Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 08 May 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
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com

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HEADLINES:

* The W3C Multimodal Architecture, Part 1: Overview and Challenges
* Public Group: Liberty Concordia
* Identity Associated RDF Attribute
* Sun Targets Mobile, Tries to Outshine Silverlight and Flash
* Standards: See the Forest and the Trees
* Sun: The Bulk of Java Is Open Sourced

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The W3C Multimodal Architecture, Part 1: Overview and Challenges
Gerald McCobb, IBM developerWorks

Applications for personal computers and small devices are rapidly
evolving to meet the market demand for alternatives to keyboard-,
keypad-, and stylus-based interaction. Alternative modes of interaction
include voice and digital pen, and may be used either separately or
combined with other modes. A cell phone user, for example, might get
flight information by speaking into the phone's receiver, saying "Show
me all flights from Boston to New York on December 23." In response,
the application would show a list of flights on the cell phone screen,
and the user could then pick one of the flights either by speaking or
using the stylus. The W3C Multimodal Interaction (MMI) Working Group
has been at work since 2002 on a standard framework for developing
such applications. Recently, the group published a new version of its
Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces working draft. While this
document is only a working draft, it is on track to becoming a W3C
recommendation, and the MMI Working Group has made a lot of progress
toward this goal. This first article in a three-part series provides
an overview of the MMI Working Group's Multimodal Architecture in its
current form. It shows that the architecture is primarily dedicated
to server-side interaction management, where the multimodal components
are distributed over multiple clients and servers. The article also
reveals some of the challenges facing the MMI Working Group and briefly
explains how these challenges will affect developers seeking to build
Web applications using the architecture.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-multimodarch1/
See also W3C Multimodal Interaction WG: http://www.w3.org/2006/12/mmi-charter.html

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Public Group: Liberty Concordia
Staff, Liberty Alliance

The published Concordia Working Group Charter describes an open, cross
organizational, public working group. The Concordia Program is designed
as an umbrella initiative to drive harmonization and interoperability
of identity specifications and protocols. As expressed by the name
(Roman goddess of agreement, understanding, and harmony), the goal of
this group is to help drive the development of use-case scenarios
where multiple identity specifications, standards and/or other
initiatives might co-exist, recognizing heterogeneous deployment
environments of the marketplace. Based on this open knowledge gathering
process, the group recognizes that additional specifications, profiles
and/or services may need to be defined. The group's goals are as
follows: (1) Drive development of a ubiquitous, interoperable, privacy-
respecting layer for identity in order to help drive deployment costs
down, assure implementers and deployers of better success and greater
productivity, and lead to more commercial products and open source
offerings, in turn leading to a healthy market facilitate new service
offerings; (2) Assure interoperability across this layer -- deliver
confidence to implementers and deployers in implementing today with
successful interoperability tomorrow; (3) Encourage strong, cross-sector,
cross-geography participation through an open development process.
The Concordia Working Group is chartered by the Liberty Management
Board, and may be may be amended from time to time. Other Liberty
Alliance Public Groups include: (1) Identity Theft Prevention SIG - a
public working group focused on preventing Identity theft and fraud;
(2) Inter-Federation Forum - a public discussion group focused on how
to overcome barriers to mass-market deployment of identity federations
that began with a breakout session at the RSA Security Conference in
January of 2007.

http://wiki.projectliberty.org/index.php/Concordia
See also Pat Patterson's Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/superpat/entry/liberty_alliance_cheaper_more_open

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Identity Associated RDF Attribute
Mark Wahl (ed), IETF Network Working Group Internet Draft

In an identity metasystem, when an end user requests access to a
service, the network interactions for authenticating and authorizing
that user can involve three parties: a relying party, an identity
provider, and the end user. The relying party is the network entity
which requires the identity of a user in order to make an access
control decision. The identity provider is the network entity which
establishes the identity of the end user. The Resource Description
Framework (RDF) is a general-purpose language for representing
information in the Web. In particular, RDF is used to describe the
metadata of attribute types in the OpenID Attribute Exchange protocol,
to describe people and relationships in FOAF, and in the Higgins Trust
Framework Eclipse Project to unify identity data description formats
across multiple protocols. It is desirable for this information to be
expressed in the RDF syntax without needing to be translated to the
attribute syntax of an underlying transfer protocol, as such a transfer
might lose the semantics associated with the RDF definitions. This
specification defines an attribute of a user identity which contains
a set of statements expressed in the Resource Description Framework
and encoded in XML. An encoding of the attribute is defined for
transport in the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), in
the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and the OpenID Attribute
Exchange Protocol.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-wahl-schema-rdf-attribute-00.txt
See also OpenID Attribute Exchange: http://openid.net/specs/openid-attribute-exchange-1_0-04.html

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Sun Targets Mobile, Tries to Outshine Silverlight and Flash
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

Sun Microsystems previewed its JavaFX Script technology at the JavaOne
show on May 8, 2007. According to the announcement, JavaFX Script is
a radically simple scripting language for creating rich content and
applications to run on billions of Java-powered devices from mobile
phones to Blu-ray Disc players to the browser. The first of a series
of content authoring products from Sun, JavaFX Script enables content
rich, highly interactive sites to be built by creative professionals
including designers, authors and developers. JavaFX Script takes
advantage of the Java Runtime Environment's (JRE) ubiquity across
devices and enables creative professionals to begin building
applications based on their current knowledge base. It also uses Java
technology's "write once, run anywhere" capability to help realize a
future where consumers can access content whenever and wherever on any
Java-powered device. JavaFX applications will run on JavaFX Mobile,
Sun's software system for mobile devices also previewed at JavaOne, as
well as desktop browsers. JavaFX Script applications will run on any
JavaSE technology-based platform including all of the upcoming JavaFX
software systems for mobile handsets, TVs and other embedded
applications from automobiles to game systems. JavaFX Script is unique
in providing close integration with Java components that run on the
server or the client, resulting in a richer end-to-end experience.
JavaFX Script brings together a simple and intuitive language design,
requiring less coding and providing fast development cycles with a
ubiquitous runtime platform and an open source program for innovation
by developers worldwide. Over time, Sun will enhance the JavaFX family
with content tools, widgets and other offerings that will further aid
developers in creating rich media and content.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2127523,00.asp
See also the announcement: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-05/sunflash.20070508.2.xml

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Standards: See the Forest and the Trees
Michael Daconta, Government Computer News

"Data standardization involves the gathering of often-independent
stakeholders to hammer out agreements on the syntax and semantics of
data across a community. This process is notoriously difficult because
of the medium and the conjoining of technical and business needs.
Cohesion binds together all the individual design elements to the
standard's primary purpose. Cohesion in design produces elegance. The
lack of cohesion produces a disjointed base, compounded with every
modification. And it starts the clock ticking on a standard's implosion.
During the past six months, I have witnessed several standards efforts
losing cohesion. The Electronic Fingerprint Transmission Specification,
used by the FBI, and the Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification,
used by the Defense Department, are implementations of the ANSI/NIST-ITL
1-2000: Data Format for the Interchange of Fingerprint, Facial, and
Scar Mark and Tattoo Information standard. The current standard is
binary, but the proposed standard will include an alternate Extensible
Markup Language (XML) version. It suffers from a kitchen-sink mentality.
It makes the mistake of combining a data standard with a service
standard, which it calls a transaction. It made sense to combine those
two when the standard was a poor man's distributed system in which you
embed transaction processing in e-mails. But now we have a better way.
It's called the Internet and the World Wide Web. When legacy constraints
hinder a standard, it begins bleeding cohesion. Another example is the
National Information Exchange Model, which recently voted to eliminate
universal data elements from its resulting messages."

http://www.gcn.com/print/26_10/44225-1.html

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Sun: The Bulk of Java Is Open Sourced
China Martens, InfoWorld

Sun Microsystems announced at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco
that it has finished the process of making the bulk of its core Java
technology available as open-source software under the GNU general
public license version 2 (GPLv2). Sun first pledged to make Java freely
available just over a year ago at JavaOne in May 2006 and then in
November announced its somewhat surprising choice of open-source license
and began releasing OpenJDK components. In all of the vendor's previous
open sourcing of its software, Sun relied on its own CDDL (Common
Development and Distribution License). Java was the first time the
vendor opted for GPL, a popular license with the free and open-source
software community. Sun is hoping that open sourcing Java under the
GPL will lead to Linux distributors embedding the software in their
operating systems and thus widening the technology's appeal to more
developers. Last month, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, said
once Java was fully available under GPL, Canonical, the commercial
sponsor of the Linux distribution, would consider including the
technology in the core of Ubuntu. Sun hopes the open-source community
will help it resolve the issue of Java source code that remains
"encumbered," where Sun doesn't hold enough rights to release the code
under GPLv2, according to Rich Sands; in the future, Sun plans to work
with the open-source community to rewrite the encumbered components to
replace the current closed-source code and make it available under GPL2.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/08/bulk-of-java-is-open-sourced_1.html
See also the announcement: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-05/sunflash.20070508.3.xml

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XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 08 May 2007