XML and Web Services In The News - 06 December 2004

Insurance That SOA Works
Michael S. Mimoso, SearchWebServices.com
Insurance and security may be what The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. offers its customers worldwide. But it's also what the investment and insurance provider's application delivery group was looking for when it created an SOA-based reference architecture using a UDDI registry so that the company's four lines of business could leverage the same applications. "We wanted to move away from siloed applications to an enterprise approach," said Ben Moreland, director of the property and casualty division's application delivery group. In 2003, Moreland's group tackled scalability issues with its single-entry multiple-carrier interface (SEMCI) application that exchanges documents in Accord XML. Accord XML is an insurance industry standard the enables agents to obtain client information and broadcast it to other carriers and receive quotes in return. The introduction of a UDDI registry enabled the application to do dynamic binding checks with the registry as the application evolves, Moreland said. UDDI is a Web services protocol that discovers and stores services. Used in conjunction with Accord XML version 2.0, The Hartford created new services, published them to the UDDI registry without any changes to the orchestration.
See also: UDDI references

Searching Smarter, Not Harder
John Gartner, Wired News
Topic maps are smart indices that improve search capabilities by categorizing terms based on their relationships with other things. Organizing content with topic maps provides context for words that can have multiple meanings, according to Patrick Durusau, chairman of a topic maps technical committee at OASIS: "The payoff (of topic maps) from the user standpoint is that you are no longer confronted with everything in the world that is known about the subject." Computer automation and human intervention are used in building topic maps, according to Michel Biezunski, president of InfoLoom and a consultant on the IRS project. Topic maps are used to help IRS representatives answer phone calls more efficiently, as well as to create the small- business CD that the agency sends to taxpayers. George Kondrach, President of software company Innodata Isogen, has been consulting with several U.S. intelligence agencies on how to use topic maps to overcome regional variations in spelling. Kondrach said agencies are working to define suspected terrorists as topics so that differences in agency spelling, such as "Osama" versus "Usama," would no longer prevent linking to vital information.
See also: (XML) Topic Maps

Adding Reliability to an Egg-and-Spoon Race
Tony Graham, Proceedings of the XML 2004 Conference
How is Web Services over an unreliable network like an egg-and-spoon relay race? How does adding reliability alter the dynamics of the race? The author answers these and other questions in his review of standards and specifications for reliable web services. The WS-Reliability standard is being developed at OASIS, while the WS-ReliableMessaging specification is being produced by BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, and Tibco. The paper begins by noting the essential similarities between an egg-and-spoon race, a computer network, and a Web Service. It then discusses ways of adding reliability to each of those without fundamentally changing their dynamics. The method, for Web Services, is to layer reliability on top of existing Web Services infrastructure. Based on the essential similarity of an egg-and-spoon race to a Web Service, it should be possible to create a reliability protocol for egg-and-spoon relay races that will deliver more eggs to the finish line -- especially where egg order is significant -- than an unreliable protocol under the same conditions.
See also: Reliable Messaging

BPMI.org: "Not Rivaling" BPEL
Jason Stamper, Computer Business Review Online
OASIS claimed that fellow standards body BPMI.org's plan to develop BPXL should be seen as complementary to BPEL rather than a rival. Last week ComputerWire broke the news that BPMI.org is planning a new raft of capabilities to extend the power of business process execution language (BPEL), a standard from the OASIS standards group. BPMI.org board member Derek Miers confirmed in an interview with ComputerWire that the standards body is working on what it is calling Business Process eXtension Layers (BPXL), described as a standard that would help to with ComputerWire late last week, OASIS president and CEO Patrick Gannon said that BPXL would complement BPEL, and in no way conflict with it. He said BPEL was never intended to solve every issue in process management: "The charter for the BPEL work was laid out very explicitly; it was very clear what the work would be. It was not designed to solve all of the problems in the process management space. We are focusing on the core specification first, then we will later produce extensions or profiles, which will be voted on; we will take input from a variety of areas."
See also: BPEL references

ASHRAE SPC 135 Adds Web Services to BACnet
Steve Tom, AutomatedBuildings.com
Currently there are no rules on how to apply Web services to building automation however. This gives programmers virtually unlimited freedom to use Web services any way they want, but it also makes them a very expensive tool to use. Each individual integration requires hours of custom programming. Fortunately, ASHRAE is adding a little structure to Web services by preparing an addendum to the BACnet specification that will add Web services to the BACnet toolkit. The standard is flexible enough to make full use of the power of Web services, but with enough structure to greatly simplify the task of using Web services to integrate building systems. In short, it has just the right degree of freedom. ASHRAE gathered input from facility engineers, equipment manufacturers, government agencies, and universities. They used this information to develop a standard for using Web services in building automation systems. This standard covers the types of data to be exchanged, the path used to locate the data, and attributes of commonly used data objects such as analog inputs or binary outputs. The services required to read or write values are defined, as well as services needed to obtain information about the available data or to return error messages if a service fails. The standard covers arrays as well as scalar data, making it particularly useful for handling trend logs. Once approved, the spec will become an addendum to the BACnet standard, which means it will also become an ANSI, CE, and ISO standard. Naturally the standard is compatible with the BACnet protocol, but it is not limited to BACnet. Indeed, one of its most useful applications may be to serve as a standard for exchanging data between building automation systems using different protocols.
See also: the news story

UK National Health Service NPfIT Uses ebXML Messaging
OASIS, BT, UK NHS NPfIT; ebXML Case Study
The UK's National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT) is the world's largest civil IT project. A central component of the NHS Care Records Service is the Transactional Messaging Service (TMS) Spine using the ebXML Messaging Service OASIS Standard and is likely to become one of the largest applications of this technical specification. The Transaction and Messaging Service provides the communications infrastructure for the National Programme. It serves to interconnect regional network clusters managed by Local Service Providers (LSPs) and national services such as systems for electronic booking and transmission of prescriptions. The technology framework used for TMS is based on a large number of advanced technical specifications and standards. This includes the ebXML Messaging Service OASIS Standard, as well as the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) OASIS Standard and other Web services specifications. Within the TMSSpine, ebXML is used to provide reliable messaging functionality. National services such as the Electronic Booking Service (Choose and Book) and Electronic Transmission of Prescriptions are accessed using pairs of XML request and response documents. These documents are transported within the NHS network as ebXML messages.
See also: ebXML references

IBM Updates CICS for Service-Oriented Architectures
M. Pezzini, D. Vecchio, and Y. Natis, Gartner Research Note
On 1-December-2004, IBM announced the release of Customer Information Control System (CICS) Transaction Server (TS) for z/OS v.3.1, which adds Web services technology to extend CICS applications to an SOA environment. IBM also announced CICS Transaction Gateway V6, which supports Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). CICS TS v.3.1 extends support for Web services (through WS-Security, WS-Atomic Transaction and other standards) and integrates technology previously available only as an add-on. Such enhancements will allow organizations to publish CICS applications as Web services that can be consumed by J2EE or .NET applications, and will enable CICS applications to consume external Web services. CICS TS v.3.1 also introduces a flow management capability that will enable organizations to orchestrate CICS applications in short-running microflows that can be published on an enterprise service bus via Web services, WebSphere MQ, IIOP and other protocols. In addition, CICS Transaction Gateway v.6 should improve CICS's high-performance connectivity for J2EE applications by supporting J2EE Connector Architecture 1.5.
See also: in eWEEK

IDA Releases European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European E-Government Services.
XML Cover Pages
The European Commission's IDA released a Final Version of its "European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European E-Government Services." The EIF document provides recommendations and defines generic standards with regard to organizational, semantic, and technical aspects of interoperability, offering a comprehensive set of principles for European cooperation in eGovernment. XML, open source, and open standards are highlighted in this EC policy document.