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XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 26 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
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com
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HEADLINES:

* US Department of Homeland Security Signs Historic Agreement with EIC
* Sun Metro and .NET WCF Interoperability
* Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Grouping of Resources
* OASIS Open Standards Symposium 2008
* Apache POI: Java API To Access Microsoft Format Files
* Jacquard: a Methodology for Web Publishing

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US Department of Homeland Security Signs Historic Agreement with EIC
Staff, Emergency Interoperability Consortium Announcement

The Emergency Interoperability Consortium (EIC) announced that an
historic agreement between EIC and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
has been signed to help further the continued development of data sharing
standards for the emergency response community. With the endorsement of
Department of Homeland Security Under-Secretary Admiral Jay Cohen, this
unique relationship, thought to be the first of its kind between DHS and
a non-government entity, strengthens an established alliance between the
organizations to jointly promote the design, development, release, and
use of standards to help solve data sharing problems commonly encountered
during life-saving emergency operations. By working together, both DHS
and the EIC believe that government and industry can more quickly and
cost-effectively bridge the data sharing gap between organizations that
must be able to interoperate in response to the natural and man-made
hazards that form the core of the DHS mission. Numerous federal, state
and local organizations as well as private industry benefit from the
collaborative efforts of the DHS/EIC relationship. Utilization of the
Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and the Emergency Data Exchange Language
(EDXL) OASIS standards, and several other supporting standards form an
interoperable data sharing communications bridge linking organizations,
government entities and the general public. Los Angeles Fire Department
Battalion Chief Robert Cramer: "By integrating these data technology
capabilities on a platform, we're making it viable to provide data
interoperability among fire, law enforcement, emergency medical services,
Hazmat, and supporting agencies such as county health and transportation.
Creating a common operating picture across multiple agencies and
jurisdictions can reduce response times and save more lives." Specific
objectives of the alliance, as specified in the Memorandum of Agreement,
are to: (1) Improve information sharing capabilities to protect the
nation and its citizens from the consequences of disasters and other
emergencies, regardless of cause; (2) Encourage broad-based participation
in the design, development, acceptance, and use of XML standards to
enable emergency organizations to receive and share data in real time;
(3) Educate federal, state, local, and tribal governments, the media,
citizens, and industry on the meaning and importance of data sharing
within the emergency response communities; (4) Promote innovation in
these communities around open architectures and standards; (5) Foster a
collaborative working environment among federal, state, local, and tribal
jurisdictions on these matters. EIC recommends and assists with the
implementation of technical interoperability standards for emergency
and incident management. The Consortium consists of both public and
private entities to ensure the practical use of open standards. The
EIC has cooperated with DHS, worked with and in its practitioner working
groups to develop detailed requirements for standards, organized
interoperability demonstrations using draft and final standards, and
submitted requirements to OASIS to initiate formal standards development.

http://xml.coverpages.org/EIC-DHS-Agreement-200803.html
See also Emergency Management and XML: http://xml.coverpages.org/emergencyManagement.html

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Sun Metro and .NET WCF Interoperability
Stefan Tilkov, InfoQueue

The latest interoperability event (a "plugfest") at Microsoft's Redmond
campus showed impressive results for interoperability between future
releases of Sun's Metro Web Services and Windows Communication Foundation
in .NET 3.5. Metro 1.1 FCS is a Web Services framework that provides
tools and infrastructure to develop Web Services solutions for the end
users and middleware developers. With Metro, clients and web services
have a big advantage: the platform independence of the Java programming
language. InfoQ had a chance to talk to Harold Carr, the engineering lead
for enterprise web services interoperability at Sun, about the interop
results. When asked what the relevance of this for Java and .NET developers
would be, Carr highlighted the role of interoperability in general: "Web
services are about wire interoperability, not about the platform they are
implemented in. Therefore, developers, whether using .NET or Java, expect
their services to interoperate. It is relatively straightforward for
platform developers to ensure interoperability for WS-I basic profiles.
But when you add in WS-Policy, WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation,
WS-ReliableMessaging, etc., the bar for platform implementors gets way
higher. The interop results give transparency into our current development
stage to give people that are planning to use Metro with .NET 3.5
confidence that we will provide an interoperable platform -- rather than
a platform that has only been tested against itself. Reminder: Metro 1.0
already works with .NET 3.0... There are two aspects to consider: the
interop scenarios we test and the deployment of services based on these
specifications. The interop scenarios are very useful, but certainly not
complete -- particularly in reliable messaging. Real deployments will come
up with combinations never tested (either by the interop scenarios tested
at the plugfest or our more extensive in-house testing). Also, .NET 3.0
and Metro 1.0 (both released products) are based on the submission versions
of the WS-* specifications (except for WS-Security, which is standard).
.NET 3.5 (which is released) is based on the standard versions. Metro 1.x,
which will ship later in 2008, will be based on the standard versions
also. All this is a long-winded way to say the standard specs haven't been
used in many deployments based on shipping platforms from different vendors."

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/03/wcf-metro-interop
See also Harold Carr's Blog: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/haroldcarr/archive/2008/03/metro_web_servi_2.html

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Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Grouping of Resources
Andrea Perego, Phil Archer, Kevin Smith (eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER)
Working Group have published a new Working Draft for Protocol for
"Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER): Grouping of Resources."
POWDER facilitates the publication of descriptions of multiple resources
such as all those available from a Web site. These descriptions are
attributable to a named individual, organization or entity that may or
may not be the creator of the described resources. This contrasts with
more usual metadata that typically applies to a single resource, such as
a specific document's title, which is usually provided by its author.
The current document sets out how Description Resources (DRs) can be
created and published, whether individually or as bulk data, how to link
to DRs from other online resources, and, crucially, how DRs may be
authenticated and trusted. The aim is to provide a platform through which
opinions, claims and assertions about online resources can be expressed
by people and exchanged by machines. The draft describes how sets of
IRIs can be defined such that descriptions or other data can be applied
to the resources obtained by dereferencing IRIs that are elements of the
set. IRI sets are defined as XML elements with relatively loose
operational semantics. This is underpinned by the formal semantics of
POWDER which include a semantic extension defined in this document. A
GRDDL transform is associated with the POWDER namespace that maps the
operational to the formal semantics. Changes since the 31-October-2007
working draft are documented in the Change Log.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-powder-grouping-20080324/
See also the W3C POWDER Working Group Charter: http://www.w3.org/2007/02/powder_charter

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OASIS Open Standards Symposium 2008
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS announced that "Composability within SOA" will be the focus of
Open Standards 2008, the fifth annual symposium hosted by OASIS. This
event, which will be held in Santa Clara, California, 28-April-2008
through 1-May-2008, will examine the critical issues faced when
architecting service-oriented applications and the benefits being
reaped by real-world implementations that take advantage of Web services
transactions. Presentations on the Business Process Execution Language
(BPEL), Service Component Architecture (SCA), Service Data Objects (SDO),
WS-Transaction, and related standards will be featured. In an Open
Standards 2008 keynote address, Peter Carbone, Vice President, SOA,
Office of the CTO at Nortel, will share insights on the new realities
presented by communications-enabled applications and the opportunities
they create for standards development, software vendors, and service
providers. OASIS has announced the launch of a new Telecommunications
Services Member Section which will work to bring the full advantages
of SOA to the telecommunications industry. At Open Standards 2008, the
OASIS Open CSA Member Section will host a table-top exhibition showcasing
SCA and SDO supporters, BEA, IBM, Primeton, Rogue Wave, SAP, Software AG,
and Sun Microsystems. Executives from these companies will participate
in a press briefing on the current state of SCA on Tuesday, 29-April-2008.

http://xml.coverpages.org/OASIS-OpenStandards2008.html
See also the event web site: http://events.oasis-open.org/home/symposium/2008

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Apache POI: Java API To Access Microsoft Format Files
Staff, Microsoft Announcement

Microsoft has announced a new partnership with Sourcesense, a leading
European open source systems integration consultancy. The two companies
will collaborate on the strategy, development and deployment of open
source solutions for the Microsoft Office product suite. One of the
initial goals of the partnership is contributing to the development of
a new version of Apache POI, a top-level project of the Apache Software
Foundation (ASF). Widely used in financial services and critical
enterprise applications across related sectors, Apache POI is a leading
open source file format reader and writer to create, edit and read
Microsoft Office formats used in Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Visio.
Apache POI is a Java application programming interface (API) used to
access and manage Microsoft Office binary formats, and can be easily
applied to today's billions of binary format documents by alleviating
the need for complex programming and/or reverse engineering. Because
Apache POI libraries are used in numerous open source projects, developing
future libraries to support the Ecma Office Open XML File Formats (the
default file format in the 2007 Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint
products) will play an important role in new interoperability scenarios
where XML-based standard formats will be key for Office documents. Apache
POI support for Open XML is currently in development within the Apache
Software Foundation; its first release is anticipated during the second
quarter of 2008. Code contributions are made by ASF members and committers
(developers authorized to 'commit' or 'write' code, patches or
documentation to the ASF repository), and overseen by the Apache POI
Project Management Committee (PMC). Details are published in the
Microsoft press release "Microsoft and Sourcesense Partner to Contribute
to Open Source, Apache POI to Support Ecma Office Open XML File Formats."

http://poi.apache.org/
See also the announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/mar08/03-25SourcesensePR.mspx

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Jacquard: a Methodology for Web Publishing
Uche Ogbuji, IBM developerWorks

This article introduces Jacquard, a software development methodology
specialized for Web projects, and especially for Web development among
diverse teams. Jacquard seeks to align the work and goals of business
interest personnel, Web designers, programmers, project managers,
database analysts, and more. The author discusses the core principles
of Jacquard, and provides an example of its use in communication between
a user experience team and a programmer team. He uses the W3C's Simple
Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), which is a very useful technology
for the expression of ideas in a way natural to humans, but in a very
Web-ready format (RDF) -- together with the Turtle syntax for RDF, which
is easier to read than RDF/XML. The Jacquard methodology requires formal
expression of the core concepts in a way that can be a shared reference
across the various teams... Jacquard (pronounced like "jack-card" with
more emphasis on the second syllable) is a software development methodology
specialized for Web projects, and especially suited for such development
among diverse teams. The Web is in many ways different from any
information platform before it, and this suggests a fresh approach to
development and teamwork. In general it makes sense to look outward to
the Web, and not inward and backward to traditional methodologies, to
find what works. Lightweight, agile process mirrors the basic nature of
the Web, and so does focusing on the data, and how data is organized for
sharing. The specific application or database implementation is not as
important, nor are the tools you choose to use. This mirrors the Web,
which builds on sharing data, and does not require uniformity of
implementations. As such, implementation independence is one of the core
principles of Jacquard. Another principle is support for decentralized
communication. The Web works well across geographical boundaries, and
with the increase of off-shore outsourcing and flexible work arrangements,
it's useful to learn lessons on decentralization and rich communication.
The Web is such a rich information space that some philosophically
consider it a realm of its own which parallels, and sometimes intersects,
our own real world -- the idea of "cyberspace." Paying attention to where
idioms on the Web draw from real-world concepts and phenomena is important
to usability, and so Jacquard's principle of conceptual alignment
encourages you to take care to express the concepts behind your Web
project, and to make that clear expression the foundation for
communication on the project.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-jacquard/

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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

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