Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 11 June 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:

* WSFED: Claims Transformation Provides Simple Federated Attribute Service
* W3C Workshop Report: Web of Services for Enterprise Computing
* Data Explosion Strains Peer Review: NIST's ThermoML
* Early Draft Review for JSR 275 Units Specification
* AmberPoint Flexing SOA Management Muscles
* Integrate Business Modeling and Interaction Design

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WSFED: Claims Transformation Provides Simple Federated Attribute Service
Don Schmidt (des), Blog

At its Inaugural TC Meeting on June 6-7, 2007 representatives from
nineteen OASIS member organizations convened in a Redmond, Washington
F2F gathering to discuss advancement of the WS-Federation specification
through the international standards process. Exploring the value of
extending the WS-Trust Security Token Service model to provide simple
Attribute Services emerged as one of the key interests of the members.
WS-Federation 1.1 covers a variety of complex topics, some of which
are challenging to understand from just the normative language in the
specification. The co-authors have contributed three other documents
that were developed to explain the functionality addressed by this
specification and the motivation for submitting it to OASIS for
standardization (white paper, slide deck, overview). Presentations
by Marc Goodner, Anthony Nadalin, and Don Schmidt elicited lively
discussion and debate amongst the members. The most recurring topics
were: (1) the need for standardized claim types and namespaces; (2)
the relationship of WS-Federation to Attribute Services; (3) best
practices for pseudonyms (logically a special type of attribute).
There is a clear pattern here. The success of Federated Identity is
dependent upon the ability to share a rich and commonly understood
set of claims between an Identity Provider (IP) and a Relying Party
(RP)... It appears that existing WSDL and WS-SecurityPolicy techniques,
augmented with Federation Metadata documents, are sufficient to locate
such federated attribute services.

http://identity-des.com/2007/06/11/wsfed-simple-attribute-services/
See also the contributed documents: http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2007-03-20-a.html#UnderstandingWS-Federation

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W3C Workshop Report: Web of Services for Enterprise Computing
Eric Newcomer, Ken Laskey, Philippe Le Hegaret; W3C Report

W3C announced the availablity of a Workshop Report for "The Web of
Services for Enterprise Computing (WSEC) Workshop," held February 27-28,
2007 in Bedford, MA, hosted by The MITRE Corporation. The Workshop was
chartered to explore the suitability of Web services and Web standards
for meeting enterprise software requirements, and what, if anything,
needs to be done to improve enterprise support. Summary: The W3C should
ensure that the requirements of those using the services are met by
consolidating efforts on specification maintenance, improving the
interoperability of the Web stack (e.g. test suites), addressing some
of the limitations (e.g. authentication), and encouraging better tooling
(e.g. REST description language). The Technical Architecture Group (TAG)
reemphasized the importance of using uniform resource identifiers (URIs),
including when exposing Web services resources. This is not intended to
advocate changing addressing mechanisms in existing enterprise systems
where such mechanisms provide current functionality but rather to
reinforce the notion of creating maximum flexibility as appropriate to
realize the original concepts behind Web services. There is also
consensus that the answer is not one anointed set of specifications
codifying one approach but rather reliable bridges are needed that
leverage the whole arsenal of architectural concepts. This would enable
seamless exploiting of any technique that provides an effective solution.
The workshop endorsed such overriding principles as the importance of
URIs to expose WS resources, such as WSDLs, and to use identifiers that
provide transparent addressing without need for proprietary knowledge
embedded in addressing constructs. The workshop, in particular,
emphatically discouraged use of reference parameters in ways that go
against accepted architectural principles that easily span implementation
approaches.

http://www.w3.org/2007/04/wsec_report
See also W3C Workshops and Symposia: http://www.w3.org/2003/08/Workshops/

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Data Explosion Strains Peer Review: NIST's ThermoML
Brian Robinson, Federal Computer Week

The production and publishing of thermodynamic data in industry journals
has caused overload. Recent improvements in measurement equipment mean
that an already voluminous amount of thermodynamic data is doubling
every 10 years. That explosive growth is straining the traditional
journal-based peer-review system and causing increasing numbers of errors
to creep into the data. Companies in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and
energy industries depend on accurate data for their engineering
applications and research projects. As part of its responsibility for
promoting U.S. competitiveness through standards and technology
development, NIST worked with industry partners to create a standard
data format and online system for verifying and disseminating
thermodynamic data. The agency's simple and effective solution is
attracting the attention of other groups that need to share large amounts
of complex data. NIST's global data exchange system has three parts: (1)
ThermoML, an XML-based industry standard for formatting and storing
thermodynamic data; (2) Software tools developed at TRC for extracting
data from various academic journals; (3) ThermoData Engine, software
NIST developed for evaluating research information. The NIST team
submitted a proposal to the International Union of Pure and Applied
Chemistry (IUPAC) to make ThermoML a formal international standard for
thermodynamic data. Publishers are already using the Web-based system;
there are about 120,000 chemical plants worldwide for which accurate
thermodynamic data is essential. Note: "ThermoML is an Extensible
Markup Language (XML)-based IUPAC standard for storage and exchange of
experimental, predicted, and critically evaluated thermophysical and
thermochemical property data. ThermoML covers essentially all
thermodynamic and transport property data (more than 120 properties) for
pure compounds, multicomponent mixtures, and chemical reactions
(including change-of-state and equilibrium reactions). Representations
of all quantities related to the expression of uncertainty in ThermoML
conform to Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM)."

http://www.fcw.com/article102836-06-04-07-Print
See also NIST ThermoML: http://trc.nist.gov/ThermoML.html

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Early Draft Review for JSR 275 Units Specification
Java Specification Request Expert Group, JCP Early Draft Review

The "Measures and Units" JSR-275 API Specification has been announced
as available for Early Draft Review; the review closes on July 08, 2007.
This JSR specifies Java packages for modeling and working with standard
measures known as units. Java developers who work with physical
quantities (such as developers in the scientific, engineering, medical,
and manufacturing domains) need to be able to handle measurements of
these quantities in their programs. Inadequate models of physical
measurements can lead to significant programmatic errors. In particular,
the practice of modeling a measure as a simple number with no regard to
the units it represents creates fragile code. Another developer or
another part of the code may misinterpret the number as representing a
different unit of measurement. For example, it may be unclear whether
a person's weight is expressed in pounds, kilograms, or stones.
Developers must either use inadequate models of measurements, or must
create their own solutions. A common solution can be safer and can save
development time for domain-specific work. This JSR proposes to
establish safe and useful methods for modeling physical quantities.
JSR-275 specifies one or more Java packages for the programmatic
handling of physical quantities and their expression as numbers of
units. The specification includes: (1) Interfaces and abstract classes
with methods for unit operations (Checking of unit compatibility,
Expression of a quantity in various units, Arithmetic operations on
units); (2) Concrete classes implementing the standard types of units
(such as base, supplementary, and derived) and unit conversions; (3)
Classes for parsing unit specifications in string form and for
formatting string representations of quantities; (4) A database of
predefined units.

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=275
See also the OASIS UnitsML TC: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/unitsml/

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AmberPoint Flexing SOA Management Muscles
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

AmberPoint is adding an Adobe Flex-based interface to its SOA management
platform, with the goal of giving users a bird's eye view of their SOA
networks. The company on Monday announced the release of Version 6 of
AmberPoint SOA Management System and AmberPoint SOA Validation System.
As part of Management System, AmberPoint will feature SOA Explorer,
which provides a graphical, interactive view of SOA networks. SOA
leverages Adobe's Flex and Flash technologies as well as AJAX
(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). With SOA Explorer, users can monitor
operational status and drill down on areas of interest. Filtering of
information gives users a more manageable amount of information to digest.
Ed Horst, AmberPoint vice president of marketing: "We now have some
customers with well over 1,000 components in their SOA; some customers
are processing millions of transactions per day... With that comes
effectively a pretty complex environment to govern at run time...
AmberPoint focuses on visibility into an SOA as well as control and
validation." According to the announcement, "The version 6 releases of
AmberPoint SOA Management System and AmberPoint SOA Validation System
deliver vital new capabilities for understanding and controlling
heterogeneous applications. These new products are outgrowths of
AmberPoint's close work with industry partners including BEA, IBM,
Microsoft, SAP, TIBCO and others. With its new products, AmberPoint
introduces capabilities that extend the breadth, depth and ease of
real-time visibility into service networks, while also providing more
comprehensive control."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/06/11/amber-six_1.html
See also the announcement: http://www.amberpoint.com/releases/pr_165.shtml

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Integrate Business Modeling and Interaction Design
Giuseppe Fioretti and Giancarlo Carbone, IBM developerWorks

Recently, business process optimization has become a primary strategy
for reducing costs while improving efficiency. Indeed, the first step
in the IBM SOA strategy consists of modeling business processes and
organizations. Nevertheless, a well-established usage pattern for
eliciting and modeling the business has not yet emerged. This article
guides you through a process for integrating and applying two different
methodologies to analyze and design solutions: business modeling and
interaction design. Applying both these methodologies yields solutions
that are both effectively aligned to the customer business and highly
usable by those who implement the business day-to-day. There are
organizations such as the Workflow Management Coalition and OASIS that
take care of its standards. While modeling and analyzing business
processes has been well-studied, there is no practical methodology for
eliciting the processes themselves. Furthermore, business modeling does
not help you understand how to link automated processes with user
interaction, which is always required, at least to some extent. One
approach is to look to the interaction design discipline for both
business process elicitation and for a way to research the user
interface definition. Interaction design (IaD) is a goal-directed design
methodology by Alan Cooper that aims to describe "how things behave and
then, as necessary, to describe the most effective form to communicate
those behaviors." Its perspective is from "an understanding of how and
why people desire to use products." It is based on the following: (1)
The creation of personas, which are archetypal users of products with
their goals, backgrounds, and mental models. (2) The description of
scenarios involving actions the personas want to perform and for which
a product must be designed. (3) The creation of storyboards of the
product interface derived from persona scenarios and mental models,
which then drive the rest of the product design.

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XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 11 June 2007