XML and Web Services In The News - 30 July 2004

Auto Industry Seeks to Improve Web Services
Laurie Sullivan, InformationWeek
As part of the Automotive Industry Action Group's project to improve visibility within the supply chain, Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., and most recently DaimlerChrysler have agreed to work to bring ebXML's encryption, reliability, and security capabilities to the UDDI registry of available services, the Web Services Description Language, XML-based code that carries out Web services requests, and the SOAP used to transfer the data. The auto industry's Inventory Visibility and Interoperability Project is based on ebXML standards, but the car makers say suppliers already supporting UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP would rather see ebXML's benefits brought to those platforms than have to support another standard. "The problem we hear from industry suppliers and customers is they have to support two techniques," says Mike Richards, manager of enterprise architecture at Ford. A consistent approach will drive cost out of the supply chain with simplified business processes, says John Jackson, GM's director of software technology.
See also: ebXML references

Industry Groups to Work Together on Enterprise Integration Standards
Renee Boucher Ferguson, eWEEK
The EAI Integration Consortium is working to drive standards and discipline in the practice of integration. To that end, the group is taking the best-of-breed integration standards, procedures and methodologies to develop a GIF (Global Integration Framework). This collection of elements will provide users with an architectural framework when doing large-scale integration projects. Earlier this week two leading integration standards bodies, The Open Group and the Object Management Group Inc. announced that they would work with the Integration Consortium to develop the Global Framework. The two groups, nudged by commercial and private sectors struggling to implement IT architectures to work together, have agreed to submit their expertise to the effort. The Open Group develops TOGAF (The Open Group Architectural Framework), a means for designing integration architecture, while OMG defines formal data standards and models for integration, including MOF (Meta-Object Facility), XMI (XML Metadata Interchange), CWM (Common Warehouse Metamodel) and UML (Unified Modeling Language), as well as some related standards.
See also: Integration Consortium web site

US Medics May Be Paid to Use Electronic Patient Records
Staff, E-Health Insider
Only 13% of US hospitals were using any form of electronic records, according to a survey cited in the US HSS report on Delivering Consumer- centric and Information-rich Health Care. The report says that many are prevented from implementing them due to insufficient resources or a negative return on investment associated with purchase, implementation and operation. David Brailer, the new National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, is exploring to counter this problem is paying clinicians to use EHRs. The Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which administer Medicare to 40 million Americans on behalf of the US Government, may pay health professionals for each individual use of EHR through adding special claim codes. Alternatively, the system could operate on an electronic 'pay-for-performance' basis that demands adoption of EHR in order to process clinicians' claims.
See also: the HL7 EHR System Spec

CSS3 Speech Module
W3C CSS and Voice Browser Working Groups, Working Draft
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language for describing the rendering of HTML and XML documents on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. CSS define aural properties that give control over rendering XML to speech. This working draft describes the text to speech properties proposed for CSS level 3. These are designed for match the model described in the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML). Besides the obvious accessibility advantages, there are other large markets for listening to information, including in-car use, industrial and medical documentation systems (intranets), home entertainment, and to help users learning to read or who have difficulty reading. When using voice properties, the canvas consists of a two channel stereo space and a temporal space The CSS properties also allow authors to vary the characteristics of synthetic speech (voice type, frequency, inflection).
See also: SSML Proposed Recommendation

Launching the DOAP Vocabulary
Edd Dumbill, XML.com
In the previous three articles in this series, Dumbill covered the development of an XML/RDF vocabulary, Description of a Project (DOAP), for describing open source projects and related resources. Through the use of DOAP, software maintainers will no longer have to register their programs at multiple Web sites. Instead, they can simply give the URL of the DOAP description. As more applications become DOAP-aware, new possibilities open up for participation in and adminstration of open source projects. To reach these goals, it's important to do more than merely create the vocabulary. In this concluding article, he looks at what's needed to get adoption for DOAP in terms of documentation, tools, and community.

W3C and Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Cooperate on Mobile Web Specifications.
XML Cover Pages
A joint announcement from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) describes approval of a formalized relationship that will enable both organizations to collaborate on specifications for mobile access to the Web. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) outlines how members of the two organizations may share documents and participate as observers in other party's relevant specification/expert groups, and technical bodies.