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XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 22 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
Primeton http://www.primeton.com

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HEADLINES:

* SIMPLE made Simple: An Overview of the IETF Specifications for
Instant Messaging and Presence using the Session Initiation Protocol
* APP vs. Web3S: the Quest for a RESTful Protocol
* News Architecture 1.0 (NAR) Officially Adopted by the IPTC
* Call for Presentations: OASIS Open Standards Forum
* Tutorials on Schematron: Rule-Based XML Validation
* GCN Editor's Desk: NIEM's Reach

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SIMPLE made Simple: An Overview of the IETF Specifications for Instant
Messaging and Presence using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
Jonathan Rosenberg (ed), IETF Internet Draft

The IETF has produced many specifications related to Presence and Instant
Messaging with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Collectively,
these specifications are known as 'SIMPLE: SIP for Instant Messaging
and Presence Leveraging Extensions'. This document serves as a guide to
the SIMPLE suite of specifications. It breaks them up into categories
and explains what each is for and how they relate to each other. Each
specification also includes a letter that designates its category in
the standards track: [S]: Standards Track (Proposed Standard, Draft
Standard, or Standard); [E]: Experimental; [B]: Best Current Practice;
[I]: Informational. SIMPLE provides for both presence and IM
capabilities. Though both of these fit underneath the broad SIMPLE
umbrella, they are well separated from each other and are supported by
different sets of specifications. That is a key part of the SIMPLE story;
presence is much broader than just IM, and it enables communications
using voice and video along with IM. The SIMPLE presence specifications
can be broken up into: (1) The core protocol machinery, which provides
the actual SIP extensions for subscriptions, notifications and
publications; (2) Presence documents, which are XML documents that
provide for rich presence and are carried by the core protocol machinery;
(3) Privacy and policy, which are documents for expressing privacy
preferences about how those presence documents are to be shown or not
shown to other users; (4) Provisioning, which describes how users
manage their privacy policies, buddy lists and other pieces of
information required for SIMPLE presence to work; (5) Optimizations,
which are improvements in the core protocol machinery that were defined
to improve the performance of SIMPLE, particularly on wireless links.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-rosenberg-simple-simple-00.txt
See also Presence Information Data Format (PIDF): http://xml.coverpages.org/pidf.html

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APP vs. Web3S: the Quest for a RESTful Protocol
Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz, InfoQ

Standardizing on a protocol for resource publishing and editing can
bring a lot of benefits since it increases the chances for achieving
interoperability between parties and universal understanding. While
XML as a base format creates brings some of those benefits, it's a
little too general to be useful without also setting some widely
accepted ground rules for describing more specific attributes like
collections and entries. Combining such a format with the generic HTTP
protocol in a RESTful promises a common ground. Indeed there are several
protocols available that aim to solve this problem. The first and
probably most mature is the ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP) which is
a draft IETF standard close to finalization. Microsoft has relesed a
protocol which called Web3S ("Web Structured, Schema'd & Searchable").
Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo explained some of the problems Microsoft sees
with APP which (probably) led to the development of an independent
protocol: mismatch with data models that aren't microcontent, lack of
support for granular updates to fields of an item, and poor support for
hierarchy. IBM's Sam Ruby, co-author of RESTful Web Services, believes
the protocol intended to support "Web Structured, Schema'd & Searchable"
support neither the Web, Schema, or Search: 'There are two new media
types (Application/Web3S+xml and Application/Web3SDelta+xml), two new
URI Protocols (Web3S and Web3SBase), and one new HTTP method (UPDATE)
defined in this document. I can find no discussion of binary data, in
fact everything seems defined in terms of the XML infoset. Given that
all data needs to be in a namespace, and that all such namespaces need
to use a new URI protocol, one can conclude that no existing XML
documents can be directly handled by Web3S. Web3S data is further
constrained to be a self enclosed tree. There is no general concept of
a hyperlink in Web3S, neither to external data, nor within a tree. To
traverse this data, one needs to be aware of the specific schema
employed by the application.'...

http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/06/app-web3s
See also Atom references: http://xml.coverpages.org/atom.html

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News Architecture 1.0 (NAR) Officially Adopted by the IPTC
Misha Wolf and Laurent Le Meur, IPTC Announcement

IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) members have
been actively working to complete the framework on which all new
IPTC standards, will be based, including NewsML-G2. The IPTC recently
adopted the News Architecture 1.0 during its AGM in Tokyo. This is an
enormous milestone for the IPTC, the outcome of many person-years of
work. The News Architecture framework (NAR) defines four main objects:
a newsItem, packageItem, conceptItem, and knowledgeItem. Information
about these structures and associated processing model can be found
in the approved package available on the IPTC web site. The NAR 1.0
ZIP package contains (1) the model specification of the NAR (Core Model
specification 1.0 and the Power Extension specification 1.0); (2) an
implementation in W3C XML Schema files, and documentation of the XML
Schemas for the five items plus the News Message at the Core Level
and the Power Level); (3) a Glossary document for the NAR; (4)
supplemental material including a catalog file (XML) with URIs and
recommended aliases for IPTC maintained metadata code schemes. The
NAR constitutes about 90% of NewsML-G2, [so it is expected] that
NewsML-G2 can be finalized before the end of the year. NewsML-G2
specifies an extension of the generic newsItem, when this newsItem is
used to represent media objects (textual stories, images or audio clips).
Most of the extensions have already been discussed internally by IPTC
members, including several large News Agencies plus the European
Broadcasting Union (EBU). We hope to work closely with the W3C, to
ensure the close integration of the News Architecture, of the standards
based on it (such as NewsML-G2), and of the many taxonomies to be used
with these standard, with the Semantic Web. The IPTC, based in Windsor,
UK, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers
and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical
standards for improved news exchange that are used by virtually every
major news organization in the world.

http://www.iptc.org/NAR/
See also the IPTC web site: http://www.iptc.org/

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Call for Presentations: OASIS Open Standards Forum
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS has issued a call for presentations relevant to the Open Standards
Forum "Enabling Transitional Government Through Web Services and SOA",
to be held October 29-30, 2007 in London, UK. From the text of the CFP:
"At the core of many practical implementations that aim to deliver on
the vision of "transformational government" are open standards and
interoperability specifications. Open standards for information exchange
allow government agencies to integrate systems provided by different
vendors, built over many years, based on evolving technologies,
architectural concepts, business processes and requirements. Standards
also permit governments to connect more easily to their citizens, to
businesses, as well as internationally to other governments. Delegates
responsible for helping define and execute integration projects in the
public sector in the UK, Europe, and around the world are invited to
join us this fall in London. By participating in this two-day event,
you'll gain an understanding of the core structure, concepts and
relations in the jungle of WS-* specifications and how to separate
mature from immature specifications and standards-based approaches from
proprietary vendor specifications."

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/announce/200706/msg00002.html
See also the web site: http://events.oasis-open.org/home/forum/2007/

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Tutorials on Schematron: Rule-Based XML Validation
Roger L. Costello, XML-DEV Posting

In a posting to the XML-DEV list, Roger Costello announced the
preparation of new tutorial materials for the Schematron language:
"Schematron is an XML-based language for validating XML instance
documents. Schematron is used to make assertions about data in an XML
document. Schematron is used to express operational and business rules.
Schematron is an ISO standard. Use Schematron to verify data
interdependencies (co-constraints), check data cardinality, and perform
algorithmic checks. A co-constraint is a dependency between data within
an XML document or across XML documents. Cardinality refers to the
presence or absence of data. An algorithmic check determines data
validity by performing an algorithm on the data. Invitation to
Contribute: These tutorials teach the core concepts of Schematron.
However, there are some aspects that are not covered, such as the use
of abstract patterns and rules, 'report' versus 'assert', and
performance of the different Schematron tools. I invite you to create
a short tutorial on some aspect of Schematron and I will incorporate
it here, and, of course, you will be acknowledged as the author. The
tutorials are HTML documents. Some of them appear as slide shows
(using S5)."

http://www.xfront.com/schematron
See also Schematron references: http://xml.coverpages.org/schematron.html

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GCN Editor's Desk: NIEM's Reach
Wyatt Kash, Government Computer News

Those with a stake in the evolution of the National Information
Exchange Model (NIEM) are likely to be pleased this month with NIEM's
first major upgrade since it was introduced a year ago. Yet even those
without a direct stake, but for whom information-sharing remains
important, might consider a fresh look at what the teams behind NIEM
are accomplishing. NIEM is the outgrowth of efforts that took root
inside the Justice Department to standardize the Extensible Markup
Language (XML) schema used to describe the information commonly used by
and exchanged among federal, state and local enforcement agencies. Those
efforts led to the Global Justice XML Data Model which laid the
foundation for building a vocabulary of metatagging terms with unified,
if not universal, meaning. Reconciling the varying definitions and uses
of even a single term among different groups remains one of the
underlying challenges to advancing the ability to share information. A
passport, for example, seems like a pretty straightforward term. But
because the many organizations that deal with passport information
differ in nature, so do the terms used to describe them. Harmonizing
that terminology -- along with 4,000 other terms used in support of
emergency management, immigration, infrastructure protection,
intelligence, international trade and other disciplines -- is among
the thousands of refinements being incorporated in the new NIEM release.
The significance of NIEM goes beyond the data model it is creating. It
also serves as a benchmark model for building information-sharing
bridges among federal, state and local government agencies. Building
an XML schema is no easy task. But NIEM demonstrates not only that it
can be done but also how it can be done.

http://www.gcn.com/print/26_16/44538-1.html
See also on NIEM Version 2: http://www.gcn.com/print/26_14/44461-1.html

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XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
Primeton http://www.primeton.com
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Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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