Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 13 April 2007
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover

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This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by
Primeton http://www.primeton.com

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HEADLINES:

* SCA Policy Framework and WS-Policy: The Best Policy?
* Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR) Version 1.0
* Extensible Supply-chain Discovery Service Concepts
* Validation Not Necessarily Harmful
* Businesses Get Serious About Software as a Service
* Major Search Engines Improve Sitemaps Protocol
* Applied Informatics Passes Fast Infoset Interoperability Testing

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The Best Policy?
Umit Yalcinalp, SAP Blog

This article covers the synergy between the SCA Policy Framework and
WS-Policy. SCA Specifications (v1.0) have been released to the public
along with the announcement of intent to work on the standardization of
the specifications at OASIS. Just as the industry is trying to digest
the results of WS-Policy, a casual observer may wonder, why yet another
framework for policy; it would be good to bring some clarification to
the approach and illustrate that the specifications and the concepts
are not necessarily competing for our attention and there is a synergy
between the two. SCA Policy proposes abstraction and layering of policy
vocabulary to existing concrete policy technologies targeted for a
particular platform or stack. (1) The primary use case for SCA policy
is to enable a developer to work with an abstract vocabulary by
simplifying the level of understanding required to express concrete
policies at service composition. This abstract vocabulary is called
intents. This approach allows tooling of compositions and frees the
developer from learning complicated expressions of policy. For example,
a transport level confidentialy may be expressed in reality with a
nested complex WS-Policy policy expression but the intent abstraction
and encapsulation allows the developer to work at a high level during
composition with a single keyword "confidentiality.transport". Anyone
who is familiar with WS-SecurityPolicy should be aware that this
shorthand is rather handy. (2) The second use case is for users who
are aware of their target deployment environment. SCA Policy provides
a formulation of concrete policies via a construct called policySet.
A policySet in essence is a mapping between an abstract and a concrete
representation of the abstract vocabulary. The content of a policySet
could be a set of WS-Policy expressions. Note that for both use cases,
the rubber meets the road by utilization of policySets, either during
development or solely at deployment. In the end, the deployment uses
the alignment of the policySets and the target policy framework for
linking services and references, realizing the concrete policies
deferring to the underlying framework, WS-Policy.

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/6144
See also the OSOA news story: http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2007-03-21-a.html

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Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR) Version 1.0
Luc Van Tichelen and Dave Burke (eds), W3C Technical Report

The World Wide Web Consortium has announced the release of "Semantic
Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR) Version 1.0" as a W3C
Recommendation. Part of a powerful trend towards Web access via
interactive voice response, SISR tags are used to extract meaning from
speech recognition. SISR defines the syntax and semantics of tag content
in the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) for output as
serialized XML or ECMAScript variables. Grammar Processors, and in
particular speech recognizers, use a grammar that defines the words
and sequences of words to define the input language that they can
accept. The major task of a grammar processor consists of finding the
sequence of words described by the grammar that (best) matches a
given utterance, or to report that no such sequence exists. In an
application, knowing the sequence of words that were uttered is
sometimes interesting but often not the most practical way of handling
the information that is present in the user utterance. What is needed
is a computer processable representation of the information, the
Semantic Result, more than a natural language transcript. The process
of producing a Semantic Result representing the meaning of a natural
language utterance is called Semantic Interpretation (SI). The Semantic
Interpretation process described in this specification uses Semantic
Interpretation Tags (SI Tags) to provide a means to attach instructions
for the computation of such semantic results to a speech recognition
grammar. When used with a Voice XML Processor, it is expected that a
Semantic Interpretation Grammar Processor will convert the result
generated by an SRGS speech grammar processor into an ECMAScript object.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-semantic-interpretation-20070405/
See also the Implementation Report: http://www.w3.org/Voice/2007/sisr-ir/
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Extensible Supply-chain Discovery Service Concepts
Michael Young (ed), IETF Network Working Group Internet Draft

An new individual IETF I-D describes the concepts related to the
application layer protocol called the Extensible Supply-chain Discovery
Service (ESDS). The ESDS captures and queries historical events related
to specific objects with attached object identifiers, such as those
programmed into RFID (radio frequency identifier) tags. The interface
enables disparate applications to track and trace shared life cycle
views of object identifiers across a supply chain. Additionally, the
ESDS provides referral services in a loosely coupled mechanism with
granular security that enables selective visibility. An object
identifier represents an object (or a group of objects) that exists
or has previously existed within a supply chain. Each object identifier
has a life cycle defined by a set of events and associated services for
those events. Each event includes a timestamp that enables a historical
view of events over time. The ESDS is agnostic to both the object
identifier type and string syntax, thus supporting a wide base of
identifier representations. An example of an object identifier could
be an RFID EPC (Electronic Product Code) in EPCglobal TDT (Tag Data
Translation) URI notation TDT1.0. Details and examples of the operation
interface of the ESDS protocol are provided in the "Extensible Supply-
chain Discovery Service Schema" document; it supplies formal syntax of
the web service interface specification in Web Service Description
Language (WSDL) and XML Schema (XSD). A document "Extensible Supply-
chain Discovery Service Commands" describes the details of the command
interface of the ESDS.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-young-esds-concepts-00.txt
See also the XML schema: http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-thompson-esds-schema-00.txt

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Validation Not Necessarily Harmful
James Clark, Blog

Several months ago, Mark Baker wrote an interesting post entitled
"Validation considered harmful." I agree with many of the points he
makes, but I would draw different conclusions. When you take
versioning into consideration, it will almost never be the case that
a particular document will inherently have a single schema against
which it should always be validated. A single document might be
validated against: (1) Version n of a schema; (2) Version n + 1 of a
schema; (3) Version n of a schema together whatever the versioning
policy of version n says future versions may add; (4) What a
particular implementation of version n generates; (5) What a particular
implementation of version n understands; (6) The minimum constraints
that a document needs in order to be processable by a particular
implementation. Extensibility is also something that increases the
range of possible schemas against which it may make sense to validate
a document. The multiplicity of possible schemas is the strongest
argument for a principle which I think is fundamental: 'Validity should
be treated not as a property of a document but as a relationship
between a document and a schema.' I have to disagree with the idea that
you shouldn't validate what you receive. You should validate, but you
need to carefully choose the schema against which you validate... The
right kind of validation can make interoperability over time more robust
than the alternative, simpler approach of having an implementation just
ignore anything that it doesn't need. [i] Validation enables mandatory
extensions. [ii] Validation by servers reduces the problems caused by
broken clients; implementations accepting random junk leads inexorably
to other implementations generating random junk. By making appropriate
use of XML namespaces, I believe it's possible to design language
evolution policies that are both loose enough not to unduly constrain
future versions and strict enough that a useful proportion of client
errors can be detected. I think Atom is a good example.

http://blog.jclark.com/2007/04/validation-not-necessarily-harmful.html

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Businesses Get Serious About Software as a Service
Mary Weier and Lisa Smith, DDJ

Two out of three businesses are either buying or considering buying
software via a subscription model, according to a recent InformationWeek
Research survey. That's put pressure on the big software vendors,
prompting them to offer SaaS models or at least give lip service to
the idea. Microsoft and SAP are among the companies developing more
subscription offerings for customers, and Oracle president Charles
Phillips is giving a presentation in New York this week on how its
subscription software can lower customers' costs. SaaS is one of those
technology delivery trends that will come from the bottom up; small
and midsize companies will adopt it faster, according to Ken Harris,
CIO at Shaklee, a $500 million-a-year supplier of nutritional
supplements, makeup, and other products. Shaklee began moving its IT
infrastructure to a service-oriented architecture two years ago, and
subscription software fits perfectly into that plan. Shaklee had
RightNow Technologies marketing and CRM software running within 120
days, spending in the six-figure range, he says. Similar projects at
other companies where Harris was CIO cost millions of dollars and
took 12 to 18 months using traditional CRM vendors. As early adopters
are showing, SaaS is no longer a niche approach to software delivery.
Security, reliability, and integration remain concerns, but not
enough to outweigh the implementation and cost benefits for many.
The true test will be whether companies can use SaaS effectively for
business-critical applications.

http://www.ddj.com/dept/webservices/199001079

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Major Search Engines Improve Sitemaps Protocol
Juan Carlos Perez, ComputerWorld

The rare collaboration between search rivals Google Inc., Yahoo Inc.
and Microsoft Corp. over site maps has yielded its first result. The
vendors announced they have enhanced Sitemap, a protocol designed
to simplify how webmasters and online publishers submit their sites'
content for indexing in search engines. Along with the improvements,
the vendors also announced that IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com will
support the protocol, which thus gains backing from another major
search engine operator. IBM also signed up to support the effort.
In November [2006], Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to support
Sitemap, an open-source protocol based on XML. A site map is a file
that webmasters and publishers put on their sites to help the search
engines' automated Web crawlers properly index Web pages. The Sitemap
protocol aims to provide a standard format for site maps, which
should simplify their creation by Web publishers and their discovery
and interpretation by search engines. The Sitemap protocol, now in
Version 0.90, now provides a uniform way of telling search index
crawlers where site map files are located on a site. All Web crawlers
recognize the robots.txt instruction, which tells crawlers not to
index certain information, so now webmasters can indicate the location
of their site map file within 'robots.txt' files.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9016290
See also Sitemaps XML Format: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

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Applied Informatics Passes Fast Infoset Interoperability Testing
Staff, Applied Informatics

Applied Informatics Software Engineering GmbH has announced successful
completion of interoperability testing its POCO C++ Fast Infoset
implementation as a participant in Sun's Fast Infoset Interoperability
Project. Fast Infoset support is now available and interoperable on
a variety of programming languages and platforms, including C++ on
Windows and Unix platforms, Java and .NET. Fast Infoset is an ITU-T
and ISO defined standard that specifies a binary encoding for W3C
XML Information Set. Unlike other XML representations, the Fast
Infoset standard has the dual benefits of both compression and
performance, making it the ideal choice for moving large XML data
between disparate low bandwidth systems or for high performance
systems such as those utilising Web services. Applied Informatics
provides a cross platform C++ implementation of the Fast Infoset
standard as part of its POCO C++ Libraries. The POCO Fast Infoset
library is available in source code form for many platforms,
including Windows, Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, and QNX. POCO, the C++
Portable Components is a collection of open source C++ class
libraries that simplify and accelerate the development of network-
centric, portable applications in C++. Their modular and efficient
design and implementation makes the C++ Portable Components extremely
well suited for embedded development.

http://www.appinf.com/en/company/press.html
See also Fast Infoset Interoperability Project: https://fi-interop.dev.java.net/

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XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 13 April 2007