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XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 14 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
Primeton http://www.primeton.com
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HEADLINES:

* Sir Tim Berners-Lee to Track Origins of Digital Content
* Data Documentation Initiative Releases DDI Specification Version 3.0
* Real Web 2.0: Practical Linked, Open Data with SIMILE Exhibit
* Web Accessibility for Older Users: A Literature Review
* Invitation to Review HTML 5 Draft Recommendation
* Use XForms and DB2 pureXML for IRS e-File Form 1120

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee to Track Origins of Digital Content
K.C. Jones, InformationWeek

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has received a grant to create a
technology that will give users more information about the origins and
sources of digital content. Berners-Lee received a Knight News Challenge
award Wednesday, during the Interactive Media Conference and Tradeshow
2008 in Las Vegas. Sixteen ideas to fund innovative digital projects
around the world were awarded $5.5 million dollars from the John S. and
James L. Knight Foundation. This is the second year of the $25 million
Knight News Challenge, which funds digital information innovations that
transform community life. Announced at the Interactive Media Conference
in Las Vegas, this year's projects will touch people in rural India,
the townships of South Africa and on college campuses across the United
States, among other places. Berners-Lee's project is a partnership
between the Media Standards Trust and the UK-based Web Science Research
Initiative, of which he is a director. According to the 2008 Winners
Reference: With the copious amounts of information (and misinformation)
on the Internet, the public needs more help finding fair, accurate and
contextual news. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add
information on their sources to their reports, as a form of source
tagging. For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based
on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific,
original documents. Filters would then use this data ('the story behind
the story') to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the
phrase 'Pakistan riots' for example, might find 9,000 articles. But
filtering by 'eyewitness accounts' would yield a more selective list.
Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working
with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into
journalists' normal workflow.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/search/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207800163
See also the announcement: http://www.newschallenge.org/189/news-challenge-press-release.html

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Data Documentation Initiative Releases DDI Specification Version 3.0
Staff, DDI Alliance Announcement

The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) recently announced the approval
the latest version of the DDI specification, DDI 3.0, and the
specification has now been officially published. The Alliance reviewed
the specification and related use cases and implementations during the
month of April [2008] and then voted to ratify DDI 3.0 officially; the
final published package was made available on April 28, 2008. The Data
Documentation Initiative is an effort to establish an international
XML-based standard for the content, presentation, transport, and
preservation of documentation for datasets in the social and behavioral
sciences. Documentation, sometimes called metadata (data about data),
constitutes the information that enables the effective, efficient, and
accurate use of those datasets. The DDI metadata specification originated
in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
and is now the project of an Alliance of about 25 institutions in North
America and Europe. Together, the member institutions comprise many of
the largest data producers and data archives in the world. Virtually
every kind of body of data is found in one or more of the archives. The
DDI specification is a major transformation of the once-familiar
electronic "codebook," retaining all of the capabilities of that kind
of document but greatly increasing the scope and rigor of the information
contained in it. Indeed, the DDI metadata can be displayed as conventional
paper or screen codebook-like documents, but unlike the old codebooks,
the information displayed can be fully understood by computer software
as well as by humans. The DDI transforms the concept of codebooks by
encoding codebook information into databases that share a known structure
and a specification language across many bodies of data. Online DDI
schema documentation has been produced using customized XSL transforms
and tools based on the Orbeon Presentation Server platform. The help
system itself is developed as an Eclipse plugin and made available on
the web through an Eclipse Infocenter, the stand alone version of Eclipse
help.

http://www.ddialliance.org/announce.html#ddi3

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Real Web 2.0: Practical Linked, Open Data with SIMILE Exhibit
Uche Ogbuji, IBM developerWorks

SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike
Environments) is a research project developing tools to share diverse
collections of data and digital media. SIMILE is a joint project of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the W3C, and it has
produced some real gems. One of these is Exhibit, which allows you to
produce Web pages with widgets the user can use to quickly comb through
large collections of data. Exhibit makes this easy and requires little
programming. It is developed by David Huynh, with contributions from
others on the SIMILE team. This article explains how the Exhibit Web
library allows you to construct functional and visually attractive user
interfaces without much work, once you have good 'LOD' available. Linking
Open Data (LOD) is a community initiative for moving the Web from
separated documents to a broad information space of data. The principles
of LOD are very important, but when a Web developer has a deadline
looming it's not always easy to put "important" into perspective. Exhibit
is one of those tools that takes a grand idea and uses it to actually
make a developer's life easier. If you have a collection of information
and you need to present it to users so they can easily see it in context
and find details they care about, take advantage of the large head start
Exhibit offers.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-realweb6/

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Web Accessibility for Older Users: A Literature Review
Andrew Arch (ed), W3C Technical Report

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working
Group Working Group (EOWG) has published "Web Accessibility for Older
Users: A Literature Review" as a First Public Working Draft. Public
comment on this WD is invited through Wednesday 4-June-2008. The document
includes reviews and analysis of guidelines and articles covering the
requirements of people with Web accessibility needs related to ageing.
This literature review will inform WAI efforts to promote accessibility
solutions for older Web users and potentially to develop profiles or
extensions to WAI guidelines. The literature review is a deliverable of
the WAI-AGE Project (Ageing Education and Harmonisation). Many countries
in Europe and elsewhere have legislation in place to reduce discrimination
against people with disabilities, both young and old, along with related
policies or guidelines applying to online services. Furthermore, the
European Union (EU) and the European Commission (EC) have programmes in
place to ensure that e-Inclusion for people with disabilities is enhanced
among the Member States, and it is also addressing the needs of the
elderly and other disadvantaged groups. In particular, they have agreed
to address the needs of older workers and elderly people by exploiting
the full potential of the internal market of information and
communications technology (ICT) services and products for the elderly,
amongst others by addressing demand fragmentation by promoting
interoperability through standards and common specifications where
appropriate. The EC has been addressing the technology needs of the
elderly for some time; however under the 6th Framework Programme (FP6)
of research under the Information Society and Technology (IST) programme,
several calls have focused on the needs of the elderly in the information
society. This issue is compounding because the world's population is
living longer with a disproportionate number of people soon to be elderly
as compared with any other period in human history. The United Nations
(UN) estimates that by 2050 one out of every five people will be over
60 years, and by 2150, one third of the people in the world are expected
to be 60 years of age or older.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-wai-age-literature-20080514/
See also the W3C WAI-AGE (IST 035015) Project Reference: http://www.w3.org/WAI/WAI-AGE/

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Invitation to Review HTML 5 Draft Recommendation
Ian Hickson, WHATWG Announcement

The HTML5 specification is still a work in progress, but a general
invitation for public review has been issued. The draft has annotations
indicating how stable each section is, as different parts of the
specification are at different levels of maturity; some sections are
widely implemented, others are in their very first draft form and
haven't really received any review yet. The HTML5 specification
"evolves HTML and its related APIs to ease the authoring of Web-based
applications. Additions include the context menus, a direct-mode
graphics canvas, inline popup windows, and server-sent events. Heavy
emphasis is placed on keeping the language backwards compatible with
existing legacy user agents and on keeping user agents backwards
compatible with existing legacy documents." The specification is being
produced by WHATWG and the W3C HTML Working Group.

http://whatwg.org/html5
See also the one-page version: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/

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Use XForms and DB2 pureXML for IRS e-File Form 1120
Keith Wells, Susan Malaika, Christian Pichler; IBM developerWorks

The W3C Forms working group, comprised of W3C members and invited experts,
is chartered by the W3C to develop the next generation of forms
technology for the world wide web. The mission is to address the patterns
of intricacy, dynamism, multi-modality, and device independence that
have become prevalent in Web Forms Applications around the world. This
article demonstrates end-to-end XML data exchange with XForms and DB
pureXML for IRS e-File Form 1120. It presents you with technologies for
quick creation of pureXML databases for XML messages, Universal Web
Services to interact with these pureXML databases, and XForms which can
be used to interrogate and visualize data from the stored XML messages
to a user in a client-based browser. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
is part of the United States Department of the Treasury that supports
individuals and companies to report their income, credits, and other
information. Therefore, the IRS defined e-file messages based on the
Extensible Markup Language (XML). E-file messages are an electronic
alternative to filing paper reports. In particular, the IRS e-File 1120
message is designed for corporations to determine the tax liability for
the corporation. The XML Forms Generator tool is an IBM alphaWorks
package (Eclipse plug-in) intended to jump-start XForms development. It
produces valid and functional forms containing XForms markup embedded
within an XHTML document. The input to form generation may be an XML
message (optionally) backed by an XML schema or a WSDL document. Response
processing templates and combination request/response forms also may be
generated from a WSDL document. Any document the XML Forms Generator
produces may serve as a starting point for further form, layout, and
styling customizations. An extension point provides opportunities for
post-processing during generation of a form. Integrating and submitting
XML data from XForms through an SOA interface to a database means there
are fewer steps between the user and the database, less server processing,
and quicker development time to retrieve and process XML data from an
XForms-capable browser.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0805malaika2/
See also XML and Forms: http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlForms.html

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XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc. http://www.bea.com
IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
Primeton http://www.primeton.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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