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XML and Web Services In The News - 9 August 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by IBM
HEADLINES:
XML Matters: Lighter than Microformats: Picoformats
Dethe Elza and David Mertz, IBM developerWorks
XML has been used to markup both documents and structured data, which
has been variously interpreted as one of its greatest strengths or
failings, depending on your point of view. Where the lines blur between
document and data XML can be a winner, but as a general solution, XML
can also be more complex than any given specific solution to a problem.
The authors previously discussed YAML — a dialect intended to be simpler
than XML for transporting data (numbers, strings, lists, simple
structures). In this article, they focus on JSON (JavaScript Object
Notation), which is a proper subset of YAML, but even easier to create
and parse. In JavaScript and Python, if the JSON is from a trusted
source, it can simply be evaluated by the scripting engine, but parsers
exist for that JSON comes from less trusted sources. In this article
the authors show how to leverage JSON using MochiKit for AJAX without
the X, and apply reStructured Text to the task of generating
microformats. Ultimately the goal of microformats is to make data easier
for humans to parse, while keeping the data friendly for machines to
parse. The philosophy of microformats is to reuse existing semantic
formats, especially HTML, as much as possible. AJAX, JSON, and REST all
make building systems for microformats and other content easier and
richer, while lightweight markup makes creating and editing content for
such systems easier, faster, and more human-friendly. So, all of these
techniques have a place, and you might notice a synergistic effect from
using them together.
Industry Consortia Join for Interoperability Standards Work
Staff, The Grid Today
The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) and the
Emergency Interoperability Consortium (EIC) announced that the two
organizations will work together to accelerate the adoption of
standards and best practices for establishing Hastily Formed Networks
in response to complex humanitarian disasters. The lack of
communications interoperability and deficient power infrastructure
evidenced in recent global and domestic disasters motivates this common
mission. Lorraine Martin, chair of NCOIC: "Initial responders must have
a common operational picture of a devastated area as quickly as
possible after a catastrophic event; common standards for voice and
data transfer technologies are essential for effective rapid reaction."
The NCOIC and EIC will work together to promote the development of Web
services and XML data interoperability standards throughout the
Emergency Management community to provide for: (1) Unified incident
identification; (2) Accessibility and usage of emergency GIS data;
(3) Notification methods and messaging; (4) Situational reporting;
(5) Source tasking; (6) Asset and resource management. The
identification of standards and protocols emerging from the
relationship between NCOIC and EIC will allow industry to rapidly
introduce interoperable products and services into the market place
for the world-wide stakeholders who respond to Complex Humanitarian
Disasters (CHD).
See also: EIC
W3C Announces Working Drafts for Web Services Policy 1.5
A. Vedamuthu, D. Orchard, et al (eds), W3C Working Draft
W3C has announced that its Web Services Policy Working Group has
released First Public Working Drafts of the Web Services Policy 1.5.
The Policy Framework defines a model for expressing the nature of Web
services in order to convey conditions for their interaction. Attachment
defines how to associate policies, for example within WSDL or UDDI, with
subjects to which they apply. Specifically, the Framework specification
defines: (1) an XML Infoset called a policy expression that contains
domain-specific, Web Service policy information and (2) a core set of
constructs to indicate how choices and/or combinations of domain-
specific policy assertions apply in a Web services environment. Framework
defines a policy to be a collection of policy alternatives, where each
policy alternative is a collection of policy assertions. Some policy
assertions specify traditional requirements and capabilities that will
ultimately manifest on the wire (e.g., authentication scheme, transport
protocol selection). Other policy assertions have no wire manifestation
yet are critical to proper service selection and usage (e.g., privacy
policy, QoS characteristics). It is the intent of the W3C Web Services
Policy Working Group that the "Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework" and
"Web Services Policy 1.5 - Attachment" XML namespace URI will not change
arbitrarily with each subsequent revision of the corresponding XML
Schema documents but rather change only when a subsequent revision,
published as a WD, CR or PR draft results in non-backwardly compatible
changes from a previously published WD, CR or PR draft of the
specification.
See also: the news item
Announcing SML (Service Modeling Language)
William Vambenepe, Blog
BEA, BMC, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun just
published a new modeling specification called SML (Service Modeling
Language). This is the next step in the ongoing drive towards more
automation in the management of IT resources. The specification makes
this possible by providing a more powerful way (using Schematron) to
express system constraints in a machine-readable (and more importantly
machine-actionable) way. It also has the advantage (being based on XSD)
to align very well with XML document exchange protocols and the Web
services infrastructure. The serviceml.org Web site is a basic but
vendor-neutral home for the specification. Those familiar with the
QuarterMaster work will see a lot of commonality and know that HP has
a lot of experience to contribute in this domain... This is an initial
draft, not a final specification. The major hole in my mind at this
time is the lack of support for versioning. Something to address soon.
See also: the spec
W3C Expands Internationalization in Speech Synthesis Markup Language
W3C StaffAnnouncement
W3C recently announced the results of the second Workshop on Speech
Synthesis Markup Language, where speech experts from around the world
presented ideas for expanding the range of languages supported by SSML
1.0. The Speech Synthesis Markup Language Specification is designed to
provide a rich, XML-based markup language for assisting the generation
of synthetic speech in Web and other applications. The essential role
of the markup language is to provide authors of synthesizable content
a standard way to control aspects of speech such as pronunciation,
volume, pitch, rate, etc. across different synthesis-capable platforms.
The W3C workshop results include a new initiative to revise SSML 1.0
in ways that support a wider range of the world's languages, including
the widely spoken languages of Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Hebrew,
and other languages spoken in India and Asia. These results reinforce
important discoveries reached at the first SSML Workshop in Beijing
late last year, which provided critical information on many Asian
languages. The announcement of the second workshop results serves as a
call for participation to researchers around the world to join the
effort to improve the specification. It is estimated that within three
years, the World Wide Web will contain significantly more content from
currently under-represented languages, such as Chinese and Indian
language families. In many of the regions where these languages are
spoken, people can access the Web more easily through a mobile handset
than through a desktop computer. There are more than 10 times as many
cellphones in the world today as there are Internet-connected PCs.
See also: the summary
Transform Eclipse Navigation Files to DITA Navigation Files
Loretta Hicks, IBM developerWorks
A previous article in this series described the basics for transforming
Eclipse navigation files to Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)
format. In August 2005, the OASIS DITA Toolkit 1.1 implemented a new way
to integrate DITA navigation files. The new capability is called 'mapref'
and provides an alternative to using the navref element to integrate
navigation files, as described in the previous article. This article
compares the mapref and navref methods of integrating navigation files.
You'll find the download archive for this article includes an updated
XSLT stylesheet that exploits the mapref capability and offers other
enhancements to the stylesheet from the earlier article. The OASIS DITA
1.0 specification added the option to use a specially coded 'topicref'
element in one DITA map to embed another DITA map. That coding convention
is currently called mapref, which is different from the mapref attribute
of the 'navref' element. The OASIS DITA Toolkit 1.1 implements the
OASIS DITA 1.0 specification. The XSLT stylesheet included with this
article supports an input parameter for specifying which integration
method to use. Transforming Eclipse TOC files to DITA map files is
easier now because both are XML files and describe a topic hierarchy.
See also: DITA references
Minnesota Gives Legislative Publishing System a Thumbs-Up
John Moore, Federal Computer Week
Minnesota's Office of the Revisor of Statutes has found that a
standards-based publishing system has saved time and provided new
functionality for users in its first year of deployment. The revisor's
office tapped PTC's Arbortext enterprise publishing software to replace
a decades-old, mainframe-based solution for creating and printing
legislative documents. The selection stemmed from an evaluation of XML
editors in 2002. The office uses Arbortext to create and publish bills,
amendments, session laws and statutes, among other documents. The
office had previously used a custom-designed bill-drafting system,
which had been running on an IBM mainframe since the 1970s. Michele
Timmons, Minnesota's revisor of statutes, said the legacy system
featured robust and well-designed applications, but it had limitations
in interfacing with modern, standards-based systems. In addition, the
35-year-old hardware would simply not keep running forever, and had to
be replaced. The revisor's office has identified a number of benefits
in moving to PTC's XML-based editing and publishing system. Another
advantage was the ability to send documents directly to printers in
the House and Senate publication offices. Timmons said the head of
the Senate duplicating office noted that this year's 278-page tax bill
took 30 minutes to copy but would have taken 90 minutes to copy using
the old system.
Oracle Readies SOA Suite Preview Featuring Single Install
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Oracle plans to offer a developer's preview of Oracle SOA Suite 10g
Release 3 which features a single-install procedure for all components.
The suite packages Oracle Fusion Middleware products for use in
deploying SOA. Already available in a beta version, the developer
offering is deemed fully functional by Oracle and serves as a preview
of the general release due this fall. It will be accessible for download
on the Oracle Technology Network Web (OTN) site. The Oracle SOA Suite
features Oracle's BPEL Process Manager, Web Services Manager, Business
Activity Monitoring, Enterprise Service Bus and Business Rules. An
abbreviated version, for use with Oracle's own application server,
lacks the ESB and Business Rules products because they are already in
the application server. Oracle officials meeting with InfoWorld editors
at the company's Redwood Shores, Calif. headquarters this week hailed
the single-install capability. "We have customers using [the components
of the suite] together, but you didn't get a single-click install
experience," that the new suite features, said David Shaffer, vice
president of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Analysts described Oracle's SOA
suite as a way for the company to link different technologies it has
acquired with its own software. Web Services Manager, for example,
features technology from Oblix whereas BPEL Process Manager has Collaxa
code in it.
See also: OTN
OpenDocument Wins More Fans
Graeme WeardenZDNet UK News
OpenDocument Format (ODF), the open file format for office documents,
is continuing to gather support from local and national governments.
The ODF Alliance recently announced that more than 280 organisations
and industry bodies have joined up to support the format. One of the
latest converts is Malaysia, whose official standards body voted this
week for ODF. This should mean that Malaysia's public sector will start
using ODF from the end of this year. "The news from Malaysia continues
momentum towards ODF that we are seeing around the globe," said Marino
Marcich, executive director of the ODF Alliance, in a statement. "For
instance, France and Belgium have recently identified ODF as the kind
of open format on which they would standardise. Denmark and Norway
have recently indicated that they are moving toward using software
based on open standards, and India is also piloting deployments of ODF
software within governmental departments." Closer to home, Bristol City
Council has also joined the Alliance. It says that it wants to simplify
the process of sharing information.
See also: ODF references
Doxology: A Document-Oriented User Interface Model
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly Articles
Anyone making a desktop application in Swing and several other
platforms will be struck by the absense of a framework for the basic
user interaction. Spurred on by the recent discussions on XML-DEV
about a common platform for XML applications, by the current work at
Sun on their Swing application framework, and by the need to brainstorm
user interface ideas at Topologi, I've made up spec for office desktop
application user interfaces called Doxology. Documents and Topologi,
geddit. It addresses a fairly basic functionality that is missing from
current Swing APIs, for example. Feel free to adopt or adapt it, as
part of your designs, if you need something like this. I don't intend
to provide code, its not that level. I've also submitted Doxology as
an input into JSR 296.
See also: the document overview
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