Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 18 October 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:

* Revised Civic Location Format for PIDF-LO
* Update XML in DB2 9.5
* Semantic Web Services, Part 1
* Semantic Web Visions: A Tale of Two Studies
* Knowledge Services on the Semantic Web
* The Search Engine Unfriendliness of Web 2.0
* Why Microsoft Should Not Support SCA

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Revised Civic Location Format for PIDF-LO
Martin Thomson and James Winterbottom (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Geographic Location/Privacy (GEOPRIV) Working Group
have released an updated version of "Revised Civic Location Format for
PIDF-LO." The work was produced within the IETF Real-time Applications
and Infrastructure Area. RFC 4119 "A Presence-based GEOPRIV Location
Object Format" defines a location object which extends the XML-based
Presence Information Data Format (PIDF), designed for communicating
privacy-sensitive presence information and which has similar properties.
RFC 4776 "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCPv4 and DHCPv6)
Option for Civic Addresses Configuration Information" further defines
information about the country, administrative units such as states,
provinces, and cities, as well as street addresses, postal community
names, and building information. The option allows multiple renditions
of the same address in different scripts and languages. This document
("Revised Civic Location Format for PIDF-LO") augments the GEOPRIV civic
form to include the additional civic parameters captured in RFC 4776.
The document also introduces a hierarchical structure for thoroughfare
(road) identification which is employed in some countries. New elements
are defined to allow for even more precision in specifying a civic
location. The XML schema (Section 4, 'Civic Address Schema') defined
for civic addresses allows for the addition of the "xml:lang" attribute
to all elements except "country" and "PLC", which both contain
language-neutral values. The IETF GEOPRIV Working Group was chartered
to assess the authorization, integrity and privacy requirements that
must be met in order to transfer [location] information, or authorize
the release or representation of such information through an agent. As
more and more resources become available on the Internet, some
applications need to acquire geographic location information about
certain resources or entities. These applications include navigation,
emergency services, management of equipment in the field, and other
location-based services. But while the formatting and transfer of such
information is in some sense a straightforward process, the implications
of doing it, especially in regards to privacy and security, are
[underspecified]. Also in scope: authorization of requestors and
responders; authorization of proxies (for instance, the ability to
authorize a carrier to reveal what timezone one is in, but not what
city; an approach to the taxonomy of requestors, as well as to the
resolution or precision of information given them.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-ietf-geopriv-revised-civic-lo-06.txt
See also the earlier story: http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2003-06-27-a.html

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Update XML in DB2 9.5
Matthias Nicola and Uttam Jain, IBM developerWorks

This article discussed the W3C "XQuery Update Facility" specification
in the context of IBM DB2 9.5. The XQuery Update Facility extends the
XML Query language, XQuery. The XQuery Update Facility provides
expressions that can be used to make persistent changes to instances
of the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model. It provides facilities to
perform any or all of the following operations on an XDM instance:
insertion of a node, deletion of a node, modification of a node by
changing some of its properties while preserving its identity, and
creation of a modified copy of a node with a new identity. One of the
most significant new features in IBM DB2 9.5 for Linux, Unix and
Windows is the XML update functionality. The previous version, DB2 9,
introduced pureXML support for storing and indexing of XML data and
querying it with the SQL/XML and XQuery languages. Modifications to an
XML document were performed outside of the database server followed
by an update of the full document in DB2. Now DB2 9.5 introduces the
XQuery Update Facility, a standardized extension to XQuery that allows
you to modify, insert, or delete individual elements and attributes
within an XML document. This makes updating XML data easier and
provides higher performance. When DB2 9.5 executes the UPDATE statement,
it locates the relevant document(s) and modifies the specified elements
or attributes. This happens within the DB2 storage layer, that is the
document stays in DB2's internal hierarchical XML format the entire
time, without any parsing or serialization. Concurrency control and
logging happens on the level of full documents. Overall, this new
update process can often be 2x to 4x faster than the [DB2 9 pureXML]
process. This article describes how to perform such XML updates with
XQuery transform expressions. You'll see how to embed a transform in
UPDATE statements to permanently change data on disk, and in queries,
to modify XML data "on the fly" while reading it out without permanently
changing it. The latter can be useful if applications need to receive
an XML format that's different from the one in the database.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0710nicola/index.html
See also IBM Systems Journal: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/452/beyer.html

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Semantic Web Services, Part 1
David Martin and John Domingue, IEEE Intelligent Systems

Semantic Web services (SWS) has been a vigorous technology research
area for about six years. A great deal of innovative work has been done,
and a great deal remains. Several large research initiatives have been
producing substantial bodies of technology, which are gradually maturing.
SOA vendors are looking seriously at semantic technologies and have
made initial commitments to supporting selected approaches. In the
world of standards, numerous activities have reflected the strong
interest in this work. Perhaps the most visible of these is SAWSDL
(Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema). SAWSDL recently
achieved Recommendation status at the World Wide Web Consortium.
SAWSDL's completion provides a fitting opportunity to reflect on the
state of the art and practice in SWS -- past, present, and future.
This two-part installment of 'Trends & Controversies' discusses what
has been accomplished in SWS, what value SWS can ultimately provide,
and where we can go from here to reap these technologies' benefits.
The essays in this issue effectively define service technology needs
from a long-term industry perspective. Brodie starts by recognizing
that, although industry has embraced services as the way forward on
some of its most pressing problems, SOA is a framework for integration
rather than the solution for integration. He outlines the contributions
that are needed from semantic technologies and the implications for
computing beyond services. Leymann emphasizes the broad scope of
service-related technical requirements that must be addressed before
SWS can effectively meet businesses' IT needs and semantically enabled
SOA can be regarded as an enterprise solution rather than a mere
packaging of applications. He argues that a great deal remains to be
done in several important areas.

http://www.computer.org/portal/cms_docs_intelligent/intelligent/homepage/2007/X507/x5012.pdf
See also W3C SAWSDL: http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/sawsdl/spec/

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Semantic Web Visions: A Tale of Two Studies
Seth Grimes, Intelligent Enterprise Weblog

Professor Jorge Cardoso of the University of Madeira, Portugal, has
written a very interesting paper titled "The Semantic Web Vision: Where
are We?" Cardoso defines the Semantic Web as "a machine-readable World
Wide Web" and he notes "a significant evolution of standards as
improvements and innovations allow the delivery of more complex, more
sophisticated, and more far-reaching semantic applications." Cardoso
posted to a variety of technical e-mail lists to solicit survey
responses and sent 40 personal invitations. Two-thirds of the 627
responses came from academics and 18% from industry with 16% of
respondents working in both academia and industry. He asked survey
participants to report their use of ontology editors, ontology
languages, and reasoning engines, software applications that derive
new facts or associations from existing information. Refer to his paper
for findings. Over 50% of respondents reported using ontologies for
either or both of two purposes: to share common understanding of the
structure of information among people or software agents (69.9%) and
to enable reuse of domain knowledge (56.3%). These are knowledge
management functions, stepping-stones on the path to the vision of
autonomous software agents negotiating the Web that Tim Berners-Lee
first articulated over ten years ago. Only 12.4% of answers indicated
use of ontologies for purposes that are, perhaps, closer to
actualization of that vision, for "code generation, data integration,
data publication and exchange, document annotation, information
retrieval, search, reasoning, annotating experiments, building common
vocabularies, Web service discovery or mediation, and enabling
interoperability." Nonetheless, Cardoso concludes that "70% of people
working on the Semantic Web are committed to deploying real-world
systems that will go into production in less than 2 years."

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/10/semantic_web_vi.html
See also W3C Semantic Web: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

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Knowledge Services on the Semantic Web
Gregoris Mentzas, Kostas Kafentzis, Panos Georgolios; CACM Preprint

In this article we present a Semantic Web-enabled architecture for
trading knowledge assets. The most suitable environment for
technologically supporting Web-enabled knowledge provision services
is the use of Semantic Web services. In this area, we should note the
recent work of the Semantic Annotations for WSDL (SAWSDL) Working
Group of the W3C, whose objective is to develop a mechanism to enable
semantic annotation of Web services descriptions. In our work we
developed multifaceted ontological structures in order to define the
necessary modeling primitives that are important for describing
knowledge provision services that go beyond common Web services like
a flight booking or book selling. The knowledge service utilizes the
content and context ontology for a twofold purpose: to discover
knowledge objects within a collection and to be discovered as a service,
namely to determine its identity. We have specified an enhanced
universal discovery, description, and integration (UDDI) platform
known as k-UDDI, which enables the discovery, negotiation, and
invocation of knowledge services with the incorporation incorporation
of reference ontologies that semantically enrich the Web services
infrastructure. The k-UDDI holds all reference ontologies that allow
a common understanding of services and facilitate semantically enhanced
service discovery, IPR and business specific issues and finally
negotiation processes generating sound contracts. Knowledge service
discovery is provided by the discovery service of the registry, which
is exposed via a Web service interface. As knowledge services will be
traded, mechanisms are needed to support negotiation and contracting
tasks. We make use of our negotiation ontology and develop a flexible
negotiation mechanism that enables bargaining between the service
provider and requester concerning the terms and conditions of use of a
knowledge service. [Also published in CACM 50/10 (October 2007), 53-58.]

http://www.imu.iccs.gr/Papers/J54-CACM-Mentzas.pdf
See also UDDI references: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/uddi-spec/faq.php

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The Search Engine Unfriendliness of Web 2.0
Stephan Spencer, SearchEngineLand.com

Wouldn't it be great if all those whiz-bang Web 2.0 interactive elements
based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flash -- such as
widgets and gadgets and Google Maps mashups -- were search engine
optimal? Unfortunately, that's not the case. In fact, these
technologies are inherently unfriendly to search engine spiders. So,
if you intend to harness Web 2.0 technologies for wider syndication,
increased conversion, improved usability and greater customer engagement,
you'd better read on or you'll end up missing the boat when it comes
to better search engine rankings. When it comes to AJAX and Flash, the
onus is on you to render them search engine friendly. The major search
engines just can't cope with these Web 2.0 technologies very well at
all. Some search engines, including Google, have rudimentary means of
extracting content and links from Flash. Nonetheless, any content or
navigation embedded within Flash will, at best, rank poorly in
comparison to a static, HTML-based counterpart, and at worst, not
even make it into the search engine's index. Google's view on Flash
is that it doesn't provide a user-friendly experience. Flash is wholly
inaccessible to the vision-impaired, unrenderable on devices such as
mobile phones and PDAs, and can't be accessed without broadband
connectivity. In particular, Google frowns on navigational elements
presented exclusively in Flash. Given this stance, Google isn't likely
to make big improvements on how it crawls, indexes and ranks Flash
files anytime soon. So, it's in your hands to either replace those
Flash elements with a more accessible alternative like CSS/DHTML or
to employ a Web design approach known as "progressive enhancement...
AJAX poses similar problems to spiders as Flash does because AJAX
also relies on JavaScript. Search engine spiders can't execute
JavaScript commands. AJAX can be used to pull data seamlessly in
the background onto an already loaded Web page, sparing the user
from the "click-and-wait" frustrations associated with more
conventional Web sites, but the additional content that's pulled in
via AJAX is invisible to the spiders unless it's preloaded into the
page's HTML and simply hidden from the user via CSS. Here, progressive
enhancement renders a non-JavaScript version of the AJAX application
for spiders and JavaScript-incapable browsers. A low-tech alternative
to progressive enhancement is to place an HTML version of your AJAX
application within noscript tags.

nla_internal_1968110.jpg Microsoft Should Not Support SCA
David Chappell, Blog

Will Microsoft support Service Component Architecture (SCA)? It seems
unlikely... First, it's important to understand that SCA is purely
about portability -- it has nothing to do with interoperability. To
connect applications across vendor boundaries, SCA relies on standard
Web services, adding nothing extra. This is an important point, but
it's often lost (or misunderstood) in SCA discussions. Because some
of SCA's supporters describe it as a standard for SOA, people assume
it somehow enhances interoperability between products from different
vendors. This just isn't true, and so Microsoft not supporting SCA
will in no way affect anyone's ability to connect applications running
on different vendor platforms. But what about portability? Just as
the various Java EE specs have allowed some portability of code and
developer skills, SCA promises the same thing. Wouldn't Microsoft
supporting SCA help here? The answer is yes, but only a little. To
explain why, it's useful to look separately at the two main things
SCA defines: programming models for creating components in various
languages and an XML-based language for defining composites from
groups of these components... While some SCA skills portability will
occur -- at least everybody will be describing components and
composites using the same terms -- I'm doubtful that SCA will do much
to help move applications from one vendor's SCA product to another.
Put another way, don't look to SCA to play a big role in reducing
vendor lock-in...

http://www.davidchappell.com/blog/2007/09/why-microsoft-should-not-support-sca.html
See also the OASIS SCA TCs: http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2007-07-06-a.html#SCA-TCs

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XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 18 October 2007