password
username
Sponsored by CakeMail, an email marketing software.
Newsletter preview


XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 16 January 2008
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover

====================================================
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com
====================================================

HEADLINES:

* Helping Dolphins Fly: Sun Acquires MySQL
* Interoperability for Searching Learning Object Repositories:
The ProLearn Query Language
* Creating Preservation-Ready Web Resources
* Thoughts on Firefox 3.0
* W3C Team Submission on N3 and Turtle
* MuleSource Readies Open Source SOA Governance
* Dairy Company Lends Insight Into Wal-Mart's RFID Mandate

COVER PAGES:

* W3C Publishes SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language Semantic Web Standard

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Helping Dolphins Fly: Sun Acquires MySQL
Jonathan Schwartz, Blog

We [Sun Microsystems] announced big news today: our preliminary results
for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're putting
a billion dollars behind the "M" in LAMP. If you're an industry insider,
you'll know what that means: we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company
behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database. MySQL is
by far the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating
network services. From Facebook, Google and Sina.com to banks and
telecommunications companies, architects looking for performance,
productivity and innovation have turned to MySQL. In high schools and
college campuses, at startups, at high performance computing labs and
in the Global 2000. The adoption of MySQL across the globe is nothing
short of breathtaking. Over the past few years, we've distributed
hundreds of millions of licenses and invested to build some of the
free software world's largest communities. From Java to ZFS, Lustre to
Glassfish, NetBeans to OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris, we've been
patient investors and contributors, both. Free and open software has
become a way of life at Sun. MySQL's has similarly driven extraordinary
adoption of their community platform, with more than 100 million
downloads over the past 10 years... Just as we did for Oracle in their
early days, our performance engineering teams will sit (virtually)
with their counterparts in MySQL and in the community, leveraging
technologies such as ZFS and DTrace (which we didn't even have in the
Oracle era) to ensure Sakila flies -- along with the rest of the LAMP
stack, from memcached and PHP, to the broader ISV community around
MySQL. MySQL is already the performance leader on a variety of
benchmarks. We'll make performance leadership the default for every
application we can find, and on every vendor's hardware platforms, not
just Sun's: on Linux, Solaris, Windows, all. For the technically
oriented, Falcon will absolutely sing on Niagara...

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/winds_of_change_are_blowing
See also Tim O'Reilly's Blog: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/01/sun_acquires_mysql.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Interoperability for Searching Learning Object Repositories:
The ProLearn Query Language
Stefaan Ternier, David Massart (et al.); D-Lib Magazine

The "ProLearn Query Language" is a query language developed for
repositories of learning objects. The most relevant standards for
describing learning objects are LOM, Dublin Core, and MPEG-7. The
IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) is a hierarchical metadata
standard usually encoded in XML, published by the IEEE in 2002. Its
purpose is to enable the description of learning objects through
attributes that include the type of object, author, owner, terms of
distribution, and format, as well as pedagogical attributes, such as
typical learning time or interaction style. LOM is based on early
work in ARIADNE and IMS. Dublin Core (DC) is a standard for generic
resource descriptions. The simple DC metadata element set consists
of 15 elements, including title, creator, subject, description,
publisher, contributor, date, type, format, identifier, source,
language, relation, coverage, and rights. MPEG-7 is an ISO/IEC
standard for describing multimedia content. MPEG-7 Multimedia
Description Schemes (DSs) are metadata structures in XML that
facilitate searching, indexing, filtering, and access. PLQL is
primarily a query interchange format, used by source applications
(or PLQL clients) for querying repositories (or PLQL servers). In
this article, we give a precise description of the semantics of PLQL,
concerning both kinds of clauses and their mutual relationship and
describe two experimentation efforts around PLQL: one involving the
ARIADNE repository and the other the EUN Learning Resource Exchange
initiative. We present PLQL as an emerging standard for querying
worldwide, heterogeneous learning object repositories. This work has
followed on the heels of previous achievements in defining SQI
(the Simple Query Interface), a unified access point to distributed
and heterogeneous repositories. PLQL is a "query interchange format"
accommodating the great diversity of the different repositories and
their capabilities. PLQL combines exact and approximate search, and
supports queries on XML-based hierarchical metadata. PLQL was designed
in a way that allows for easy mapping to various paradigms for
metadata management. So far, we have mapped PLQL to Lucene, XML Query
(XQuery), and SQL. Apache Lucene is an important deployment context
for PLQL as this open source toolkit for text indexing and searching
is widespread and easy to use. XQuery is the W3C recommendation for
querying XML data; with this mapping, all PLQL levels can be mapped
and executed on XML database systems.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january08/ceri/01ceri.html
See also the Wiki: http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/lomi/index.php/QueryLanguages

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Creating Preservation-Ready Web Resources
Joan A. Smith and Michael L. Nelson, D-Lib Magazine

Preservation is an on-going challenge for digital libraries, but even
more so for the World Wide Web. While archivists may understand web
sites, webmasters typically know little about preservation models,
metadata, and methods. From the webmaster's point of view, the ideal
solution would be a tool installed on the web server which manages
itself, and which automatically provides the "extra information"
(i.e., metadata) that the archiving site needs to prepare the website
for preservation, and which does not impact the normal operation of
the web server. We propose a simple model for such everyday web sites
which takes advantage of the web server itself to help prepare the
site's resources for preservation. This is accomplished by having
metadata utilities analyze the resource at the time of dissemination.
The web server responds to the archiving repository crawler by
sending both the resource and the just-in-time generated metadata as
a straight-forward XML-formatted response. We call this complex object
(resource + metadata) a CRATE. In this paper we discuss mod_oai, the
web server module we developed to support this approach, and we
describe the process of harvesting preservation-ready resources using
this technique... How can metadata be derived for web resources? Several
tools have been developed in recent years that can be used to analyze
a web resource. The limitations of MIME typing as currently implemented
by web servers has led to projects like the Global Digital Format
Registry (GDFR) and Pronom's DROID tool, which provide a deeper
introspection of the resource's format. Once the format type is known
and described, additional utilities can extract information like
keywords and subject matter, or derive an abstract from text content.
JHOVE, which arose from Harvard's JSTOR project, can identify, validate
and characterize a number of file types including images (JPEG, GIF,
PNG, etc.), text (HTML, XML), and PDF documents... A CRATE consists
entirely of XML-formatted, plain ASCII (human-readable) content. The
concept calls for the disseminating web server to preprocess the
resources it serves up by using metadata-generation utilities and to
serialize this information together with the Base64-encoded resource
in a simple XML-formatted complex object response, using the Apache
mod_oai web server module. [As to the] content-length of the full
response, XML files can grow very large, particularly where images
are concerned; there are several mechanisms for dealing with this issue.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january08/smith/01smith.html
See also Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH): http://xml.coverpages.org/oams.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Thoughts on Firefox 3.0
Kurt Cagle. O'Reilly Reviews

The second beta version of Firefox Version 3.0 is now out, and I have
to say that overall I'm feeling quite pleased with what I'm seeing,
with a few caveats. As to DOM: the changes coming to this version with
JavaScript are likely to engender some headaches in the short-term,
especially for big AJAX libraries, but longer term will prove fairly
beneficial... Certain efforts of the HTML 5/WhatWG efforts are also
making their way into Firefox. Among them is the introduction of the
activeElement and hasFocus properties. The activeElement property
(on the document) gives a pointer to the element that currently has
the focus, or the body element if nothing else has it within the document.
Similarly, the hasFocus property on an element will retrieve whether
that element currently has the property or not... Detecting and Working
with Offline Applications: As web applications have become more complex
and robust, they have also become far more sensitive to needing to
know when they are in fact online or offline. This is especially true
of AJAX applications that often 'die' at the worst possible time
because you've lost a wireless signal to the Internet. Firefox 3
implements a new read-only property and two new events ('ononline' and
'onoffline') which makes it possible to detect which such events occur...
One of the central changes for CSS in Firefox is the adoption of the
W3C Cascading StyleSheet Object Model (CSSOM) working draft, which
provides a comprehensive mechanism for enabling or disabling individual
stylesheets, and for manipulating stylesheets from DOM. CSS changes at
the individual rule and property level are pretty impressive as well:
(1) Support for inline-block and inline-table. This is an extraordinarily
welcome addition (especially for XForms developers), because it makes
it possible to take a span within a div element and set the height,
width, text-alignment and so forth. (2) rgba() and hsla() -- these CSS
functions let you specify either red/green/blue/alpha byte values or
hue/saturation/luminosity/alpha values for the CSS color property.
(3) text-rendering() -- text-rendering determines the quality of the
text output compared to the speed of rendering. (4) Soft hypens and
tabs -- soft hyphens (indicated by the ­ entity) will force a word
to break at the hypen if its at the edge of a block of text, while hard
(default) hyphens generally force the word onto the next line; tabs in
monospaced fonts are also now rendered more accurately, rather than
just being treated as generic white space.

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/01/thoughts_on_firefox_30.html
See also CSS improvements in Firefox 3: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/CSS_improvements_in_Firefox_3

----------------------------------------------------------------------

W3C Team Submission on N3 and Turtle
Ivan Herman, Blog

As provided in the W3C Process Document, the W3C Team may request that
the Director publish information at the W3C Web site. At the Director's
discretion, these documents are published as "Team Submissions". These
documents are analogous to Member Submissions (e.g., in expected scope).
However, Team Submissions are not part of the Recommendation Track
process, and there is no additional Team comment. W3C recently announced
the release of new versions of the RDF N3 and the RDF Turtle
serialization formats, co-authored by Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly
for the former, and David Beckett and Tim Berners-Lee for the latter.
The new versions also eliminate some minor incompatibilities between
these languages and the SPARQL pattern language. The authors have also
submitted the 'text/n3' and 'text/turtle' media types to IETF.
"Turtle: Terse RDF Triple Language" defines a textual syntax for RDF
called 'Turtle' that allows RDF graphs to be completely written in a
compact and natural text form, with abbreviations for common usage
patterns and datatypes. Turtle provides levels of compatibility with
the existing N-Triples and Notation 3 formats as well as the triple
pattern syntax of the SPARQL Recommendation. The "Notation3 (N3): A
Readable RDF Syntax" specification defines Notation 3 (also known as N3),
an assertion and logic language which is a superset of RDF. N3 extends
the RDF datamodel by adding formulae (literals which are graphs
themselves), variables, logical implication, and functional predicates,
as well as providing an textual syntax alternative to RDF/XML.

http://www.w3.org/blog/SW/2008/01/15/w3c_team_submission_on_n3_and_turtle
See also W3C Team Submissions: http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/

----------------------------------------------------------------------

MuleSource Readies Open Source SOA Governance
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Branching out in the SOA space, MuleSource has introduced its Mule
Galaxy software, an open source SOA governance platform with an
integrated registry and repository. The company also refreshed its
Mule open source ESB (enterprise service bus) and offer Mule Saturn,
a lightweight BAM (business activity monitoring) tool that works with
the ESB. Working with Mule software or as a stand-alone component in
an SOA infrastructure, Galaxy features a RESTful Atom Pub interface
to simplify integration with frameworks such as Apache CXF and Windows
Communication Foundation, MuleSource said. Support for artifact types
is provided for Mule configuration, WSDL (Web Service Definition
Language), policies, and custom artifacts. Enterprises can set their
own policies. According to the announcement: "MuleSource, the leading
provider of open source service oriented architecture (SOA)
infrastructure software, today announced the Beta release of Mule
Saturn 1.0, a lightweight business activity monitoring tool for
business processes and workflow. Saturn is designed to complement an
SOA infrastructure by providing detailed logging and reporting on
every transaction that flows through the Mule Enterprise Service Bus
(ESB). It is one of the first new tools to be featured in today's
release of Mule 1.5 Enterprise Edition. The Mule ESB is the core
component of SOA, and enables a broad range of integration scenarios,
moving and managing data between systems inside and outside of the
firewall. Saturn is designed to complement the SOA infrastructure by
providing detailed logging and reporting on every transaction that
flows through the Mule ESB. By aggregating real-time transactional
data, Saturn analyzes the complete flow from one system to another
and captures the relevant information to determine the state."

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/15/mulesource-galaxy_1.html
See also the announcement: http://www.mulesource.com/company/press_releases/Galaxy_011508.php

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Dairy Company Lends Insight Into Wal-Mart's RFID Mandate
Mary Hayes Weier, InformationWeek

After its initial partnership back in 2004, Daisy Brands decided to
tag all of its pallets no matter where they're heading. Daisy Brands,
which sells its sour cream and cottage cheese through retail stores
worldwide, joined Wal-Mart's RFID mandate early on to avoid the rush
of companies clamoring for help with RFID products, certification
and services. While others have hesitated, Daisy says its investment
in RFID has been a boon, helping Daisy better manage the flow of its
perishable products through Wal-Mart stores and ensure marketing
promotions proceed as planned, according to Kevin Brown, Daisy's
information systems manager. It also lets Daisy's other customers --
including those who don't use RFID -- better track their orders. In
2003, Wal-Mart announced 100 top suppliers would launch its initial
RFID effort. Daisy was among another 30-some companies that also
volunteered... Using Wal-Mart's Retail Link Web site for suppliers,
Brown can track, by lot number, how quickly pallets of product make
it to stores and when they're unpacked (Wal-Mart has readers at its
dock entrances and on its cardboard case compactors), and when
products pass through a store's point-of-sale system based on their
bar codes. Daisy's own ERP systems contain production and expiration
information on all cases and pallets shipped. If product is moving
too slowly, indicating a potential issue with freshness, Daisy can
dispatch someone to a store to investigate. The information also
provides Daisy with insight about trends and behaviors among different
types of stores. RFID is far superior to bar codes, Brown said, because
it doesn't require a line of site from a reader. Brown is also using
the information to track promotion success.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205602991

======================================================================
Selected From The Cover Pages, by Robin Cover
======================================================================

W3C Publishes SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language Semantic Web Standard

SPARQL (a recursive acronym for "SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language,"
pronounced "sparkle") has been released as a standard by W3C. The
three-part specification was produced by members of the RDF Data Access
Working Group, which is part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity. It
defines a standardized query language for RDF enabling the 'joining' of
decentralized collections of RDF data. RDF (Resource Description Framework)
is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in
the Web. RDF "integrates a variety of applications from library catalogs
and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of news,
software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and
events using XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF specifications
provide a lightweight ontology system to support the exchange of
knowledge on the Web." As explained in the W3C announcement, SPARQL
allows people to "focus on what they want to know rather than on the
database technology or data format used behind the scenes to store the
data. Because SPARQL queries express high-level goals, it is easier to
extend them to unanticipated data sources, or even to port them to new
applications." Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director: "Trying to use the
Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database
without SQL. SPARQL makes it possible to query information from
databases and other diverse sources in the wild, across the Web."
Three SPARQL implementation reports accompany the prose specifications.
W3C reports that fourteen implementations of SPARQL are already
documented, many of which are available as open source software.

http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2008-01-16-a.html
See also Physical Markup Language (PML) for RFID: http://xml.coverpages.org/pml-ons.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
EDS http://www.eds.com
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
Primeton http://www.primeton.com
SAP AG http://www.sap.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

----------------------------------------------------------------------

XML Daily Newslink: http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletter.html
Newsletter archive: http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletterArchive.html
Newsletter subscribe: newsletter-subscribe@xml.coverpages.org
Newsletter ***: newsletter-***@xml.coverpages.org
Newsletter help: newsletter-help@xml.coverpages.org
Cover Pages: http://xml.coverpages.org/

----------------------------------------------------------------------