Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 05 March 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
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
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HEADLINES:

* W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group to Study Mapping Relational Data into RDF
* Enhancing Residential Gateways: A Semantic OSGi Platform
* Microsoft Bets on Atom Publishing Protocol for Web APIs
* W3C Last Call Working Drafts for Service Modeling Language (SML) 1.1
* Planning a Semantic Web Site
* Microsoft's Directory Team Forced to Reconsider Ignored Standards
* AOL Opens AIM for Open Source

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W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group to Study Mapping Relational Data into RDF
Staff, W3C Announcement

W3C has announced the creation of a new RDB2RDF Incubator Group sponsored
by Oracle, HP, PartnersHealthcare, and OpenLink Software. The RDB2RDF
Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, has two chartered
initiatives. The first is to examine and classify existing approaches
to mapping relational data into RDF, and decide whether standardization
is possible and/or necessary in this area and, if so, the direction such
standardization could take. The goal is to specify how to generate RDF
triples from one or more Relational tables without loss of information.
Furher, a default mapping should not be used, but, instead, it should
be possible for the the mapping to be customized by the user. The second
initiative is to examine and classify existing approaches to mapping OWL
classes to Relational data, or, more accurately, SQL queries, moving
towards the goal of defining a standard in this area. Each OWL class
would be associated with one or more SQL queries which may be run on
separate databases. The results from these queries would then be
integrated into a single Relational table; this would be transformed into
RDF using the approach defined as a result of the first initiative. An
important problem to be solved is the mapping of RDB names to RDF/XML
names. The RDB2RDF Incubator Group is chartered through February 2009,
with Ashok Malhotra (Oracle) serving as XG Chair. Existing work in this
area included, for example: Virtuoso, D2RQ, SquirrelRDF, and ongoing
investigations at the University of Texas at Austin. Several approaches
are documented in the Collection of Accepted Papers from the "W3C Workshop
on RDF Access to Relational Databases," held October 25-26, 2007. This
work is expected to be used as a starting point for the Incubator Group.

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/rdb2rdf
See also the RDB2RDF Incubator Group Charter: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/rdb2rdf/charter-20080304

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Enhancing Residential Gateways: A Semantic OSGi Platform
Rebeca P. Diaz Redondo (et al.), IEEE Intelligent Systems

The OSGi (Open Service Gateway initiative) service platform specification
is the most widely adopted technology for building a control system for
the networked home. This article proposes a semantic approach to service
discovery that turns OSGi into a semantic OSGi platform. In this new
platform, OSGi services describe their properties and capabilities so
other software elements in the residential gateway can automatically
determine their purpose (semantic discovery) and how to invoke them. Both
tasks involve the semantic markup of OSGi services through appropriate
ontologies, which is the core of the Semantic Web and, by extension, of
our semantic OSGi platform. The OSGi platform consists of a Java virtual
machine (JVM), a set of running components called bundles, and an OSGi
framework. In OSGi, the minimal unit of functionality is a service. So,
a bundle is designed as a set of cooperating services, which any
application might discover after the services are published in the OSGi
service registry. An OSGi service is defined by a service interface, which
specifies the service's public methods and is implemented as a service
object, which is owned by, and runs within, a bundle. The bundle registers
the service object with the OSGi service registry so its functionality
is available to other bundles. In general, registered services are
referenced through service reference objects, which maintain the
properties and other metainformation about the service. To implement our
proposal, we selected the Open Source Container Architecture (OSCAR),
an open software implementation of the OSGi framework. To manage the local
OWL-OS ontology and provide the proposed semantic OSGi services, we use
the Protege OWL API. This open source Java library provides classes and
methods to load and save OWL files, query and manipulate OWL data models,
and perform reasoning. We implemented a semantic version of the OSCAR
registry that interprets the new bundle manifests and manages the OWL-OS
ontology to accomplish service registration (populating the ontology)
and search (querying the ontology) as described earlier. To include
query processing in our framework, we use the OWL-QL toolkit. For
reasoning, we used Jess, a rule engine for the Java platform that can
reason from knowledge expressed in declarative rules; jessTab is a
plug-in for Protege that lets users interact with Jess. By automating
OSGi services composition, we open the platform to ambitious applications
that rely on the idea that different home services usually form a pool
committed to various home activities, such as energy control, security,
and healthcare.

http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/pages/dsonline/2008/03/x1dia.html
See also the JavaWorld magazine article: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2008/jw-03-osgi1.html

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Microsoft Bets on Atom Publishing Protocol for Web APIs
Hartmut Wilms, InfoQ

Microsoft is switching from the "Web Structured, Schema'd & Searchable
(Web3S)" protocol to the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) for services
offered by Microsoft's Live Platform on the Web. David Treadwell,
Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Live Platform Services,
discussing the Windows Live Platform Services, notes that "Microsoft
is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform
protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format
(RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). At MIX we are
enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable
any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and
for unstructured application storage. Or you can use any Atom-aware
public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write
these cloud service-based feeds." AtomPub will also be used as the
standard protocol for ADO.NET Data Services, codename "Project Astoria".
According to Dare Obasanjo: "The fact is when we listened to the
community of Web developers the feedback was overwhelmingly clear that
people would prefer if we worked together with the community to make
AtomPub work for the scenarios we felt it wasn't suited for than Microsoft
creating a competing proprietary protocol. We listened and now here we
are. If you are interested in the technical details of how Microsoft
plans to use AtomPub and how we've dealt with the various issues we
originally had with the protocol, I suggest subscribing to the Astoria
team's blog and check out the various posts on this topic by Pablo
Castro..." Adapting the standardized Atom Publishing Protocol is in
line with Microsoft's new interoperability principles, support for
REST and Syndication in WCF, and the high extensibility and pluggability
of the ASP.NET MVC Framework.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/03/microsoft-atompub
See also the InfoWorld article: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/05/ms-live_1.html

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W3C Last Call Working Drafts for Service Modeling Language (SML) 1.1
B. Pandit, V. Popescu, V. Smith (eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C Service Modeling Language Working Group have
published Last Call Working Drafts for "Service Modeling Language,
Version 1.1" and "Service Modeling Language Interchange Format, Version
1.1." SML defines extensions to the W3C XML Schema language by adding
support for inter-document references and user-defined constraints.
This combination of features is very useful in building complex
multi-document models that capture structure, constraints, and
relationships. In the management domain, these models are typically
used to automate configuration, deployment, monitoring, capacity planning,
change verification, desired configuration management, root-cause
analysis for faults, etc. A "model" in SML is realized as a set of
interrelated XML documents. The XML documents contain information about
the parts of a service, as well as the constraints that each part must
satisfy for the service to function properly. Constraints are captured
in two ways: (1) Schemas: defining constraints on the structure and
content of the documents in a model. SML uses XML Schema (XML Schema
Structures, XML Schema Datatypes) as the schema language. In addition
SML defines a set of extensions to XML Schema to support references that
may cross document boundaries. (2) Rules: Boolean expressions that
constrain the structure and content of documents in a model. SML uses
Schematron (ISO/IEC 19757-3, Introduction to Schematron, Improving
Validation with Schematron) and W3C XPath for rules. One of the important
operations on the model is to establish its validity. This involves
checking whether all data in a model satisfies the schemas and rules
declared. This specification focuses primarily on defining the
extensions to XML Schema for references that cross document boundaries,
Schematron usage in SML, as well as the process of model validation.
The Last Call review period extends until 26-March-2008.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-sml-20080303/
See also the SML Working Group Charter: http://www.w3.org/2007/03/SML_Charter.html

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Planning a Semantic Web Site
Rob Crowther, IBM developerWorks

The Semantic Web brings with it the opportunities for users to get
smarter search results, and for site owners to get more targeted
traffic as users find what they really want. This article discusses
what you need to know to make your Web site part of the Semantic Web.
It starts with a discussion of the problems the Semantic Web tries to
solve and then moves to the technologies involved, such as Resource
Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and SPARQL
Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL). You'll see how the Semantic
Web is layered on top of the existing Web. It then covers some issues
that you want to know about when you plan a new Web site and also
gives specific examples of how to use technologies like RDFa and
Microformats to enable your existing Web site to become a part of the
Semantic Web. Although the promise of Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web
is yet to be fully realized, the years of thinking and research that
have gone into it are starting to bear fruit in terms of solutions to
practical problems that people face today. The strong collaboration
trends in Web 2.0 will only lead to more requirements for structured
and semantically encoded data being available on the Web. With some
planning, you can be in position to take advantage of the Semantic Web
tools which help meet that need.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-plansemantic/
See also the W3C Semantic Web: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

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Microsoft's Directory Team Forced to Reconsider Ignored Standards
John Fontana, Network World

Recent proclamations by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer that the company
would move toward interoperability and support for standards is putting
pressure on the head of the company's directory and identity development
to reconsider support for industry standards such as Security Assertion
Markup Language (SAML) that have been long ignored. Joe Long, general
manager of the connected identity and directory at Microsoft, said
during a panel discussion at NetPro's Directory Experts Conference that
Microsoft was being forced to re-examine if it would support SAML, the
Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) and the Extensible Access
Control Markup Language (XACML). Microsoft already supports the SAML
1.1 token format but does not support the SAML request/response engine
that it is part of the specification. It also does not support SAML 2.0.
The Liberty Alliance and the Shibboleth identity project support SAML.
Microsoft supports WS-Federation, a specification it created with IBM
and sent to OASIS. WS-Federation unlike SAML splits the request/response
engine and the token format allowing it to support many token formats.
Long's comments came a day before Microsoft's Stuart Kwan took the DEC
keynote stage and explained that standards were a key cog in building
an "identity bus" for identity systems that applications could plug into.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/030408-microsoft-directory-team-standards.html
See also the 'identity bus': http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/030408-microsoft-identity-bus.html

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AOL Opens AIM for Open Source
Sean Michael Kerner, InternetNews.com

For the last two years, AOL has been promoting its OpenAIM initiative
as a vehicle to enable developers to build their own AIM (AOL Instant
Messenger)-based clients. But there were issues with documentation that
got in the way of some projects. With the release of Open AIM 2.0 today,
AOL is aiming AIM at open source developers with more ease-of-use tools.
Among the major changes in Open AIM 2.0 is the fact that AOL is now
providing open documentation on its core OSCAR protocol (Open System
for CommunicAtion in Realtime), which powers AIM. Previously, open
source instant messaging client implementations of OSCAR had to
reverse-engineer the protocol instead of simply using a documented
protocol. Although Open AIM 2.0 provides open access to the OSCAR
protocols, developers need to do something for AOL in return. AOL
requires that developers choose two options from a list of five items
that must be added to an Open AIM-based client. The list includes the
addition of display ads, a link to include the AIM toolbar, showing AIM
buddy icons, displaying AIM buddy information or displaying the AIM
start page. Cypes noted that a number of open source AIM implementations
already provide the buddy icon and information features so he expects
no major issues. In addition to being open with OSCAR, Open AIM 2.0
also lifts the Open AIM 1.0 restriction on multi-headed clients. That
is to say, Open AIM will now allow users to build IM clients that
support AIM as well as IM protocols from other vendors, including Jabber
(XMPP), Yahoo, and Microsoft.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3732331/AOL+Opens+AIM+for+Open+Source.htm

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XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 05 March 2008