to describe the privacy promises of an enterprise, EPAL aims at formalizing enterprise-internal privacy policies, which requires a fine-grained vocabulary; it also includes a fine-grained hierarchy of purposes for which an enterprise collects data." While EPAL is not in scope for the W3C P3P 1.1 Specification Working Group as currently chartered, the submission will be brought to the attention of the P3P Coordination Group, the P3P community, W3C's AC, and the PET community. [Full context]
[December 02, 2003] ISTH Initiative Develops Core Payments XML Kernel Transaction Standard. Key players in the financial services area have launched an International Standards Team Harmonization (ISTH) Initiative to develop and promote a "single 'Core Payment XML Kernel' that can be used globally by any corporate, irrespective of size and sector and by any servicing bank, regardless of location." Details of the project are summarized in an agreement between IFX, OAGi, SWIFT, and TWIST; this MOU sets out "the framework of cooperation and coordination in the area of the content and use of a core payment kernel XML transaction." Several banks support the initiative, including ABN AMRO, Bank of America, Citibank, Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Nordea, Standard Chartered, and Wells Fargo. A pilot version of XML schemas and basic documentation was completed in August 2003; a handbook and final versions of XML schemas to be available in Q2 of 2004, while interim deliverables will be made available for public review. The Core Payment XML Kernel "provides the definition of an XML message that will be used for making a payment or direct debit as indicated in three message types: Payment Initiation; Status and Advice; Reconciliation. Direct Debit and Bank Statement will be addressed in future phases of work, while other types are currently out of scope (Extended Remittance Advice; Working Capital Management and Card Payments). Participating members will "identify and resolve content differences between the messages so a single set of content can be used, recommending a common core payment that can be accepted for use by each of the standards bodies. They will establish a method of interoperability that allows the Core Payment XML Kernel to have extended or related messages packaged with it. The goals are to support straight through processing, to provide reconciliation for corporates, to enhance the transparency of payments, and reduce the costs of a host-to-host file delivery implementation." [Full context]
[December 01, 2003] ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 Publishes Topic Map Query Language (TMQL) Requirements. A posting from Lars Marius Garshol announces the publication of a new draft version of TMQL Requirements, defining informal requirements and feature lists for the upcoming ISO standard TMQL (Topic Map Query Language, ISO/IEC 18048). This language "is intended to be a kind of SQL (or XML Query) for topic maps, and will greatly simplify topic map application development by making it much easier to extract information from topic maps." TMQL is being developed by SC34 in connection with TMCL (ISO 19756: Topic Maps Constraint Language) and the multi-part standard ISO/IEC 13250: Topic Maps. This updated TMQL Version 1.2.0 draft supersedes the August 2003 draft version 1.0.0. ISO/IEC 13250-2 (Topic Maps Data Model) defines the abstract structure of topic maps and provides the foundation for TMQL. The revised TMQL requirements draft "reflects the intentions of the Topic Map community regarding a Topic Map retrieval and manipulation language, and contains the consolidated view of the standards editors. It defines the requirements for the TMQL standard as a whole, and for the query aspect of TMQL in particular; additional requirements for the update part of TMQL will be detailed at a later stage." SC34/WG3 ('Information Association') will be meeting for standards work December 6-8, 2003 in Philadelphia, PA, USA. Special attention is being given to the Topic Map specifications, including the ISO 13250 Roadmap and Primer, XTM (XTM Syntax and Specification), TMDM ( Topic Map Data Model), TMCL, Canonical XTM, TMQL, and the Topic Map Reference Model. [Full context]
[November 28, 2003] UBL Version 1.0 Committee Draft Beta Approved for Public Implementation Testing. The OASIS Universal Business Language Technical Committee has reached a major milestone with the approval of UBL 1.0 Beta as a Committee Draft, now published to enable trial implementations of UBL in realistic business environments. A posting from Jon Bosak (Chair, OASIS UBL TC) announces the results of the TC voting and purpose of the UBL 1.0 Beta draft. The UBL TC was chartered to: "(1) develop a standard library of XML business documents (purchase orders, invoices, etc.) by modifying an already existing library of XML schemas to incorporate the best features of other existing XML business libraries; (2) design a mechanism for the generation of context-specific business schemas through the application of transformation rules to the common UBL source library; (3) produce an international standard for electronic commerce freely available to everyone without licensing or other fees." The UBL 1.0 Beta package approved as a Committee Draft is intended to "provide the specifications needed to begin implementation testing of UBL in advance of its recommendation to OASIS for standardization. Normative components of the CD are intended to represent UBL 1.0 as it will be released in 2004, with the exception of code list validation (which will be addressed by a Code List Subcommittee that has been formed for this purpose) and fixes for any major problems that may be discovered during the implementation phase. The non-normative parts of the draft (e.g., page formatting, illustrations, documentation) will be subject to further editorial work during the implementation phase. The implementation testing phase began as of November 25, 2003 and will end two weeks prior to the UBL TC meeting in Washington D.C., 23-27 February 2004. An implementation subcommittee (UBL ISC) is being formed to coordinate input received during implementation testing." [Full context]
[November 26, 2003] W3C and ISO Publish Final Version of Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification. The Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification Second Edition has been published as a W3C Recommendation and as an International Standard, ISO/IEC 15948:2003. PNG is an "extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images. PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel. Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits. The specification also defines an Internet Media Type image/png. PNG is designed to work well in online viewing applications, such as the World Wide Web, so it is fully streamable with a progressive display option. PNG is robust, providing both full file integrity checking and simple detection of common transmission errors. Also, PNG can store gamma and chromaticity data for improved color matching on heterogeneous platforms. The PNG specification enjoys a good level of implementation with good interoperability. At the time of this publication more than 180 image viewers could display PNG images and over 100 image editors could read and write valid PNG files. Full support of PNG is required for conforming SVG viewers; at the time of publication all eighteen SVG viewers had PNG support. HTML has no required image formats, but over 60 HTML browsers had at least basic support of PNG images." The W3C PNG Recommendation has been produced as part of the W3C Graphics Activity. Related standards include the WebCGM Profile and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a modularized language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in XML. [Full context]
[November 25, 2003] BEA and IBM Publish Service Data Objects (SDO) Specifications. Three specifications describing Service Data Objects (SDO) have been published jointly by BEA and IBM, and will be implemented in upcoming releases of the BEA WebLogic Platform and IBM WebSphere Application Server. The documents "provide programmers with simpler and more powerful ways of building portable server applications." Java Specification Requests (JSRs) are also being filed in the areas of these specifications for formal consideration under the Java Community Process (JCP). Introduced by a whitepaper on Next-Generation Data Programming: Service Data Objects, the principal Service Data Objects document describes SDO as "data programming architecture and API for the Java platform that unifies data programming across data source types, provides robust support for common application patterns, and enable applications, tools, and frameworks to more easily query, view, bind, update, and introspect data. The core concepts in the SDO architecture are the Data Object and Data Graph. A Data Object holds a set of named properties, each of which contains either a primitive-type value or a reference to another Data Object. The Data Object API provides a dynamic data API for manipulating these properties. The Data Graph provides an envelope for Data Objects, and is the normal unit of transport between components. Data Graphs also have the responsibility to track changes made to the graph of Data Objects, including inserts, deletes, and modification to Data Object properties." Related documents include: (1) Work Manager for Application Servers, which provides an API for application-server supported concurrent execution of work items, and (2) and Timer for Application Servers, which defines an API for using timers in an application-server supported fashion. The three specifications have been published under royalty-free terms. [Full context]
[November 24, 2003] Open GIS Consortium Issues RFQ for OGC Web Services Phase 2 Interoperability Initiative. The Open GIS Consortium Inc. (OGC) has announced a Request for Quotations from technology developers in connection with the OGC Web Services Phase 2 (OWS-2) testbed. OGC Web Services make up a the set of OpenGIS Specifications for interfaces, schemas, and encodings that comprise the interoperability framework for the emerging Spatial Web. "OWS-2 is part of OGC's Interoperability Program, a global, collaborative, hands-on engineering and testing program that rapidly delivers proven candidate specifications into OGC's Specification Program, where they are formalized for public release." Participants in the initiative will develop enhancements and compliance tests for current OpenGIS Specifications, including Open Location Services, the Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Coverage Service (WCS), Web Object Service (WOS), Catalog Services, and Geography Markup Language version 3.x. In OGC's Interoperability Initiatives, international teams of technology providers work together to solve specific geoprocessing interoperability problems posed by the Initiatives' Sponsors. The sponsors for this OGC initiative include: The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Spot Image (France), Sun Microsystems, and other organizations. The Open GIS Consortium is "an international industry consortium of 257 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS Specifications support interoperable solutions that geo-enable the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications." [Full context]
[November 21, 2003] Event-Driven Process Chain Markup Language (EPML) for Business Process Modeling. A communiqué from Jan Mendling (New Media Lab, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration) describes the progress of a standardization initiative within the EPC Community, focused upon development of an Event-Driven Process Chain Markup Language (EPML). Event-Driven Process Chains (EPCs) are a method for representation of business process models, popular especially in Germany. EPML is motivated by the goal of supporting data and model interchange in the face of heterogenous Business Process Modeling tools. The chief design principles in EPML are "readability, extensibility, tool orientation, and syntactic correctness. Readability expects EPML elements and attributes to have intuitive and perspicuous names. This is important because EPML documents will be used not only by applications, but also by humans who write XSLT-scripts that transform between EPML and other XML vocabularies. Extensibility reflects the need to provide different business perspectives and views on a process. EPML will be capable of expressing arbitrary perspectives instead of supporting just a pre-defined set. Tool orientation deals with graphical representation of EPCs. This is a crucial feature because BPM tools provide a GUI for developing the models. EPML will be able to store various layout and position information for EPC elements. Finally, syntactic correctness addresses EPC syntax elements and their interrelation." An initial EPML XML Schema and supporting documentation have been published. [Full context]
[November 18, 2003] Microsoft Announces Licenses for Use of Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas. Claiming that it may have patents necessarily infringed by implementations reading or writing files conforming to Office 2003 XML Schemas, Microsoft has published the terms of a license allowing third parties to create and distribute "Licensed Implementations" that support the XML Reference Schemas. A "Licensed Implementation" in this context refers to specific portions of a software product that solely read and write files that are fully compliant with the specifications for the Office Schemas. The Microsoft announcement of royalty-free licensing follows a period of "fruitful discussions with the Danish Government" and the publication of a 91-page report on "Open-Source Software in E-Government" from the Danish Board of Technology. XML Schemas and documentation for WordprocessingML, the XML file format for Microsoft Office Word 2003, are now available for download. Additional Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas to be delivered in December 2003 include SpreadsheetML (Microsoft Office Excel 2003) and FormTemplate XML schemas (Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003). The Microsoft schemas define document structures used for presentation and layout of XML data, describing how information is stored when Microsoft Office documents are saved as XML. [Full context]
[November 14, 2003] IETF Draft on Language Tags Defines Mechanism for Private Use Extension. An initial public draft of Tags for Languages presented to the IETF Network Working Group builds upon the current IETF RFC 3066 Tags for the Identification of Languages and defines additional mechanisms for private use extension. The Internet Draft also clarifies how private use, registered values, and matching interact. Identifiers known as language tags are authorized for use in XML and many related computing technologies that need to support language-sensitive and locale-based processing. Current practice regarding the creation, registration, and use of language tags is in a considerable state of confusion and "mess," in the experience of localization experts and software engineers. The goal of the new draft is to work toward a new IETF RFC that replaces RFC 3066. The proposed syntax for construction of a language tag provides for designation of language, script, region, variant, and arbitrary extension (using name/value pairs). Under the new proposal, "all 4-letter subtags are interpreted as ISO 15924 alpha-4 script codes from ISO 15924, or subsequently assigned by the ISO 15924 maintenance agency or governing standardization bodies, denoting the script or writing system used in conjunction with this language. All 2-letter and 3-letter subtags are interpreted as ISO 3166 alpha-2 (or alpha-3) country codes from ISO 3166, or subsequently assigned by the ISO 3166 maintenance agency or governing standardization bodies, denoting the area to which this language variant relates. Region tags must occur after any script tags and before any variants or extensions." A further goal of the new RFC is to provide for stable language tags even in the face of ISO instability. "To maintain backwards compatibility, there are two provisions to account for instabilities in ISO 639, 3166, and 15924 codes: (1) Ambiguity - in the event that one of these ISO standards reassigns a code that was previously assigned to a different value, the new use of the code will not be permitted and the IANA registry, as soon as practical, will register a surrogate value for the new code, based on the year that the new code assignment was made. (2) Stability - all other ISO codes are valid, even if they have been deprecated; where a new equivalent code has been defined, implementations should treat these tags as identical." [Full context]
[November 12, 2003] Liberty Alliance Publishes Final Phase 2 Specifications and Previews Phase 3. An announcement from the Liberty Alliance Project describes the final publication of Phase 2 Specifications in the Liberty Identity Web Services Framework, along with the Liberty Privacy Guidelines for Federated Identity. The announcement also sketches a roadmap for Liberty Alliance Phase 3 deliverables that will benefit from member participation in two new expert groups. A Services Expert Group was formed "to define and manage the process for creating new service specifications," and a Conformance Expert Group (CEG) was formed "to define and manage the process for validating interoperability between vendors' implementations of the Liberty Alliance standards." New Service Interface Specifications planned for Liberty Phase 3 include: (1) a Contact Book Service Interface, providing a "common method for users to manage and share personal or business contacts regardless of contact book provider, enabling service providers to access or automatically update, at the user's request, information like billing or shipping address"; (2) a Geo-location Service Interface, "supporting an interoperable way to automatically identify a person's location, at the user's request, to provide services like weather, news, travel or currency updates or directions to a chosen location"; (3) a Presence Service Interface "defining a common way for users to share presence information. The new Liberty Web Services Framework provides organizations with an open, standards-based way of delivering identity-based web services that can enable new revenue opportunities, cut internal IT costs, and make web services more secure and private. Because the Liberty specifications are built on existing open industry standards such as SAML, SOAP, XML and WS-Security, they can be deployed and supported in any environment and maximize an organizations investment in non-proprietary standards." The announcement identifies five companies that have announced plans to support the Phase 2 Liberty specifications in existing or new products and services. [Full context]
[November 11, 2003] US Federal Trade Commission Report Calls for Patent Law and Policy Reform. Several conclusions and recommendations on software patent reform published in the FTC's recent report seek to restore a proper balance of interests between competition and current patent policy. The 315-page report summarizes the results of extensive Hearings held by the US Federal Trade Commission and the DOJ during 2002. "The Hearings took place over 24 days, and involved more than 300 panelists, including business representatives from large and small firms, and the independent inventor community; leading patent and antitrust organizations; leading antitrust and patent practitioners; and leading scholars in economics and antitrust and patent law. In addition, the FTC received about 100 written submissions." The FTC report observes that questionable patents can deter or raise the costs of innovation, and that in industries with incremental innovation such as computer hardware and software, questionable patents can increase 'defensive patenting' and licensing complications, "creating a 'patent thicket' of overlapping intellectual property rights that a company must hack its way through in order to actually commercialize new technology." The FTC recommends the creation of a new administrative procedure "that will make it easier for firms to challenge a patent's validity at the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), without having to raise an expensive and time-consuming federal court challenge. It also recommends allowing courts to find patents invalid based on the mere preponderance of the evidence, without having to find that clear and convincing evidence compels that result. The current standard of 'clear and convincing evidence' undermines courts' ability to weed out questionable patents. This is especially troubling, since certain PTO procedures and rules tend to favor the issuance of patents. The FTC recommends tightening certain legal standards used to evaluate whether a patent is 'obvious'. In appropriate circumstances, the FTC will ask the PTO Director to reexamine questionable patents that raise competitive concerns." [Full context]
[November 10, 2003] Physical Markup Language (PML) Core Specification Version 1.0 for EPC Objects. A PML Core Specification Version 1.0 has been published as an Auto-ID Center Recommendation. The specification documents the core part of the Physical Markup Language (PML Core), explaining details the scope of PML Core and its relation to the Physical Markup Language. The document provides usage scenarios, articulates the requirements, explains design decisions, and supplies XML schemas and sample instance documents. The goal of PML is to "provide a collection of common, standardized vocabularies to represent and distribute information related to EPC Network enabled objects." The EPC Network is "an enabling technology that will transform the global supply chain through a new, open global standard for real-time, automatic identification of items in the supply chain of any company; the EPC Network was developed by the Auto-ID Center, a global research team directed through MIT and affiliated labs around the world, supported by more than 100 leading companies." Examples of EPC objects include observations by sensors such as RFID readers, "configuration files for infrastructure components such as RFID readers or e-commerce documents featuring EPC data such as advanced shipping notices containing EPCs of the items shipped. Although these different vocabularies might have diverse contents, they will be using naming and design rules common to the PML. The PML vocabularies provide the XML definitions of the data exchanged between components in the EPC Network system. XML messages interchanged in the systems should be instantiated from these PML schemas. The PML development is part of the Auto-ID Center's effort to develop standardized interfaces and protocols for the communication with and within the Auto-ID infrastructure. PML does not attempt to replace existing vocabularies for business transactions or any other XML application libraries, but complements these by defining a new library containing definitions about EPC Network system related data." [Full context]
[November 10, 2003] Portlet Open Source Trading (POST) Site for JSR 168 and WSRP Portlets. An open source web site featuring shared resources for implementation of the JCP JSR 168 and WSRP OASIS standards has been announced by Plumtree Software, Documentum, BEA Systems Inc., and Sun Microsystems. The Portlet Open Source Trading Site (POST) "aims to help companies kickstart their portal deployments, leading to faster time to value for all portal customers by providing open source portlets and a forum to exchange and learn about how these emerging new standards. Separate areas within POST are provided for sharing JSR-168 and WSRP portlets. As with any open-source site on SourceForge.net, any registered organization can contribute portlets to POST, which become available to all other members of the open-source community. Using POST, participants can see lists of newly available portlets, post requests to the community for the development of new portlets, search for portlets, upload new portlets, download available portlets, submit modified or enhanced versions of downloaded portlets, and discuss portlet development best practices, issues and solutions. Both the JCP (ava Community Process) and OASIS, the standard bodies that developed JSR 168 and WSRP respectively, have expressed support for the POST open-source site. The site will help companies learn from their industry peers and share best practices for developing standards-based portlets." [Full context]
[November 07, 2003] W3C Public Working Draft on Authoring Techniques for Device Independence. The W3C Device Independence Working Group has published an initial public working draft of Authoring Techniques for Device Independence. The document provides a summary of several techniques and best practices that Web site authors and solution providers may employ when creating and delivering content to a diverse set of access mechanisms. It includes discussions on the features of authoring tools, site creation and maintenance tools, storage, delivery, adaptation, end-user devices and software on such devices. The working draft seeks to identify known, published practices and techniques that address (1) the creation of original, reusable and adaptable content; (2) the representation of author intentions and decisions; (3) creating and adapting navigation features; (4) design and adaptation of interactive content; (5) use and management of contextual information." The W3C Device Independence WG was chartered to "study issues related to authoring, adaptation and presentation of Web content and applications that can be delivered effectively through different access mechanisms. The Working Group has the dual role of monitoring and reviewing the work of other groups from a device independence perspective, as well as proposing solutions for achieving better device independence in areas not already covered by other groups. The long-term objective of the Device Independence WG is to avoid fragmentation of the Web space, making it accessible with various kinds of presentation device. Consistent with this goal, presentation devices should be able to access Web content appropriate for their capabilities and authors should be enabled to create Web content that is deliverable across different presentation devices." [Full context]
[November 07, 2003] CLaRK XML-Based System for Corpora Development. A posting from Kiril Simov of the BulTreeBank Project announces the Version 2.0 release of CLaRK, an XML-based System for Corpora Development. The principal aim of the CLaRK system design is minimization of human intervention during the creation of language resources. It incorporates several XML-based technologies, including a Unicode XML Editor, XPath Engine, XSLT Engine, XML Constraints, and XML Cascaded Regular Grammar Engine. The basic mechanism of CLaRK for linguistic processing of text corpora is the cascaded regular grammar processor. The main challenge to the grammars in question is how to apply them on XML encoding of the linguistic information. The system offers a solution using an XPath language for constructing the input word to the grammar and an XML encoding of the categories of the recognised words. Several mechanisms for imposing constraints over XML documents are available. The constraints cannot be stated by the standard XML technology. The following types of constraints are implemented in CLaRK: (1) Regular expression constraints: additional constraints over the content of given elements based on a context; (2) Number restriction constraints: cardinality constraints over the content of a document; (3) Value constraints: restriction of the possible content or parent of an element in a document based on a context." The CLaRK system is implemented in Java and is available for download. [Full context]
[November 04, 2003] BEA Offers Preview Release of JSR 173 Streaming API for Java (StAX). BEA Systems, Inc. has announced the availability of the "first compliant preview" of the Streaming API for Java (StAX), documented in Java Specification Request (JSR) 173, Streaming API for XML. StAX is "a new Java API designed to improve developer productivity and performance by making it easier to incorporate Extensible Markup Language (XML) into Java. StAX is designed to overcome many of the disadvantages of former methods of accessing and manipulating XML documents from Java applications by providing the efficiency of streaming APIs and the control of tree-based APIs. This new method represents a next generation of APIs -- pull parsing. Unlike SAX and DOM, StAX is bidirectional, and can allow programs to both read existing XML documents and create new ones. Unlike other event-based approaches, developers using StAX for XML document parsing can pull events, rather than handling events in callback, which can enable them to stop processing, skip ahead, or get subsections and, ultimately, help to gain precise control, thereby saving time and reducing overall development costs." The BEA preview release of StAX is designed to provide developers with a suite of tests, tools and documentation designed to allow fully standardized implementation. This StAX preview is freely available online for developers. [Full context]
[November 04, 2003] OASIS Opens Discussion List for Proposed Music Notation XML TC. OASIS has created a public email list for the purpose of discussing the creation of one or more Technical Committees related to machine-processable music notation. According to a draft proposal for discussion, the purpose of the Music Notation XML TC would be "to develop a standard XML format for common Western musical notation. Although there are clearly a number of applications for such an XML standard, the proposed TC would initially focus on an XML standard to serve as an interchange format for score writing, music notation editing, and music publishing products. Many music notation products are already using XML for either interchange or native data storage. For example, interchange between Sibelius and Finale can be done using the MusicXML format. A major goal of the TC would be to minimize migration issues for existing music applications moving to an OASIS music notation standard. The TC would expect to receive and build upon existing music notation XML applications such as MusicXML and MEI as contributions to its work. These applications date back to 2000 and reflect the DTD technology of the time. The work of the TC might include modernizing current applications to improve support for schemas, namespaces, and other W3C and OASIS standards." The discussion list will be active for a maximum of 90 days (through calendar year 2003), during which time the list participants will decide if there is sufficient interest to form an OASIS TC. Public participation in the discussion list is welcome. [Full context]
[November 03, 2003] IBM alphaWorks Releases Snobase Ontology Management System. A new systems management technology known as SNOBASE (Semantic Network Ontology Base) or the Ontology Management System has been released by IBM alphaWorks. The Java-based application provides a "framework for loading ontologies from files and via the Internet and for locally creating, modifying, querying, and storing ontologies. It provides a mechanism for querying ontologies and an easy-to-use programming interface for interacting with vocabularies of standard ontology specification languages such as RDF, RDF Schema, DAML+OIL, and W3C OWL. Internally, the SNOBASE system uses an inference engine, an ontology persistent store, an ontology directory, and ontology source connectors. Applications can query against the created ontology models and the inference engine deduces the answers and returns results sets similar to JDBC (Java Data Base Connectivity) result sets. An ontology defines the terms and concepts used to describe and represent an area of knowledge. The ontology management system allows an application to manipulate and query ontology without worrying about how the ontology is stored and accessed, how queries are processed, how query results are retrieved, etc., by providing a programming interface. An ontology management system is to an ontology what a database management system (DBMS) is to data." The SNOBASE emerging technology was developed by an IBM research team including Juhnyoung Lee, Richard Goodwin, Rama Akkiraju, Yiming Ye, and Prashant Doshi. [Full context]
[October 31, 2003] IETF Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol Specifications Approved. A public message from the Internet Engineering Steering Group announces the approval of five proposed standard IETF Working Drafts from the Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (IMPP) WG. These documents include Presence Information Data Format (PIDF), Common Profile for Instant Messaging (CPIM), Common Presence and Instant Messaging: Message Format, Address Resolution for Instant Messaging and Presence, and Common Profile for Presence (CPP). Two key RFCs on instant messaging were published by the IMPP WG earlier: A Model for Presence and Instant Messaging (RFC 2778) and Instant Messaging / Presence Protocol Requirements (RFC 2779). The IMPP WG specifications "form the basis for a mechanism by which multiple distinct Instant Messaging applications may pass messages among the different systems while retaining the ability to use end-to-end encryption, integrity protection, and a shared framework for presence information. The work on PIDF (Presence Information Data Format) is already in widespread usage by the SIP-based instant messaging community, as is the message format described." The IMPP working group, now in the process of concluding its work program, is one of three IETF working groups chartered to develop architectuural, protocol, and data format specifications supporting internet-scale end-user presence awareness, notification, and instant messaging systems. The IETF Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) WG is extending current XMPP protocols "to provide finished support for RFC 2779-compliant security mechanisms, including authentication, privacy, access control and end-to-end as well as hop-by-hop message security. XMPP is an open, XML-based protocol for near real-time extensible messaging and presence and is the core protocol of the Jabber Instant Messaging and Presence technology." The SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) WG has produced a number of SIP-related specifications in parallel with the IMPP WG efforts. [Full context]
[October 30, 2003] OASIS Emergency Management TC Approves Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Draft. A Comittee Draft for the Common Alerting Protocol Version 1.0 has been approved by members of the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee and has been released for 30-day public review. The Common Alerting Protocol is "a simple but general format for exchanging all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings over all kinds of networks. CAP allows a consistent warning message to be disseminated simultaneously over many different warning systems, thus increasing warning effectiveness while simplifying the warning task. CAP also facilitates the detection of emerging patterns in local warnings of various kinds, such as might indicate an undetected hazard or hostile act. And CAP provides a template for effective warning messages based on best practices identified in academic research and real-world experience." The OASIS TC was chartered to "advance the fields of incident and emergency preparedness and response, to be accomplished by designing, developing, and releasing XML Schema-based core and metadata standards to help facilitate and improve the real-world interoperability problems around incident and emergency management." Public review of the CAP Version 1.0 CD and comments are invited through November 30, 2003. [Full context]
[October 28, 2003] W3C Presents Prior Art Filing to USPTO and Urges Removal of Eolas Patent. A letter from Tim Berners-Lee (Director, World Wide Web Consortium) to the Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (James E. Rogan, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property) appeals for a "reexamination of the '906 patent in order to prevent substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of World Wide Web." The Eolas '906 patent granted by the USPTO is described as applicable to Java applets, browser plug-ins, ActiveX components, Macromedia Flash, Windows Media Player, and related "embedded program objects." The W3C letter cites evidence of prior art, described in a "Citation of Prior Art Under 35 U.S.C. § 301 and 37 CFR 1.501 In Relation to U.S. Patent Number 5,838,906," which renders the Eloas patent invalid and justifies reexamination of the '906 patent. The Berners-Lee letter argues that the "impact of the '906 patent reaches far beyond a single vendor and even beyond those who could be alleged to infringe the patent. The existence of the patent and associated licensing demands compels many developers of Web browsers, Web pages, and many other important components of the Web to deviate from the fundamental technical standards that enable the Web to function as a coherent system. In many cases, those who will be forced to incur the cost of modifying Web pages or software applications do not even themselves infringe the patent (assuming it is even valid). Given the interdependence of Web technology, those who wrote Web pages or developed software in reliance on Web standards will now have to retrofit their systems in order to accommodate deviations from standards forced by the '906 patent. These deviations will either reflect individual decisions by developers about how to avoid infringement liability, or will be an effort to be compatible with decisions individual vendors make in the course of their own re-design. What's more, the inevitable fragmentation and re-tooling costs caused by the ability to enforce this patent, which we believe to be invalid, cannot even be remedied by individual parties choosing simply to pay licensing fees to the patent holder." [Full context]
[October 28, 2003] IDEAlliance Working Group Publishes PRISM Aggregator DTD for Online Content. The IDEAlliance PRISM Working Group has announced the publication of a new PRISM Aggregator XML DTD designed for use by publishers "to mark up and transmit magazine and journal content to aggregators and to push data to their internal web sites." Described as a "new standard format for publishers to use in transmitting content for online usage to aggregators and syndicators," the PRISM Aggregator DTD was developed in partnership with commecial publishers and content aggregators. The PRISM Aggregator Message DTD "combines a customization of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XHTML standard and a set of PRISM metadata that augments the widely accepted Dublin Core metadata standard. The current DTD includes basic metadata and structural elements that will be found in any serial publication or web-based editorial. The XML DTD provides an explicit way of describing the article markup and metadata to support processes such as corrections, additions, deletions and updates. Future releases of the DTD will include additional elements to aid searching and to help track copyright ownership, rights and permissions information, and license agreements." The PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) working group "was established in 1999 by a group of companies primarily involved in the production of serial and web-based editorial content. This group includes publishers, other rights holders, systems integrators, software developers and content aggregators." [Full context]
[October 27, 2003] Danish Board of Technology Report Recommends Open Source Software for E-Government. Members of an interdisciplinary working group under the Danish Board of Technology have published the results of a detailed investivation into the usability of open-source software in public administration, including the economic perspectives in a change-over to open-source software. The 91-page report Open-Source Software in E-Government "contains an economic analysis of open-source software and additionally analyses its usability and makes a number of recommendations on how the public sector can promote the use of open-source software." The document concludes that "switching from proprietary software to open source software in Danish public administration has an economic impact of several billion Denmark Kroner (DKK) every year. One reason the open source software is competitive is because it allows users to change, to correct, and to distribute the software and therefore to a greater extent leaves the user in control of changes." The working group report recommends that the state "not put all its eggs in one basket" and that an "initial pilot project must be established in the near future in which open-source software such as StarOffice/OpenOffice is implemented in medium-sized e-government." A larger followup project should be designed "in which a number of administrative units use open-source software, for example switching over to StarOffice/OpenOffice, and utilize previously gathered experience to reduce installation and adaptation costs. The working group recommends that a standard document format be developed, firstly for problem-free exchange of documents and secondly for integration in systems used in e-government. A strategy for the introduction of an open standard for the exchange of word-processed documents is important, because there is no genuine competition at present in the desktop area, largely due to the fact that Microsoft formats also represent de facto standards for electronic document exchange." [Full context]
[October 24, 2003] El Consorcio World Wide Web inaugura la Oficina Española en Oviedo, España. W3C has announced the launch of a new W3C Spanish Office based at the Fundación para el Fomento de la Investigacin Científica y la Tecnología (FICYT) in Oviedo, Spain. FICYT carries out and disseminates applied research in information technologies, both self-financed and on behalf of the private and public sectors. It is a non-profit institution whose goal is to co-operate with industry on important areas of research and development. FICYT's activities include: (1) undertaking and supporting research and development projects; (2) warding individual grants to researchers and scientists; (3) promoting and disseminating technology transfer and collaboration among the scientific, education and research communities and the private and public sectors; (4) contributing to the development of the Information Society. FICYT also has an important network of contacts in Latin America. The new W3C Spanish Office will assist in coordinating with Latin American communities by also disseminating information in Latin America, encouraging and co-ordinating new translations to Spanish, build up press contacts, etc. FICYT meets the criteria for W3C Office selection as a vendor-neutral Member of W3C with an extensive contact network and shared objectives for Web development. Although the primary goal of the new W3C Office is to be dedicated to outreach in Spain, this is also the first W3C Office with active contacts with Spanish-speakers worldwide. It joins the complement of W3C European Offices in The Benelux Countries, Finland, Germany & Austria; Greece; Hungary, Italy; Sweden; and the United Kingdom and Ireland. As its Members work to realize the full potential of the Web, W3C partners with regional organizations wishing to further W3C's mission. The W3C Offices assist with promotion efforts in local languages, help broaden W3C's geographical base, and encourage international participation in W3C Activities. W3C currently has 14 Offices in Australia, the Benelux countries, Germany and Austria, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Korea, Morocco, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom and Ireland. En la fecha actual, existen 13 miembros españoles del World Wide Web Consortium W3C." [Full context]
[October 24, 2003] OASIS Members Form Production Planning and Scheduling Technical Committee. Representatives from Hitachi, Fujitsu, and the PSLX Consortium have joined with other individual members to form a new OASIS Production Planning and Scheduling Technical Committee. The nine members proposing the PPS work will focus on "production planning and production scheduling problems in manufacturing industries. The categories of manufacturers and types of manufacturing processes are not restricted; in scope are production planning and scheduling problems relating to a master production schedule, detail production schedule, material requirement planning, capacity requirement planning, production order management, and loading and dispatching in a shop floor. As a starting point, specifications published by PSLX Consortium will be discussed as one possible contribution to the standardization process. The PSLX Consortium specifications contain wide variety of information about planning and scheduling in manufacturing industries," including abstract models and data dictionaries. Some of these specifications are now being considered for stardization in ISO/TC184/SC5, "Architecture, Communications and Integration Frameworks, as described in SC5 Resolution 448. The OASIS TC will only deal with the XML Specification PSLX-04 which "prescribes how to represent the production planning and scheduling information by XML, and how to implement the interfaces on computers." The initial Committee Draft TC deliverable is expected to provide outlines of target applications of production planning and scheduling problems, list appropriate business execution messages for production planning and scheduling, define rules for an application in responding the business execution messages, and present XML schemas for each business execution message. Specifications produced by the TC will be of interest to system integrators and software vendors focusing on production planning and scheduling problems in manufacturing industries. The PPS TC's first meeting wlll be held December 18, 2003 in Tokyo. The TC Convenor and Proposed Chair is Yasuyuki Nishioka of the PSLX Consortium and Hosei University. [Full context]
[October 22, 2003] Atom as the New XML-Based Web Publishing and Syndication Format. The Atom Project, to the extent that anyone can declare authoritatively what it is, or is quintessentially meant to support, is "an initiative to develop a common syntax for syndication, archiving, and publishing." Sam Ruby (Emerging Technologies Group, IBM) is most often credited for originating the core ideas, and design work spread across several wikis and weblog Internet sites is now being shared by some of the brightest developer minds focused upon the future of Web content creation and distribution. The developers agree that Atom "will be vendor neutral, implemented by everybody, freely extensible by anybody, and cleanly and thoroughly specified." Atom is sometimes characterized as the successor to RSS, which is variably used for headline syndication, website metadata description, and content syndication. Like RSS, Atom is being created through an informal consensus process by volunteers in the Web developer community at large. Sam Ruby appears to recognize that the function of Atom will be revealed in unpredictable ways, escaping any telos imagined by the current designers. The key insights are these: design Atom such that content is not treated as a second class citizen (allow its conceptual model and syntax to blur the subjective distinction between metadata and data); insist upon a uniform mechanism for expressing the core concepts independent of the usage (e.g., allow multiple implementation designs conforming to abstract API requirements, and anticipate multiple schema formalisms for validation); keep the format open and simple (e.g., not requiring special serialization of the XML, implementable using simple POST and GET operations under HTTP). The Atom design is envisioned as extensible for different application areas (license terms, access control, content categorization, versioning, related resources, etc.) The core features are those common to most creations of intellectual works: source/author, editing date(s), resource identifier/location, and content. Given these minimal but central goals, we can understand the simplicity and generality of the abstract for the draft Atom API specification: the API document "presents a technique for using XML and HTTP to edit content." In this context, "edit" means "read, write, modify, delete" (approximately: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). [Full context]
[October 21, 2003] New Microsoft Office System Marketed to Enterprises. Microsoft Corporation has announced the general availability of its new Microsoft Office System with six product suites, eleven products, and four servers. The press kit includes references to several dozen promotional documents (press releases, feature stories, speech transcripts, white papers, and product information datasheets) describing the major components: Office 2003, Exchange Server 2003, Office FrontPage 2003, Office InfoPath 2003, Office OneNote 2003, Office Project 2003, Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Office Visio 2003, and Solution Accelerators. The controversial Windows Rights Management Services solution has been delayed, but is promised for delivery before the end of 2003. Enterprises prepared to pay for the new servers and "professional" editions of the Office software will be able to take advantage of XML and collaboration features. According to Microsoft's Bill Gates, the October 21, 2003 release includes the largest number of products ever released by Microsoft on a single day. [Full context]
[October 20, 2003] UN/CEFACT Announces V1.1 Release of ebXML Business Process Specification Schema. A posting from Klaus-Dieter Naujok (UN/CEFACT/TMG Chair) announces the final release publication of UN/CEFACT ebXML Business Process Specification Schema Version 1.1. This ebXML BPSS specification was "developed in accordance with the UN/CEFACT/TRADE/22 Open Development Process (ODP) for Technical Specifications and has been approved by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) Techniques and Methodologies Group (TMG). It defines a standard language by which business systems may be configured to support execution of business collaborations consisting of business transactions. The document is based upon prior UN/CEFACT work, specifically the metamodel behind the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) defined in UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology -- Meta Model -- Revision 12. Over the last two years, interested parties from around the world have collaborated in the development of the Specification addressing a number of deficiencies implementers of Version 1.01 identified." As to the TMG's BPSS road map, "as agreed to by the TMG in March 2003, work on Version 2.0 and alignment with the UMM Meta-Model's Business Transaction View (BTV) will commence starting with the upcoming TMG meeting in December. Interested parties are invited to attend the meeting in Waidhofen/Ybbs (Austria), 8-12 December 2003." The UN/CEFACT TMG has also announced commencement of technical work on a Business Collaboration Framework (BCF) based upon the UMM Meta-Model; it is focused on the creation of a new e-business standard using a "technological and implementation neutral approach to the exchange of global information requirements." [Full context]
[October 17, 2003] ODRL International Workshop 2004 Call for Participation. A call for participation has been issued in connection with the ODRL International Workshop 2004, featuring papers and demo presentations on standardized XML exchange formats for rights expressions. The workshop will be held April 21 - 23, 2004, hosted by the Department of Information Systems, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) initiative "was started in 2001 and is today an accepted technology in the field of rights expressions. ODRL has been formally approved by the Open Mobile Alliance (previously, the WAP Forum) as the Rights Language for mobile devices and has also been deployed in various projects (e.g., the COLIS project, and OpenIPMP) and in prototype implementations." The XML-based ODRL specification "supports an extensible language and vocabulary (data dictionary) for the expression of terms and conditions over any content including permissions, constraints, obligations, conditions, and offers and agreements with rights holders. The ODRL specification is freely available and has no licensing requirements. The ODRL International Workshop 2004 has the goal of bringing together people from research and industry to share experiences, and discuss the future develop the language to ensure its timeliness, usability, and future success." Submissions are invited for research and industry papers on experiences with ODRL and for demo presentations on ODRL implementations. The deadline for submissions is December 20, 2003. [Full context]
[October 16, 2003] SPML Provisioning and Identity Management Specification Balloted for Approval. The Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) Version 1.0 has been released in Committee Draft for approval as an OASIS Standard. The OASIS Provisioning Services Technical Committee (PSTC) was formed in late 2001 "to define an XML-based framework for exchanging user, resource and service provisioning information. The resulting Version 1.0 specification defines the concepts, operations, deployment and XML schema, for an XML based request and response protocol for provisioning. SPML will be of interest to any organization that develops custom built provisioning solutions or is involved in identity management." The Core SPML document is accompanied by Bindings for the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) Version 1.0 (defining protocol bindings and profiles for the use of SPML request-response elements in communications protocols and applications) and the Core XML Schema. The SPML 1.0 specification "supports identifying principles using the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and Project Liberty standards. Additionally, the SPML 1.0 specification has been designed to accommodate the use of the OASIS Web Services Security (WSS) specification, XML Digital Signatures, and XML Encryption." Implementation code for SPML is provided on the OpenSPML.org web site, dedicated to "the promotion and distribution of an open source client code that supports SPML; OpenSPML is a cooperative initiative by independent software vendors and implementers of the SPML version 1.0 specification. Initially developed in Java, the OpenSPML client code is expected to be available in other languages." [Full context]
[October 14, 2003] World Wide Web Consortium Releases XForms 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation. W3C has announced the publication of XForms 1.0 as an approved W3C Recommendation, signifying that the specification is "stable, contributes to Web interoperability, and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favor its adoption by the industry. In contrast to HTML forms in which functional and presentation markup are intertwined, XForms lets forms authors distinguish the descriptions of the purpose of the form; the presentation of the form, and how the instance data are written in XML. By splitting traditional HTML forms into three parts -- XForms model, instance data, and the XForms user interface -- XForms cleanly separates presentation from content. This separation brings new advantages: (1) Reuse: XForms modules can be reused independently of the information they collect; (2) Device independence: user interface controls are abstract -- that is, their generic features are the only thing indicated -- so they can easily be delivered to different devices with different capabilities; (3) Accessibility: separation of presentation from content leaves information more readily available for users of assistive technologies; in addition, the user interface controls encapsulate all relevant metadata such as labels, thereby enhancing accessibility of the application when using different modalities. Practically speaking, XForms technologies make it possible to deliver the same form to a PDA, a cell phone, screen reader or conventional desktop machine, without loss of functionality for the end user." The XForms 1.0 Basic Profile has now been published as a standalone W3C Candidate Recommendation. This profile describes a minimal level of XForms processing tailored to the needs of constrained devices and environments. A brief tutorial XForms for HTML Authors has also been released to support authors; it provides an introduction to XForms and shows how to convert existing forms to their XForms equivalent. [Full context]
[October 14, 2003] Opsware and EDS Launch Data Center Markup Language (DCML) for Utility Computing. A new Data Center Markup Language (DCML) has been announced by Opsware and EDS, designed to "help organizations realize the benefits of utility computing: greater operational efficiencies, increased visibility into data center environments and operations and reduced time and cost to implement strategic IT initiatives such as consolidation, disaster recovery, application capacity management, software policy management and data center planning." Opsware and EDS are joined by twenty-some technology companies in support of the DCML "foundation to enable utility computing." DCML is an XML-based standard that "will enable data center environment breakthroughs in three areas: construction, management and visibility. DCML is the first systematic, open language to describe data center environments, dependencies between data center components and the policies governing management and construction of those environments. DCML provides a standard method for data center automation, system management and performance management solutions to interoperate and share descriptions of data center elements, directions on constructing the environment and policies governing their use. Because automation and utility computing systems require a common understanding of the environment under management, DCML is a necessary precursor for realizing the benefits of utility computing. DCML provides the first standard model to describe what is contained within a data center, and specifically how that environment is constructed. This enables systematic reproduction, rebuilding or reprovisioning of any portion of the data center environment. DCML will encompass a wide array of data center elements, including network components, storage components, UNIX, Linux, Windows and other servers, software infrastructure and applications." The organization will submit the DCML specification(s) to a standards body such as DMTF, IETF, OASIS, or SNIA. [Full context]
[October 13, 2003] XML 2003 News Standards Summit Seeks Interoperability and Convergence. A News Standards Summit sponsored by IDEAlliance, IFRA, IPTC, NAA, and OASIS will be held December 8, 2003, in conjunction with the Philadelphia XML 2003 Conference. The organizers are concerned that key specifications for news content representation and dissemination (NewsML, NITF, PRISM, RSS, Atom, ICE, XMP, XHTML, etc.) are being developed in isolation. The News Standards Summit "will bring together major players -- experts on news metadata standards as well as commercial news providers, users, and aggregators. News Summit attendees will analyze the current state and future expectations for news and publishing XML efforts from both the content and processing model perspectives. The goal is to increase understanding and drive practical, productive convergence. All interested parties are welcome to participate. Anyone who develops or implements news exchange standards is strongly encouraged to attend, particularly providers and users of news, online content, mobile communications, newspapers and magazines, and picture libraries. The program will feature presentations from several key news standards efforts, balanced by a requirements overview from a panel of international users." Confirmed speakers include Chet Ensign (LexisNexis), Laurent Le Meur (AFP), Alan Karben (XML Team Solutions), Ron Daniel (Taxonomy Strategies), Dianne Kennedy (IDEAlliance), Sam Ruby (IBM), Ben Hammersley (author of Content Syndication with RSS), John Cowan (Reuters), Peter Meirs (Time Inc), and Patricia Harris (NISO). They will be joined by speakers from Adobe, Associated Press, Dow Jones and Nokia; other well-known participants include Tim Bray, David Megginson, and Mark Walters. [Full context]
[October 10, 2003] Antenna House Issues Major Upgrade to XSL Formatter for High-Quality Print. The XSL Formatter from Antenna House has been released in version 3.0, incorporating "an entirely new formatting engine developed from scratch." The XSL Formatter V3.0 application implements an XSL-FO (Extensible Style Language-Formatting Objects) processor meeting the specifications of the W3C XSL Recommendation. It supports the formatting of XML documents for production-quality printing and output to PDF. According to the announcement, XSL Formatter V3.0 "formats large XML documents, data, and forms with high speed; V3.0 is the fastest XSL Formatter available and is significantly faster than XSL Formatter V2. Version 3.0 has newly developed SVG support to retain the vector information for the output module, thus meeting the increasing demands for SVG delivery and viewing. The new V3.0 formatting engine has been designed to be able to format virtually any size of document; this design overcomes the V2.X limitation of approximately 4,000 pages in a single document so that v3.0 is able to format about 10 times as much content as XSL Formatter V2. The new version supports direct streaming of both the input FO and output PDF; since it does not go through a temporary disk file, system integration is easier and moreover is safer. Command line, COM, .NET, Java, and C++/C interfaces are supported. The XSL Formatter Hyphenation Option makes it possible to hyphenate 40 or more languages without preparing dictionaries. " An evaluation version for XSL Formatter V3.0 is available for download. [Full context]
[October 09, 2003] W3C Publishes Draft Guidelines for Authoring Internationalized XHTML and HTML. The World Wide Web Consortium has issued an initial Working Draft for Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization 1.0. Produced by the Guidelines, Education & Outreach Task Force (GEO) of the Internationalization Working Group, the document describes and illustrates authoring techniques for the creation of "internationalized HTML using XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.01, supported by CSS1, CSS2 and some aspects of CSS3." Most of the techniques for completed document subsections are implemented in the latest versions of popular Web browsers, so readers can inspect the source code and observe the visual behaviors, where relevant. In this initial WD, sigla are represented for implementation support in three user agents (Internet Explorer 6, Netscape Navigator 7, and Opera 7). The document is organized according to "tasks that a developer of XHMTL/HTML content may want to perform." Document sections at least partially complete include: Document structure and metadata; Character sets, character encodings and entities; Fonts; Specifying the language of content; Handling bidirectional text; Handling data that varies by locale. Subsequent versions of the document will document authoring techniques relating to: Handling vertical text; Text formatting; Lists; Tables; Links; Objects; Images; Forms; Keyboard shortcuts; Writing source text; Navigation; File management; Supplying data for localization. The Working Draft is presented in a full (detail) view, collapsible outline view, and resource view. In the resource view, bibliographic citations are hyperlinked to relevant standards from W3C, IANA, IETF, Unicode Consortium, etc. Icons in the document margins help the reader switch between the detail, outline, and resource views. The W3C GEO Task Force "encourages feedback about the content of this document as well as participation in the development of the techniques by people who have experience creating Web content that conforms to internationalization needs." [Full context]
[October 08, 2003] OpenOffice.org Releases Free, Open Source, Cross Platform Office Productivity Suite. Following several months of beta testing, OpenOffice.org has released the new version of its award-winning OpenOffice.org 1.1 office productivity suite. According to the terms of the LGPL and SISSL open source licenses, the software is "free for all to use, improve, modify, and to redistribute to anyone. OpenOffice.org has tracked "over 20 million downloads" of the software, which is becoming increasingly popular in government jurisdictions, hospitals, schools, and in developing countries where money is not predictably available for software purchase and upgrades. The Version 1.1 OpenOffice.org suite comes complete with word-processor, spreadsheet, presentation and various other components and provides a revolutionary open, future-proof XML file format. The new release introduces many enhancements and new features including native one-click PDF (Adobe Acrobat) export, Macromedia Flash export for presentations and drawings, faster load-time, enhanced MS Office file compatibility, accessibility support, and a smoother look and feel. It supports vertical and bidirectional writing with complex text layout. It comes with a a macro recorder, software development kit, and an XML filter tool including filters for DocBook and XHTML." Downloads are available for for Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP), Linux (x86 & PowerPC), and Solaris Operating System (SPARC platform edition) in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean and Japanese. Support for other languages is underway; versions for Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris (x86) will be available later in 2003. [Full context]
[October 07, 2003] IBM Releases Web Services Provisioning (WS-Provisioning) Specification. A draft version of Web Services Provisioning (WS-Provisioning) has been presented by IBM/Tivoli as a submission for consideration by the OASIS Provisioning Services TC. The contribution is provided as input to technical work on SPML Version 2, as Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) Version 1.0 is currently out for ballot as an OASIS Standard. The WS-Provisioning specification "describes the APIs and schemas necessary to facilitate interoperability between provisioning systems and to allow software vendors to provide provisioning facilities in a consistent way. The specification addresses many of the problems faced by provisioning vendors in their use of existing protocols, commonly based on directory concepts, and confronts the challenges involved in provisioning Web Services described using WSDL and XML Schema. WS-Provisioning defines a model for the primary entities and operations common to provisioning systems including the provisioning and de-provisioning of resources, retrieval of target data and target schema information, and provides a mechanism to describe and control the lifecycle of provisioned state." The WS-Provisioning authors envision that the technical work of the OASIS PSTC may at some point converge with the IBM specification. [Full context]
[October 03, 2003] ECMA International Publishes CSTA XML Standard for Web Services Call Control. ECMA International has announced the official publication of the ECMA-348 Standard, providing "the world's first complete call control web services specification." Web Services Description Language (WSDL) for CSTA Phase III defines a WSDL for the XML messages defined in ECMA-323. It "builds upon the XML data types and message formats specified in ECMA-323 second edition, supporting all CSTA features, e.g., services and events as specified in ECMA-269 (Services for Computer Supported Telecommunications Applications - CSTA) and in ECMA-323. CSTA provides a protocol independent abstraction layer for applications. It provides a consistent, standards-based messaging interface that can be used with basic first party call control based platforms as well as more complex third party call control (CTI) platforms, or a combination of both. ECMA-323 consists of a set of XML Schemas based upon the W3C XML Schema Language Recommendation; it extensible XML schemas for all of the categories of services defined in ECMA-269. Call control is just one category of services in ECMA-323. Examples of other categories of services are: capability exchange (feature discovery) services, call routing services, services to control a device (e.g., message waiting, writing to display, forwarding settings), and others." ECMA International is "an industry association founded in 1961 and dedicated to the standardization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Systems. For over forty years ECMA has actively contributed to world-wide standardization in information technology and telecommunications. More than 335 ECMA Standards and 85 Technical Reports of high quality have been published, more than 40% of which have also been adopted as International Standards." [Full context]
[October 02, 2003] OAGIS RiskML Work Group Defines XML Vocabulary for Risk and Control Libraries. The Open Applications Group (OAGi) has announced the formation of a new RiskML Work Group to define an XML vocabulary for the definition of risk and control libraries. Formation of the RiskML WG is set against the backdrop of recent Sarbanes-Oxley legislation where "there is increased likelihood of ERP customers and Audit Firms exchanging a great deal of risk and control information. The separation of the External Audit from the Risk Assurance activity will mean that Audit firms will be exchanging risk and control information. Mapping different formats from different audit firms and different ERP solutions is inefficient, expensive and adds no value to the parties involved." The RiskML WG will therefore create a standardized vocabulary to describe a risk and control library facilitating risk library information exchange and a standardized mechanism for publication. It will focus on the Risk and Control structure described in the COSO framework. Key deliverables include a Class Diagram, Use Case Diagram, XML Schema Definition, and corresponding documentation. New OAGIS Business Object Documents (BODs)/Nouns to be added include: Financial Statement, Process, Objective, Risk, Control, and Testing Procedure. The Open Applications Group is "a non-profit consortium focusing on best practices and processes based on XML content for eBusiness and Application Integration. Its members have created a consensus based framework for business software application interoperability and have developed a repeatable process for quickly developing high quality business content and XML representations of that content." Other OAGi Content Working Group Projects include: Core Components, CRM XML, Internet Parts Order, Inventory Visibility, Location Services, Logistics XML, Semantic Integration, and STAR (Standards for Technology in Automotive Retail). [Full context]

Earlier Stories 2003 Q3

[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]

What Was New in 1995 - 2003

Other SGML/XML news items recorded for 1995 and later may be found in separate online documents:


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