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XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 21 February 2008
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
SAP AG http://www.sap.com
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HEADLINES:

* W3C Publishes SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer
* Developing RESTful Web Services in Perl
* Healthvault Asks the Questions While Google Goes Beta
* Oracle Unveils New Release of Oracle Identity Manager
* Microsoft Announces New interoperability Principles and Actions

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W3C Publishes SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer
Antoine Isaac and Ed Summers (eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group have published
the First Public Working Draft for the "SKOS Simple Knowledge
Organization System Primer." SKOS provides a model for expressing the
basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri,
classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, folksonomies,
and other types of controlled vocabulary. SKOS has been designed to
provide a low-cost migration path for porting existing organization
systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a light weight, intuitive
conceptual modeling language for developing and sharing new KOSs. It
can be used on its own, or in combination with more formal languages like
the Web Ontology Language (OWL). SKOS can also be seen as a bridging
technology, providing the missing link between the rigorous logical
formalism of ontology languages such as OWL and the chaotic, informal
and weakly-structured world of social approaches to information management,
as exemplified by social tagging applications. In the library and
information sciences, a long and distinguished heritage is devoted to
developing tools for organizing large collections of objects such as
books or museum artifacts. These tools are known generally as "knowledge
organization systems" (KOS) or sometimes "controlled structured
vocabularies", although no widely agreed definitions exist for these
terms. The situation is complicated because several similar yet distinct
traditions have emerged over time, each supported by a distinct community
of practice and set of agreed standards. Different families of knowledge
organization systems, including "thesauri", "classification schemes",
"subject heading systems", and "taxonomies" are widely recognized and
applied in both modern and traditional information systems. In practice
it can be hard to draw an absolute distinction between "thesauri" and
"classification schemes" or "taxonomies." SKOS aims to provide a bridge
between different communities of practice within the library and
information sciences involved in the design and application of knowledge
organization systems. In addition, SKOS aims to provide a bridge between
these communities and the Semantic Web, by transferring existing models
of knowledge organization to the Semantic Web technology context, and
by providing a low-cost migration path for porting existing knowledge
organization systems to RDF.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-skos-primer-20080221/
See also the SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference: http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference

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Developing RESTful Web Services in Perl
Andrew Sterling Hanenkamp, O'Reilly ONLamp.com

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architecture
originally published by Roy Fielding in his dissertation. More
specifically, this term has been used to define web service APIs for
the management of resources that may be created, read, updated, and
deleted (CRUD) over HTTP. This is the focus of this article... A
resource in a RESTful web service is just some unit of data useful to
your site. This is probably a record in your SQL database, but it could
be an account on an LDAP server, a segment of an XML data file, or just
about any other unit of data you want to share with others. The sample
server, for example, will be reading from and writing to files on the
disk... Essentially, there are three key concepts to REST: nouns,
verbs, and content types. A noun is an identifier for a resource. This
is generally a URL (link to GET the resource) when we talk about REST
in HTTP. It might also be a URN (a name for a resource that can be
used via HTTP or something else to identify the resource) or another
kind of URI (URLs and URNs are often URIs when used as REST nouns).
You probably want nouns that uniquely identify (a URI: Unique Resource
Identifier) your resource or at least one noun that uniquely identifies
the resource... CRUD is an acronym referring to the common changes made
to data: Create, Read, Update, and Delete. This set of operations
generally encompasses everything that can be done to a piece of data. In
REST nomenclature, these are called the verbs of the architecture... The
final piece of the triangle is the content type of your resources. The
content types provide the format for the data that will take part in your
RESTful discussion. You will specify these with the "Content-Type" header
in the requests (client-side) and responses (server-side). If you are
exchanging organized data, like the sample server and client included
with this article, you will probably want a data interchange format like
XML, YAML, JSON, or CSV. If your application deals with documents, you
will probably want to use a document format related to that, such as
HTML, DocBook, SGML, ODF, PDF, PostScript, etc. Your application might
manipulate photos (JPG, PNG, BMP) or calendar information (iCal) or
categorized links (OPML) or whatever else. You can use microformats or
whatever you happen to like...

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2008/02/19/developing-restful-web-services-in-perl.html

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Healthvault Asks the Questions While Google Goes Beta
Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet Blog

Microsoft is way ahead of Google in asking the questions which need
answering before either company can demand everyone's health records.
Over the last week Microsoft has put out specific promises on privacy
and interoperability for the community to review... The privacy claims
have already drawn a rebuttal from Fred Trotter. The interoperability
claims, made by HealthVault chief architect Sean Nolan on his blog,
will also be subject to sharp questioning. So far, Microsoft has put
its HealthVault XML interface protocols under the Microsoft Open
Specification Promise (OSP) and new HealthVault platform open source
projects on its CodePlex system. These are all substantive moves which
can be tested, critiqued, and implemented by other vendors. Google,
meanwhile, has basically gone beta. The Cleveland Clinic will link to
Google Health and try to interoperate with it. The pilot project is
drawing more media attention than any of Microsoft's moves in this
area have so far. One can argue that this is just how the two companies
roll. Microsoft masters each step of the process methodically before
delivering a product to market. Google throws something on a Web site
and, like Tom Sawyer, lets its friends whitewash the fence. In the
context of the medical market, however, Microsoft's process seems
more reasonable. This is less about gaining the trust of consumers
than it is about winning over doctors, hospitals, and payment
processors. So far, advantage Microsoft.

http://healthcare.zdnet.com/?p=731
See also XML Standards in Healthcare: http://xml.coverpages.org/healthcare.html

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Oracle Unveils New Release of Oracle Identity Manager
Staff, Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal

Oracle has announced the immediate availability of a new release of
Oracle Identity Manager. The latest release of Oracle Identity Manager
addresses a number of growing concerns that organizations have regarding
compliance and the time it takes to complete an audit with several new
features... WS-SPML 2.0 Inbound Gateway is an industry standard based
interface that enables rapid integration across heterogeneous
environments, helping to accelerate deployment. Serving as the security
backbone for Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Identity Management helps
customers and partners decrease security threats across diverse IT
environments while helping address governance, risk and compliance needs.
Oracle Identity Management was the market's fastest growing suite of
Identity Management products in 2006, based on total software revenues
worldwide. Oracle Identity Management's support of industry standards
such as WS*, XACML, SAML, and SPML helps enable customers and partners
to more easily integrate applications with the framework. The family of
best-in-class software includes Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access
Manager, Oracle Adaptive Access Manager, Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On
Suite, Oracle Identity Federation, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle
Internet Directory, Oracle Management Pack for Identity Management and
Oracle Web Services Manager; all of which can be used in its entirety
or as individual components.

http://www.s-ox.com/dsp_getNewsDetails.cfm?CID=2129
See also the Oracle Identity Management Resource Library: http://www.oracle.com/identity

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Microsoft Announces New interoperability Principles and Actions
Staff, Microsoft Announcement

A Microsoft press conference that included Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie,
Bob Muglia, Brad Smith, four new interoperability principles were
announced that will apply to the company's high volume products: "Number
one, we're committing to ensure open connections for our high volume
products. Number two, we're committing to promote data portability for
our high volume products. Number three, we're committing to enhancing
Microsoft's support for industry standards. And four, we're committing
to fostering a more open engagement with industry, as well as the open
source software community." In the area of open connections "we will
document all of the APIs and communication protocols that are used by
other Microsoft products. We're announcing that developers will not
need to take a license, or pay a royalty, or other fee to access any
of that information. As an immediate first step to apply the principles
today we're publishing to the Web over 30,000 pages of documentation
for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available
only under a 4D trade secret license. In addition, protocol documents
for additional products like Office 2007 will be published in the
upcoming months. Second, in the area of data portability, we recognize
that different users definitely support different file formats for
different reasons. And we have consistently supported multiple file
formats and user choice. But, as part of today's announcement
specifically, we're announcing that we're designing new APIs for Word,
Excel and PowerPoint that will allow developers to plug in additional
document formats, and enable users to set those formats as their default
for saving documents. In the area of standards, we're also going to
document how we support various standards, including documentation of
extensions we make to the standards. This should allow developers to
understand how a standard is used in a Microsoft product and foster
improved interoperability for our customers."

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/feb08/02-21ExpandInteroperabilityPR.mspx
See also the InfoWorld analysis: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/02/21/Microsoft-makes-boldest-move-yet-embracing-open-source_1.html

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