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XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 17 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
Primeton http://www.primeton.com

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HEADLINES:

* Code List Representation (Genericode) Version 1.0
* W3C First Public Working Draft: SKOS Use Cases and Requirements
* Extending and Versioning Languages: XML Languages
* XML Parser Benchmarks: Part 2
* Microsoft Wants ODF Added to ANSI Standards

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Code List Representation (Genericode) Version 1.0
Anthony B. Coates (ed), OASIS Public Review Draft

OASIS announced that a Committee Draft of "Code List Representation
(Genericode) Version 1.0" has been approved for public review. The TC
was chartered to produce a neutral XML format for codifying and
transmitting information about code lists. A code list in its simplest
form is just a set of strings that each represent an item or idea. The
OASIS code list representation is not just a simple list of strings.
It is a complete description of a code list, including not only the
codes, but also alternate codes, descriptions of the codes, and any
other data that is associated with the codes. The OASIS code list
representation also describes how new code lists are derived from
existing code lists, so that the derivation is repeatable, automatable
and auditable. It is hoped that third parties will produce software
which processes the code list representation XML to produce run-time
validation formats such as W3C XML Schema enumerations, programming
language enumerations, database code lookup tables, ebRIM repository
code list structures, etc. The OASIS Code List Representation format
has a tabular model for code lists. The 'rows' are individual entries
in a code list, where an entry is a set of one or more codes, plus
other metadata, that is associated with a single conceptual entry in
the code list. The 'columns' are individual (typed) pieces of metadata
that can be applied to each entry in a code list. So columns define
what kind of data can be in the code list, while rows define what
actual data is in the code list.The code list format also supports the
concept of 'keys', where a key is a set of one or more columns which
uniquely identifies each row in the code list. Where a key has more
than one column, it is a compound key.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/codelist/cd-genericode-1.0/doc/oasis-code-list-representation-genericode.pdf
See also the Requirements: http://docs.oasis-open.org/codelist/cd-genericode-1.0/doc/oasis-code-list-representation-requirements-1.0.1.pdf

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W3C First Public Working Draft: SKOS Use Cases and Requirements
Antoine Isaac, Jon Phipps, Daniel Rubin (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C's Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the First
Public Working Draft for "SKOS Use Cases and Requirements." Knowledge
organisation systems play a fundamental role in information structuring
and access, e.g. for asset description or web site organisation. Such
vocabularies, coming in the form of thesauri, classification schemes,
subject heading lists, taxonomies or even folksonomies, are developed
and used worldwide, by institutions as well as individuals. However,
these very important knowledge resources are still mostly isolated
from the outside world, and not widely used in implementing systems.
The development of new information technologies and infrastructures,
such as the World Wide Web, calls for new ways to create, manage,
publish and use these knowledge organisation systems. It is especially
expected that conceptual schemes will benefit from greater shareability,
e.g. by being published via web services. In the meantime, the
documentary systems which use them will turn to advanced information
retrieval techniques to construct most of their semantic structure
and lexical content. SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System)
provides a model to represent and use vocabularies and ontologies in
the framework of the Semantic Web. The document presents the
preparatory work for a future version of SKOS. It lists representative
use cases, which were obtained after a dedicated questionnaire was
sent to a wide audience. It also features a set of fundamental or
secondary requirements derived from these use cases, that will be
used to guide the design of SKOS.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-skos-ucr-20070516/
See also the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/

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Extending and Versioning Languages: XML Languages
David Orchard (ed), W3C Draft TAG Finding

Significant revision has been made to W3C's draft TAG Finding, produced
by the W3C Technical Architecture Group. The document is now published
in three parts. "Extending and Versioning Languages: XML Languages"
discusses the XML related aspects of versioning. It describes XML based
terminology, technologies and versioning strategies. It provides XML
Schema examples for each of the strategies and discussion about various
schema design patterns. A number of XML languages, including XHTML and
Atom, are used as case studies in different strategies. "Extending and
Versioning Languages: Terminology" provides terminology for discussing
language versioning. The evolution of languages by adding, deleting, or
changing syntax or semantics is called versioning. Making versioning
work in practice is one of the most difficult problems in computing.
Arguably, the Web rose dramatically in popularity because evolution and
versioning were built into HTML and HTTP. Both systems provide explicit
extensibility points and rules for understanding extensions that
enable their decentralized extension and versioning. The "Strategies"
document provides motivation for versioning, presents a number of
questions that language designers must answer, and discusses a variety of
version identification strategies.

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-xml
See also Versioning Terminology: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning

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XML Parser Benchmarks: Part 2
Matthias Farwick and Michael Hafner, XML.com

The outcome of these benchmarks show that the LIBXML2 SAX-like parser
in C is superior over the other tested parsers. In second place followed
the two Java pull-parser implementations Javolution and Woodstox. In
this part of the series we will show you how the object model parser
performed in our tests. Object model parsers read in the data by using
the event parsers. The object model parser benchmarks were of special
interest for our high performance web service security gateway, because
most web services security operations involve that at least the header
of a SOAP message is read and altered. This in-memory altering can only
be done by object model parsers like DOM implementations. The results
for the AXIOM implementations are also very interesting in this context.
They use a pull-parser to build up the in-memory representation of a
XML document until the last node that needs to be read or altered. This
has the advantage that not the whole document needs to be read into
memory. LIBXML2 can be considered as the overall performance winner for
object model parsers. It not only performs much better than all other
parsers on documents up to 500 KB in size, but it also beats the two
AXIOM implementations for documents up to 5 KB, when only the first part
of the documents is read. It also does especially well for very small
documents of about 1 KB where it is up to 10 times faster than the other
implementations. For really big documents above 500 KB the default Java
1.5 DOM parser and the Oracle DOM parser in C are alternatives. But as
the partial documents parsing benchmarks show, it is advisable that you
evaluate which use cases of XML processing you will perform the most.
If you find that in most cases you will only need to alter parts in the
beginning of a XML document, you should consider using the Java AXIOM
implementation.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/05/16/xml-parser-benchmarks-part-2.html
See also part 1: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/05/09/xml-parser-benchmarks-part-1.html

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Microsoft Wants ODF Added to ANSI Standards
Elizabeth Montalbano, ComputerWorld

Days after declaring its intention to aggressively collect patent
royalties from open-source distributors, Microsoft Corp. backed the
addition of ODF -- the document file format used widely in open-source
alternatives to Microsoft Office -- to a list of business standards.
Microsoft also said it will support Office 2007's default document file
format, Open XML, for the list maintained by the American National
Standards Institute (ANSI) as well. The company said it supports ODF
(Open Document Format for XML) because businesses want choice and
interoperability for software they deploy. ANSI recommends business
best practices, standards and guidelines to a range of industries in
the U.S. Andy Updegrove said that by supporting ODF as an ANSI
standard, Microsoft is "making it appear it is rising above the
squabble to do the right thing." Instead, he thinks the move serves
as a challenge to vocal ODF supporters to support approval of Open
XML as a global standard when a final vote for the draft specification
comes before the ISO. To its credit, Microsoft voted for ODF when it
came before the ISO (International Organization for Standards), while
IBM cast the only negative vote for Open XML when it was up for
approval by standards organization Ecma International.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9019820
See also InternetNews.com: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3678306

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