XML and Web Services In The News - 02 May 2005

It's Not Just Semantics
Jeanette Burriesci, Intelligent Enterprise
The Semantic Web project exposes relationships among now disparate Web data sources, but many businesses are skeptical it applies to their integration needs. Eric Miller, technical design lead for infrastructure, says the project is business's best hope for pervasive, sustainable data interoperability: "Semantic Web technologies are primarily a powerful means for supporting data integration and reducing the costs of data reuse, freeing the information from the applications that create it. As a side benefit, these technologies can allow more people to work on quality and maintenance, continuously and collectively. RDF at the very basic level defines a simple, powerful, flexible data model. RDF Schema builds on this model, enabling individuals or communities to declare descriptive terms such as 'cost' along with classes of objects such as 'person' or 'car' for any particular domain or application. OWL, the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Ontology Language, provides a descriptive means of relating and constraining terms. For example, 'automobile' is the same as 'car,' 'author' is a relationship that exists only between a 'person' and a 'document,' and a 'person' can be male or female but not both, and so on. RDF, RDF Schema and OWL are also designed to provide incrementally more powerful inferencing capabilities -- recognizing implied relationships that exist among data and making these explicit for others to use. The cumulative effect of all these assertions (machine inferenced or provided by people) being recorded back into the Web is powerful. Each new assertion adds value to the Web for everyone."
See also: W3C Semantic Web

Principles of XML Design: When the Order of XML Elements Matters
Uche Ogbuji, IBM developerWorks
When multiple XML elements occur within another element, does element order matter? Whether it's the order in which the parser reports elements to applications, or the question of whether or not to mandate specific order in schema patterns, things are not always as simple as they may seem. In this article, Uche Ogbuji covers design and processing considerations related to the order of XML elements. The XML 1.0 specification itself does not guarantee element order in the sections on well-formedness The XML 1.0 well-formedness definition specifically states that attributes are unordered, but says nothing about elements. This means that technically speaking, a conforming XML parser might decide to report the child elements [os an instance] in any order; you might expect them to be reported in the order they appear in the actual XML text, the same as what is called document order. The XML Information Set (InfoSet), the core XML data model defined by the W3C, characterizes element children as: "An ordered list of child information items, in document order..." Many general-purpose XML processing specifications, such as Canonical XML, derive from the InfoSet and thus inherit this rule for sibling order. Others, such as XPath (and thus XSLT) and DOM, define their own data models with similar rules for siblings.

Sun Shines With Solaris 10
Alan Zeichick, InfoWorld
Solaris 10 embraces a 64-bit version of the x64 architecture with a fast and secure offering -- and its aggressive pricing makes it as affordable as Linux. "I tested Solaris 10 on two Opteron-based systems: a dual-processor Sun V20z server with 4GB RAM and a dual-processor high-end workstationwith 4GB from Electronic Business Solutions (EBS), a long-time Solaris reseller and integrator. Both systems came with the 64-bit OS preinstalled and configured. The software stack was pure Sun: JES (Java Enterprise System) on the server and JDS (Java Desktop Systems) with StarOffice on the workstation. After more than a month of use for the server and three weeks for the desktop, the conclusion was clear: Solaris 10 is fast and stable. Its ability to isolate applications into their run-time containers is a strong security feature, and aggressive use of containers should be considered a best practice by Solaris users. As for the desktop, it's on a par with the very best Linux systems. The Gnome-based UI is intuitive and works seamlessly with JDS and StarOffice. A number of individuals given access to the test workstation -- and told only that it was something different from Windows orMMac OS X -- had no trouble completing simple and complex tasks, such as setting up and using printers and other devices."

Microsoft Wants Everybody Talking
Susan Kuchinskas, InternetNews.com
While much of the excitement about Web services is about how corporations and e-commerce operations, such as Amazon.com, can use these standard protocols for trading and collaboration, Microsoft wants to get consumer devices like printers and cell phones into the loop. Longhorn, Microsoft's next-generation version of Windows, will include Web Services for Devices, executives said at WinHEC this week. The specification and device profiles are available now, and will be included in the first beta of Longhorn, expected this summer. Microsoft's protocol enables easier networking and installation of peripherals. At WinHEC, executives demonstrated how Web Services- Discovery enabled installation of a printer and projector without a search for drivers. In addition to WS-Discovery, the protocol specs include WSDAPI.DLL, which allows for publishing, finding and consuming Web services resources on a network. Web services-enabled devices also need to have a Web service definition language file that defines what functions the device can use, plus application software to control the device. Also included is WS-Discovery Microsoft Operations Manager (WSD-MOM) will be implemented and extensible in Longhorn. Microsoft has written print and scan protocols, but Williams said that hardware vendors can create their own. WSD-MOM will be delivered in the Longhorn Driver Kit
See also: updated WS-Discovery

Secretive Buyer of Some E-Commerce Patents Turns Out to Be Novell
John Markoff, New York Times
A Silicon Valley mystery has been solved: the mystery involves a set of electronic commerce patents purchased, after heated bidding, in a dot-com bankruptcy auction by a Texas lawyer last December. They were acquired, it turns out, on behalf of the Novell Corporation, the giant software and computer services company, a company official acknowledged on Friday. Many executives in the computer industry and at Internet software and services firms had expressed concern that the patents could be used to extract payments from their companies. The portfolio consists of three fundamental patents covering the basic technology of business- to-business electronic commerce as well as several other patents and a range of patent applications, said Robert Glushko, one of the inventors. Bruce Lowry, a spokesman for Novell, said the company had acquired the patents for defensive reasons and did not plan to seek licensing revenue from them. He said the company had chosen the secretive approach at the auction "for competitive reasons." The patent issue is a contentious one in the computer industry because companies increasingly use intellectual property both to protect markets and to attack competitors. Moreover, a secondary market is emerging for intellectual property acquired by individuals and corporations not involved in the original inventions.
See also: the CommerceNet story

A Payday for Patents 'R' Us
Ian Austen and Lisa Guernsey, New York Times
Donald E. Stout, who has practiced patent law for 33 years, is a founder of NTP, whose only assets are a series of wireless e-mail patents granted to Thomas J. Campana Jr., the other founder, and whose only business is extracting licensing fees from companies. Started 13 years ago, NTP has used the staff at Mr. Stout's law firm to exploit those patents. In March, their persistence paid off. Research In Motion, the Canadian maker of the popular BlackBerry wireless e-mail devices, agreed to pay NTP $450 million to settle a long-running and sometimes bitter patent dispute between the companies. But others find the growth of patent holding companies troublesome rather than heartwarming. Critics of the patent system maintain that these companies -- called "patent trolls" by their detractors -- rely on excessively broad patents, particularly for software, that should never have been granted in the first place. Josh Lerner, a Harvard Business School professor and an author of "Innovation and Its Discontents," argues that the potential costs of patent litigation are higher for small technology companies: "Any start-up company is a long shot," he said. "But now, even if you are successful in the market, there's a high probability that someone will show up with a patent." NTP picks new targets for its licenses, Mr. Stout is quick to reject suggestions that the company's patents will not survive patent office review or that the patent holding business is a less-than-desirable line of work. "Those who criticize, they think that unless you make products, you aren't entitled to having rights," he said. "That's just not so."
See also: Microsoft's defense against Forgent

Microsoft, Intel Building Up Patent Portfolios
Alexander Wolfe, InformationWeek
As Washington eyes patent reforms, the imperative to secure intellectual property is driving companies to build up their portfolios. Patents issued this week to Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. highlight the intellectual-property imperative that's driving technology powerhouses creating an MHTML file, which is used to attach Web pages to an e-mail message. Over at Intel, the semiconductor giant was awarded U.S. patent 6,886,180. The invention takes the functions of a standalone, broadband cable-modem and implements them on a personal computer. The two patents provide just a small snapshot of the innovations the two companies have shepherded through the process at the U.S Patent and Trademark Office. Microsoft and Intel also want the patent office to be better funded, in hopes this will enable a larger cadre of better-trained examiners to filter out unworthy patents. Indeed, there's a general consensus that the rising tide of software patents in recent years overwhelmed the patent office.
See also: Patents and Open Standards

OASIS TC Addresses Software Deployment, Configuration, and Lifecycle Management.
XML Cover Pages
A call for participation has been issued in connection with a new OASIS Solution Deployment Descriptor (SDD) Technical Committee. The SDD TC will develop standardized schemas which describe the characteristics of an installable unit (IU) of software that are relevant for core aspects of IU deployment, configuration, and maintenance. This technology, previously described in a W3C Solution Installation Schema submission by IBM and Novell, is being designed for multi-platform use in heterogeneous environments.
See also: Resource Management