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XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 24 September 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
BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
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HEADLINES:

* Lawrence D. Eicher Leadership Award Presented to ISO/TC 184/SC 4
* Microformats: Toward a Semantic Web
* Actuate: Commercial Open Source, Commercial Community
* W3C Working Draft: A MathML for CSS Profile
* Certificate Exchange Messaging for EDIINT
* Semantic Technologies Meet SOA
* URI Identity Management for Semantic Web Data Integration and Linkage
* Open Source Is the Big Disruptor

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Lawrence D. Eicher Leadership Award Presented to ISO/TC 184/SC 4
Staff, ISO Announcement

At the 30th ISO General Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, Howard Mason
received the Lawrence D. Eicher Leadership Award on behalf of ISO/TC
184 (Industrial Automation Systems And Integration) Subcommittee 4
(Industrial Data) from ISO President Hakan Murby. For the last decade,
ISO/TC 184/SC 4 has been publishing a range of standards to support
the efficient exchange and sharing of industrial information between
dissimilar computer systems. The major development efforts have focused
on the STEP series of standards, i.e., Standards for Exchange and Product
Data (ISO 10303 -- Product data representation and exchange) for
different functional areas, covering product design, analysis and
manufacture. The STEP standards and data modules represent hundreds of
millions of dollars of proven investment, and are available to help in
the generation of consistent product information models through the
entire range of products covered by ISO... The first application protocol
(AP) to make use of the modular structure is ISO 10303 part 239, Product
Life Cycle Support (PLCS). This AP extended the STEP model to support
all the information required to design maintenance solutions for a
product through life, to track planned and unplanned maintenance based
on the actual state of the product, and the changing configuration of
the product as components are replaced and repaired. PLCS implementations
are now in production use in Norway, Sweden and the USA, and many more
are under development or pilot testing. This standard is being used by
OASIS [Product Life Cycle Support - PLCS] to develop a range of
consistent data exchange sets to support different business processes
across the life cycle. The modular approach means that another new AP --
the second edition of ISO 10303 part 203 on configuration-controlled
3D design -- uses the same configuration model as PLCS for the initial
design and manufacture of the product, so that information can be
transferred directly from manufacturing to the support systems covered
by PLCS. Howard Mason, Chair of SC 4, has been involved in industrial
automation standards for over 20 years, and has chaired ISO/TC 184/SC 4
since 2000. He also chairs the OASIS consortium technical committee
exploiting the STEP standard, and the management group of the MoU on
eBusiness among ISO, IEC, the International Telecommunications Union
(ITU) and the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and
Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT).

http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1076
See also the ISO Focus article: http://www.iso.org/iso/pr1076-step_supporting_innovation_2006.pdf

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Microformats: Toward a Semantic Web
Sean Michael Kerner, InternetNews.com

Microformats offer the promise of helping Web content owners enable
users to connect the disparate dots that connect content in a semantic
way. Though the term "microformats" may not yet be mainstream,
mainstream vendors have taken notice. Big names like Technorati, Mozilla,
IBM, Microsoft, Google, Digg, and Yahoo among countless others are all
at work trying to make microformats work. By some estimates there are
already hundreds of millions of microformatted pieces of information
online. Microformats.org currently recognizes nine specifications for
microformats: hCalendar, hCard, 'rel-license', 'rel-nofollow', 'rel-tag',
VoteLinks, XFN, XMDP, and XOXO. There are drafts for eleven (11)
additional specifications, some of which are already in wide use: adr,
geo hAtom, hResume, hReview, rel-directory, rel-enclosure, rel-home,
rel-payment, robots exclusion and xFolk. Though microformats enable
semantic Web connections, Mozilla's User Experience Designer Alex
Faaborg explained that microformats are sometimes referred to as the
lower-case semantic Web, since they are not as complex or as expressive
as RDF and OWL. "While microformats are less formal, they are also
easier to author, and the semantic information is human readable, in
addition to being machine readable," Faaborg said. "But it isn't about
one approach being better than the other, as much as each approach
being useful in different situations." Technically speaking, though
microformats and the Semantic Web are now actually interoperable as
the W3C has announced that GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from
Dialects of Languages) now extracts data from microformats and make
it part of the Semantic Web.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3701096
See also the GRDDL Recommendation: http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2007-09-13-a.html

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Actuate: Commercial Open Source, Commercial Community
Seth Grimes, Intelligent Enterprise Weblog

"I'm grateful to Actuate for giving me an preview look at BIRT Exchange,
a new community site set. Like the sponsoring company, the new site
straddles the commercial open and closed source worlds. It will surely
benefit BIRT Java programmers whether they use the open-source Eclipse
version of BIRT or the closed source Actuate version. But make no
mistake: Actuate's motives remain staunchly commercial and the company
will retain tight control over BIRT development. BIRT is a set of
Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, simultaneously an Actuate
commercial product and 'an Eclipse-based open source reporting system
for web applications, especially those based on Java and J2EE.' Eclipse
participation has paid off for Actuate. According to Vijay Ramakrishnan,
Actuate director of marketing for Java reporting, 'Eclipse is such a
diverse ecosystem of projects, and reporting is a pretty horizontal
technology. There will be lots of cases where developers come to BIRT
through other technologies.' Note that open-source BI rivals including
Pentaho and JasperSoft and non-OS powerhouses such as Business Objects
offer Eclipse plug-ins that are similar to Actuate's and allow comparable
interoperability with non-BI Eclipse projects. Their technologies do
not, however, share BIRT's status as a top-level Eclipse project."

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/09/actuate_commerc.html
See also the announcement: http://www.actuate.com/company/news/press-releases-resources.asp?ArticleId=12559

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W3C Working Draft: A MathML for CSS Profile
Bert Bos, David Carlisle, et al. (eds); W3C Technical Report

Members of W3C's Math Working Group have published an updated Working
Draft for "A MathML for CSS Profile." This Working Draft specifies a
profile of a specification, MathML 3.0, which is itself under development
at W3C, and is intended to accord with CSS 3, which is likewise under
active development. The Math WG hopes this outline draft will permit
informed feedback on this part of its work. This subset of MathML 3.0
can be used to capture structure of mathematical formulae in the way
suitable for further CSS formatting. This profile is expected to
facilitate adoption of MathML in web browsers and CSS formatters,
allowing them to reuse existing CSS visual formatting model, enhanced
with a few mathematics oriented extensions, for rendering of layouts
schemata of presentational MathML. Development of the CSS profile is
assumed to be coordinated with ongoing work on CSS3 and may require a
limited set of new properties to be added to existing CSS3 modules...
One difficulty in the way of more adoption of MathML, especially on
the web, has been the difficulty of rendering MathML in common browsers.
However, with improved CSS support in recent browsers, as well as the
extensions to CSS planned for CSS3, it will soon be possible to
acceptably render a significant subset of the MathML language in a
cross-browser way. This is already possible in browsers such as Opera
that already implement some of the planned CSS3 functionality. This
would remove a major obstacle to increased adoption of MathML, at least
in many use cases... W3C's work on areas such as math, scalable vector
graphics, synchronized multimedia, voice browsing and forms holds great
promise for a new generation of Web content. MathML is intended, by
design, to combine with such other XML vocabularies. The MathML Working
Group collaborates with other Working Groups to realize the promise of
combining MathML with other vocabularies.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-mathml-for-css-20070924/
See also the Math Working Group Roadmap: http://www.w3.org/Math/Roadmap/

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Certificate Exchange Messaging for EDIINT
Kyle Meadors and Dale Moberg (eds), IETF Internet Draft

The EDIINT AS1, AS2 and AS3 message formats do not currently contain any
neutral provisions for transporting and exchanging trading partner
profiles or digital certificates. EDIINT Certificate Exchange Messaging
provides the format and means to effectively exchange certificates for
use within trading partner relationships. The messaging consists of two
types of messages, Request and Response, which allow trading partners
to communicate certificates, their intended usage and their acceptance
through XML. Certificates can be specified for use in digital signatures,
data encryption or SSL/TLS over HTTP (HTTPS). This document describes
how EDIINT products may exchange public-key certificates. Since EDIINT
is built upon the security provided by public-private key pairs, it is
vital that implementers are able to update their trading partners with
new certificates as their old certificates expire, become outdated or
insecure. Certificate Exchange Messaging (CEM) described here utilizes
XML data to exchange the certificate and provide information on its
intended usage and acceptance within the trading partner relationship.
CEM messages use the underlying EDIINT transport, such as AS2, to
communicate information on the certificate, its intended use and its
acceptance. Both digital certificates and the XML data describing their
intended use are stored within a multipart/related MIME envelope
(RFC 2387). For the CEM Request message, the certificates are stored
in certificate chains through SMIME, certs-only MIME envelope, and
processing information is XML data which is identified through the MIME
content-type of 'application/ediint-cert-exchange+xml'. Appendix A
supplies the EDIINT Certificate Exchange XML Schema, Example of EDIINT
Certificate Exchange Request XML, and Example of EDIINT Certificate
Exchange Response XML.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-meadors-certificate-exchange-07.txt
See also Certificate Exchange Messaging: http://www.drummondgroup.com/html-v2/standards-as2-2.html

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Semantic Technologies Meet SOA
David Worthington, SD Times

Do semantic technologies have a place in software-oriented architecture
(SOA), and more important, can they break organizations' reliance on
expensive data warehouses? Metatomix believes they can. This month
saw the release of version 5.0 of Metatomix's semantic middleware
platform . The platform applies business process rules, and semantic
reasoning from industry domain ontologies to information that it
collects, enabling customers to integrate data and to uncover and define
relationships. "Semantic technology eases the way to describe and work
with information," said chief technology officer Colin Britton. The use
of a metadata-based approach permits users a network-centric view of
information stored in various silos of data, he explained. Metatomix
5.0 uses the SPARQL RDF query language to perform federated queries
across multiple databases and data formats, and now offers support for
a number of data types, including relational, file-based and
memory-resident, said Britton. Support has also been added for Oracle
11g's semantic layer. The new release also includes reasoning and
validation enhancements to validate semantic data against an ontology,
and has an improved business policy engine, licensed from an unnamed
third-party vendor. The policy engine permits organizations to
semantically describe business actions without writing business rules.
Another new feature is service links, which are data access services
that create links between data, creating reusable modules out of
service profiles.

http://www.sdtimes.com/article/latestnews-20070915-14.html
See also the announcement: http://www.metatomix.com/news_and_events/070910.html

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URI Identity Management for Semantic Web Data Integration and Linkage
Afraz Jaffri, Hugh Glaser, Ian Millard; Workshop Presentation

This online paper is published in the Proceedings of the Third
International Workshop On Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems.
"The Semantic Web vision involves the production and use of large
amounts of RDF data. There have been recent initiatives amongst the
Semantic Web community, in particular the Linking Open Data activity
and our own ReSIST project, to publish large amounts of RDF that are
both interlinked and dereferenceable. The proliferation of such data
gives rise to millions of URIs for non-information resources such as
people, places and abstract things. Frequently, different data providers
will mint different URIs for the same resource, giving rise to the
problem of coreference. This paper describes the phenomenon of
coreference, where it occurs in other disciplines and how it is
relevant to the Semantic Web. We propose a 'Consistent Reference
Service' for URI identity management and describe how this is being
used in the infrastructure of a scalable Semantic Web system... The
Consistent Reference Service (CRS) has been created in order to manage
coreference between the millions of URIs that are accumulating on the
Semantic Web. This section will describe the concept of a bundle that
groups together URIs referring to the same resource, and also describe
the implementation and architecture of the CRS. The CRS service has
been implemented as both an RDF knowledge base and a relational
database with RDF export. The CRS sits in the Semantic Web as any
other knowledge base or database would. Each data provider maintains
one or more CRSs for their own knowledge. In the ReSIST project there
are over 15 repositories each with their own CRS. The CRS introduces
a given context. Different bundles may be used to group together URIs
of the same resource in different contexts. For example, there may
be a bundle containing all of the URIs about a person in the context
of institution #1; and another bundle containing all of the URIs about
the same person in the context of institution #2. Each CRS can use
different algorithms to identify equivalent resources. For example,
the algorithms to detect equivalence amongst authors are different
from the algorithms used to detect equivalence between countries. To
begin with, each URI in a repository has its own bundle in the CRS.
When an equivalence is detected the bundles containing the URIs are
merged together to create a new bundle. In this way successive
iterations group together larger bundles, with each bundle having an
anonymous URI. The concept of a bundle is defined as a class in a
coreference ontology used by the CRS. There is also a database schema
that maps onto the ontology.

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14361/01/URI_Identity_Management_for_Semantic_Web_Data_Integration_and_Linkage.pdf
See also the reference document: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14361/

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Open Source Is the Big Disruptor
Peter Galli, eWEEK

Gartner declared open-source software the biggest disruptor the software
industry has ever seen and postulated it will eventually result in
cheaper software and new business models. Open-source products accounted
for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006, but
should account for 27 percent of the market in 2011 when revenue is
expected to be $169.2 billion. Gartner research director Laurie Wurster:
"Open-source software is going to erode proprietary sales revenue by
offering less-expensive or free alternatives, expanding the total market
potential by meeting the demands of SMBs for affordable solutions, and
creating a new business model for established and emerging service
providers to provide selection, customization and management services
for open-source solutions." A recent Gartner survey of 295 respondents
in the U.S. and Europe found that open source software usage stood at
23.6 percent, and this number is set to grow to 25.9 percent over the
next year. Wurster also spoke on some of the market accelerators to open
source, which included the low barriers to entry and increased return
on investment, the availability of high-quality solutions at low cost,
the access to open standards and development processes, vendor
independence and flexibility -- resulting in investment protection --
and faster procurement and a shorter development time. Among the market
inhibitors, many of which are perceptions rather than reality, are
concerns about migration and skills transfer, internal development,
support and maintenance costs, quality assurance, and the large number
of license with conflicting terms.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2186932,00.asp

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XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
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Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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