Back to newsletter listDate:
Fri, May 02, 2008 07:09:08 AMFrom:
Robin Cover
Subject:
XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 01 May 2008
XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 01 May 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
BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
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HEADLINES:
* NOAA Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Implements OGC Standards
* Incubator Group Review of Emergency Management Information Standards
* The Semantic Web and Ontological Technologies Continue to Expand
* W3C Launches New Product Modelling Incubator Group
* NIST Workshop Presentation: OASIS SAML v2.0 and XACML v2.0
* W3C Update for XProc: An XML Pipeline Language
* Member Ballot for OASIS Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Specification
* Microsoft Ships Expression Studio 2 Tools
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NOAA Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Implements OGC Standards
Staff, OGC Announcement
The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announced that the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) program Integrated Ocean
Observing System (IOOS) is implementing a number of OGC standards. The
Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) is a multidisciplinary system
designed to enhance our ability to collect, deliver, and use ocean
information. The goal is to provide continuous data on our open oceans,
coastal waters, and Great Lakes in the formats, rates, and scales
required by scientists, managers, businesses, governments, and the
public to support research and inform decision-making. NOAA will begin
the effort by establishing interoperable access to online databases
maintained by the National Weather Service (NWS) National Data Buoy
Center (NDBC), the National Ocean Service (NOS) Center for Operational
Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) and the National
Environmental Satellite Data Information Service (NESDIS) CoastWatch
Program. This will be accomplished using web service interface and
encoding standards developed by the OGC. The standards being used are
part of OGC's Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) suite of specifications,
which enable diverse network-connected sensors and sensor systems to
be queried and controlled by remote users. For IOOS, NOAA data providers
will implement OGC's Sensor Observation Service, Geography Markup
Language (GML) and Observations and Measurements (O&M) specifications
to provide data on temperature, salinity, water level, currents, winds
and waves. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an
agency of the U.S. Commerce Department, is dedicated to enhancing
economic security and national safety through the prediction and
research of weather and climate-related events and information service
delivery for transportation, and by providing environmental stewardship
of our nation's coastal and marine resources. Through the emerging Global
Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), NOAA is working with its
federal partners, more than 70 countries and the European Commission
to develop a global monitoring network that is as integrated as the
p***t it observes, predicts and protects.
http://xml.coverpages.org/IOOS-OGC.html
See also the NOAA announcement: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080430_oceandata.html
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Incubator Group Review of Emergency Management Information Standards
Sai Sun and Renato Iannella (eds), W3C Incubator Group Draft
Renato Iannella (National ICT Australia - NICTA and co-chair of the W3C
Emergency Information Interoperability Framework Incubator Group)
announced the availability of an early draft review of five EM standards
(CAP, EDXL-*, C/TWML). The idea is to review the common aspects of these
specifications and the various mechanisms used to express similar
semantics. "This document is a first attempt to review and analyse the
current state-of-the-art in vocabularies used in emergency management
information standards. It will facilitate emergency information sharing
and interoperability across different systems, organizations and
countries. The standards reviewed by this document [include] "Common
Alerting Protocol (CAP)", "Emergency Data Exchange Language --
Distribution Element (EDXL-DE)", "Emergency Data Exchange Language --
Resource Messaging (EDXL-RM)", "Emergency Data Exchange Language --
Hospital Availability Exchange (EDXL-HAVE)", "Cyclone Warning Markup
Language (CWML)", and "Tsunami Warning Markup Language (TWML)". These
standards aim to build on XML-based standard messages for emergency
information systems. However, because of diverse intentions and
application areas, the standards support overlapping semantics and
different structures... Among the standards, EDXL-DE focuses on the
information to distribute and route the emergency messages, rather
than the semantics of the message itself. Contrarily, the other standards
pay more attention to 'content' of the message, such as the emergency
hazard, the community situation or the system response. Thus, EDXL-DE
may be thought of as a 'container' for emergency messages. It provides
the information to route 'payload' message sets (ie the other standards),
by including key routing information such as distribution type,
geography, incident, and sender/recipient IDs. CAP, CWML and TWML are
all standards to describe emergency alerts or advisories. CAP is
intended to provide a simple but general format for exchanging all-hazard
emergency alerts and public warnings over all kinds of networks. Whereas,
CWML is specially designed for describing cyclone warnings and TWML
is for tsunami bulletins. CWML and TWML have common similarities as
they where developed in close cooperation...
http://xml.coverpages.org/emergencyManagement.html#EM-InfoStds-Review-01
See also the W3C EIIF Incubator Group: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/eiif/
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The Semantic Web and Ontological Technologies Continue to Expand
Steven Robbins, InfoQueue
Ontologies and Ontological management have become more popular as
enterprise architecture has gained ground among organizations. As tool
support has become more available and the concepts of semantics and
ontologies are being understood, there are more players that have come
to the table with contributions. The AKSW group recently released their
Triplify product to provide "a building block for the 'semantification'
of the web." The UMBEL backbone project has started up to provide a
lightweight subject structure for the Web. Dan McCreary talked about
some of the main pitfalls in developing and maintaining enterprise
ontologies. The Agile Knowledge and Semantic Web research group (AKSW)
has recently released the newest version of their Triplify product.
Triplify is a small plugin for Web applications, which reveals the
semantic structures encoded in relational databases by making database
content available as RDF, JSON or Linked Data. By using the plugin
and ordering the columns in the application queries, Triplify can
analyze the data returned by the applications queries and make them
available in the previously mentioned formats. The Upper Mapping and
Bind Exchange Layer (UMBEL) project billed itself as "a lightweight
ontology for relating Web data and datasets to one another via a
standard set of subject concepts." UMBEL defines "subject concepts"
as: a distinct subset of the more broadly understood concept such as
used in the SKOS RDFS controlled vocabulary or formal concept analysis
or the very general concepts common to some upper ontologies. Subject
concepts are a special kind of concept: ones that are concrete,
subject-related and non-abstract. We further contrast these with named
entities, which are the real things or instances in the world that are
members of these subject concept classes. The main thrust of the project
is to help provide "meta-maps" of the relationships between the immense
number of fine-grainied, local ontological and concept maps... [As to
"ontologies"]: "Just call it a metadata registry and you my get better
adoption. Many people that work with database developers just end up
calling it a logical data model or and enterprise data dictionary. XML
types like to call it an XML Schema type library. Whatever the audience...
pick a term that makes them feel comfortable and then focus on the pain
points of the organzation. I only tell about 25% of my customers I am
building ontologies."
http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/semantic-and-ontological
See also the UMBEL web site: http://umbel.org/
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W3C Launches New Product Modelling Incubator Group
Staff, W3C Announcement
W3C has announced the creation of a new Product Modelling Incubator
Group to identify a basic ontology for product modelling. The Group is
sponsored by W3C Members TNO, POSC-Caesar Association, and Fraunhofer.
Per the charter, the SWOP and S-TEN projects, with the POSC Caesar
Association, believe that it is possible to define a small core of
basic classes and properties for product modelling. The European SWOP
project is developing end-user product ontologies for product data
based on an upper ontology called PMO for Product Modelling Ontology.
The construction industry sector is one of the application areas, and
these ontologies will be related to the Industry Foundation Classes
(IFC) of the International Association for Interoperability (IAI). The
European S-TEN project is developing ontologies for technical and
environmental networks (such as piping or electricity networks and
river basins). These ontologies will be related to the information
models for product data within ISO 10303 (STEP) and for process plants
within ISO 15926. This "product core" could be the basis of the
ontologies defined by the two projects, and for many other application
ontologies. The use of the "product core" will enable simple operations
to be carried out on product data irrespective of any extension to the
core specific to an application. These operations could include: (1)
derivations of bills of materials, and calculations of the material
costs; (2) calculation of the environmental impact of a product, such
as the CO2 emissions; (3) calculation of the mass of a product, (4)
generation of (re)presentations of product aspects. This core could
help the development of Web ontologies derived from existing
international standards, such as IFC, STEP and ISO 15926. The Incubator
Group (XG) has been proposed to work on this core set.
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/w3pm/
See also the Product Modelling Incubator Group Charter: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/w3pm/charter
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NIST Workshop Presentation: OASIS SAML v2.0 and XACML v2.0
Anil Saldhana, Slide Presentation
An "OASIS SAML and XACML Presentation" has been prepared by Anil
Saldhana (Leader, JBoss Security and Identity Management, Red Hat Inc):
"I am going to be making a presentation on OASIS SAML and XACML at the
ExpeditionWorkshop (Exploring Identity Management Landscape) at NIST."
This NIST workshop "will build on the implications of Preparedness as
a dimension of the National Response Framework, for Identity Management
(persons and objects) within a global context, and facilitate engagement
by multiple communities advancing emergent national readiness including:
identity management, enterprise architecture, disaster preparedness and
response, cyber-security, ontology, modeling and simulation, and
international digital standards. The workshop is responsive to expressed
interest from Federal representatives to better appreciate identity
management potentials and realities in light of ongoing research,
standards development, and on-going national and global implementation
strategies. This includes national and international groups working to
develop standards across domains, such as Shibboleth, Security Assertion
Markup Language (SAML 2.0), OpenID, Privacy, and authorization management.
This broad and comprehensive context for shared understanding is of keen
interest to the Coordinating Groups of the Subcommittee on Networking
and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) including:
Large Scale Networking, High Confidence Software and Systems,
Human-Computer Interaction and Information Management, FASTER,
Cyber-Security Information Assurance, and Social-Economic and Workforce
Implications of IT. Saldhana's The 31-slide presentation covers
Definitions; Authentication/Authorization Use Cases; Introduction to
SAML V2.0; Introduction to XACML v2.0; References. OASIS SAML v2 is a
specification that deals with Federated Identity and Oasis XACML v2
is a specification that deals with access control.
http://seamlessidentity.googlepages.com/AnilSaldhana_Oasis_SAML_XACML.pdf
See also the blog entry: http://www.jboss.org/feeds/post/oasis_saml_and_xacml_presentation
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W3C Update for XProc: An XML Pipeline Language
Norm Walsh, Alex Milowski, Henry Thompson (eds), W3C Technical Report
Members of W3C's XML Processing Model Working Group have published an
updated Working Draft for "XProc: An XML Pipeline Language". A
color-coded diff-marked version is provided to show revisions: its
presentation has been augmented to identify changes from a previous
version (new text, added text, changed text, and deleted text). Since
the last public working draft, the Working Group has considered several
hundred comments in nearly 150 threads. The document "Status" section
therefore also lists eighteen (18) significant changes in this updated
Working Draft. The specification describes the syntax and semantics of
XProc: An XML Pipeline Language, a language for describing operations
to be performed on XML documents. Pipelines are made up of simple steps
which perform atomic operations on XML documents and constructs similar
to conditionals, iteration, and exception handlers, which control which
steps are executed. An XML Pipeline specifies a sequence of operations
to be performed on a collection of XML input documents. Pipelines take
zero or more XML documents as their input and produce zero or more XML
documents as their output. A pipeline consists of steps. Like pipelines,
steps take zero or more XML documents as their inputs and produce zero
or more XML documents as their outputs. The inputs of a step come from
the web, from the pipeline document, from the inputs to the pipeline
itself, or from the outputs of other steps in the pipeline. The outputs
from a step are consumed by other steps, are outputs of the pipeline
as a whole, or are discarded. There are two kinds of steps: atomic
steps and compound steps. Atomic steps carry out single operations and
have no substructure as far as the pipeline is concerned, whereas
compound steps control the execution of other steps, which they include
in the form of one or more subpipelines.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-xproc-20080501/
See also the W3C XML Processing Model Working Group: http://www.w3.org/XML/Processing/
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Member Ballot for OASIS Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Specification
Staff, OASIS Announcement
OASIS announced that the Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Technical
Committee has submitted two specifications for consideration by the
membership as OASIS Standards. Balloting will begin on May 16, 2008
and extend through the end of the month. [1] "Extensible Resource
Identifier (XRI) Syntax V2.0" specifies the normative syntax and
transformation rules for a new type of digital identifier called an XRI
(Extensible Resource Identifier). XRIs are called "abstract structured
identifiers" -- abstract because they are intended to be resolved via a
standard discovery process into other concrete identifiers for a resource,
and structured because they may contain self-describing "tags". Abstract
structured identifiers are designed for use with digital identity and data
sharing infrastructure such as OpenID, OAuth, SAML, information cards,
Higgins, XDI, etc. XRI Syntax 2.0 extends IRI/URI syntax by: (1) Allowing
the internal components of an XRI to be explicitly tagged as either
persistent or reassignable. (2) Enabling XRIs to contain other XRIs
(or IRIs or URIs), a syntactic structure called "cross-referencing" that
allows sharing of identifiers, such as generic identifiers or "tags",
across multiple authorities and namespaces. (3) Supporting new types of
identifier authorities including global context symbols and
cross-references. XRIs build on the foundation of interoperable Web
identifiers established by URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers, RFC 3986)
and IRIs (Internationalized Resource Identifiers, RFC 3987). Just as
the IRI specification created a new identifier by extending the unreserved
character set allowed in generic URIs, and defined rules for transforming
IRIs into valid URIs, the XRI Syntax 2.0 specification creates a new
identifier by extending the syntax of IRIs and defining transformations
of XRIs into valid IRIs (which can then be transformed into valid URIs.)
[2] "Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Resolution Version 2.0", a
companion specification to the XRI Syntax 2.0 specification for abstract
structured identifiers, provides a simple standardized method for
performing resource discovery on either HTTP(S) URIs or XRIs. XRI
Resolution 2.0 defines a simple generic XML discovery document format
called XRDS (Extensible Resource Descriptor Sequence), a standard
protocol for requesting XRDS documents using HTTP(S) URIs, and standard
protocol for resolving XRIs using XRDS documents and HTTP(S) URIs. Both
generic and trusted versions of the XRI resolution protocol are defined
(the latter using HTTPS (RFC 2818) and/or signed SAML assertions). In
addition, an HTTP(S) proxy resolution service is specified both to
provide network-based resolution services and for backwards compatibility
with existing HTTP(S) infrastructure.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/15376/xri-syntax-V2.0-cs.html
See also the Resolution companion spec: http://docs.oasis-open.org/xri/xri-resolution/2.0/specs/cs01/xri-resolution-V2.0-cs-01.html
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Microsoft Ships Expression Studio 2 Tools
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Microsoft has announced the release of its Expression 2 Studio design
tools, which provide application design capabilities to complement
application development capabilities of the company's Visual Studio
toolset. Leveraging XAML, the products in Expression Studio can be
used to build standards-based and Microsoft Silverlight Web experiences.
Windows Vista and .Net Framework 3.5 client applications also can be
designed. The tools are said to be 'Standards Based' -- "built to
translate your visual layouts into fully compliant pages using your
choice of versions of XHTML, CSS, XML and XSLT." XAML "is a declarative
XML-based language that defines objects and their properties in XML.
XAML syntax describes objects, properties and their relationships to
one another. Generic XAML syntax defines the relationship between
objects and children. Properties can be set as attributes or by using
'period notation' to specify the object as a property of its parent...
Although XAML is presently for use on the Windows platform, the WPF/E
(Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere) initiative will
eventually bring XAML to other platforms and devices... As the XAML
markup for an application's UI remains separate from the remainder of
application logic, a designer's exact layout can be saved in XAML and
combined with the application without affecting the development
process." According to the announcement, key features include the
following: (1) Expression Web 2 adds support for PHP and Adobe
Photoshop import based on customer feedback. (2) Expression Blend 2,
in addition to Silverlight support, adds vertex animation and an
improved user interface with a new split design/XAML view. (3)
Expression Design 2 adds improved exporting functionality including
the ability to export slices. (4) Expression Media 2 is a robust digital
asset management solution for photographers and other creative
professionals. It adds support for the latest file formats including
RAW, provides geotagging functionality, and is supported by Microsoft
Office 2007 and Microsoft Office for Mac 2008. (5) Expression Encoder
2 is now a core offering of the suite. It allows creative and Web
professionals to optimize almost any type of video content quickly for
publishing on the Web, either in streaming video, rich-media advertising
or other Web 2.0 projects.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/05/01/microsoft-expression_1.html
See also the announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/may08/05-01Expression2PR.mspx
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