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XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 20 June 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:

* W3C Call for Implementations: RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing
* Conference Information Data Model for Centralized Conferencing (XCON)
* Emergency Data Exchange Language Resource Messaging (EDXL-RM) 1.0
* Make Use of WS-I Resources to Test for Web Service Interoperability
* WS-Transfer, WS-Enumeration, WS-MetadataExchange, WS-ResourceTransfer
* Preservation DataStores: Storage Paradigm for Preservation Environments
* Project Concordia Shows Important Step in Federation Interoperability
* DITA Open Platform Version 1.0.0
* NYS Open Records Discussion Must Recognize Technical Requirements
* Some AIR in Adobe's Web Services?

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W3C Call for Implementations: RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing
Ben Adida, Mark Birbeck, et al. (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C has announced the advance of the following specification to
Candidate Recommendation status: "RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing.
A Collection of Attributes and Processing Rules for Extending XHTML to
Support RDF." The This is a Candidate Recommendation and call for
implementations was produced jointly by the W3C Semantic Web Deployment
Working Group and the XHTML 2 Working Group. The working groups also
released revised a revised version of "RDFa Primer: Bridging the Human
and Data Webs" and "RDFa Implementation Report." The specification is
considered stable by the working groups, whose members intend to submit
it consideration as a W3C Proposed Recommendation after 19-July-2008,
having met the following criteria (1) At least two implementations have
been demonstrated that pass all tests in the test suite; (2) All issues
raised during the CR period against this document have received formal
responses. Specificatio summary: Today's web is built predominantly
for human consumption. Even as machine-readable data begins to appear
on the web, it is typically distributed in a separate file, with a
separate format, and no correspondence between the human and machine
versions. As a result, web browsers can provide only minimal assistance
to humans in parsing and processing web data: browsers only see
presentation information. We introduce RDFa, which provides a set of
HTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints. We
show how to express simple and more complex datasets using RDFa, and
in particular how to turn the existing human-visible text and links
into machine-readable data without repeating content... RDFa is a
specification for attributes to be used with languages such as HTML
and XHTML to express structured data. The rendered, hypertext data of
XHTML is reused by the RDFa markup, so that publishers don't need to
repeat significant data in the document content. This document only
specifies the use of the RDFa attributes with XHTML. The underlying
abstract representation is RDF, which lets publishers build their own
vocabulary, extend others, and evolve their vocabulary with maximal
interoperability over time. The expressed structure is closely tied to
the data, so that rendered data can be copied and pasted along with
its relevant structure. The rules for interpreting the data are generic,
so that there is no need for different rules for different formats;
this allows authors and publishers of data to define their own formats
without having to update software, register formats via a central
authority, or worry that two formats may interfere with each other.
RDFa shares some use cases with microformats. Whereas microformats
specify both a syntax for embedding structured data into HTML documents
and a vocabulary of specific terms for each microformat, RDFa specifies
only a syntax and relies on independent specification of terms (often
called vocabularies or taxonomies) by others. RDFa allows terms from
multiple independently-developed vocabularies to be freely intermixed
and is designed such that the language can be parsed without knowledge
of the specific term vocabulary being used.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/CR-rdfa-syntax-20080620/
See also the RDFa Implementation Report: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/implementation-report/

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Conference Information Data Model for Centralized Conferencing (XCON)
O. Novo, G. Camarillo, D. Morgan, R. Even (eds), IETF Internet Draft

Members of the IETF Centralized Conferencing (XCON) Working Group have
published a revised Internet Draft for the "Conference Information Data
Model for Centralized Conferencing (XCON)." This 75-page specification
defines an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based conference information
data model for centralized conferencing (XCON). A conference information
data model is designed to convey information about the conference and
about participation in the conference. The conference information data
model defined in this document constitutes an extension of the data
format specified in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Event Package
for Conference State. Appendix A supplies the Non-Normative RELAX NG
Schema in XML Syntax. Overview: There is a core data set of conference
information that is utilized in any conference, independent of the
specific conference media. This core data set called the 'conference
information data model' is defined in this document using XML. The
conference information data model defined in this document is logically
represented by the conference object. Conference objects are a fundamental
concept in Centralized Conferencing, as described in the Centralized
Conferencing Framework (RFC 5239). A conference object contains data
that represents a conference during each of its various stages (e.g.,
created/creation, reserved/reservation, active/activation,
completed/completion). A conference object can be manipulated using a
conference control protocol at a conference server. The conference
object represents a particular instantiation of a conference information
data model. Consequently, conference objects follow the XML format
defined in this document. A conference object contains the core
information of a conference (i.e., capabilities, membership, call
control signaling, media, etc.) and specifies who, and in which way that
information can be manipulated... The data model specified in this
document is the result of extending the data format defined in IETF
RFC 4575 with new elements. Examples of such extensions include
scheduling elements, media control elements, floor control elements,
non-SIP URIs, and addition of localization extensions to text elements.
This data model can be used by conference servers providing different
types of basic conferences. It is expected that this data model can be
further extended with new elements in the future in order to implement
additional advanced features.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-ietf-xcon-common-data-model-11.txt
See also the IETF Centralized Conferencing (XCON) Working Group Status Pages: http://tools.ietf.org/wg/xcon/

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Emergency Data Exchange Language Resource Messaging (EDXL-RM) 1.0
Patti Aymond, Rex Brooks, Tim Grapes (et al., eds), OASIS PR Draft

OASIS announced that the Emergency Management Technical Committee has
released an approved Committee Draft for public review: "Emergency Data
Exchange Language Resource Messaging (EDXL-RM) 1.0," Public Review Draft
03. The public review period ends July 05, 2008. As detailed in the
EDXL-DE Specification, the goal of the EDXL project is to facilitate
emergency information sharing and data exchange across the local,
state, tribal, national and non-governmental organizations of different
professions that provide emergency response and management services.
EDXL will accomplish this goal by focusing on the standardization of
specific messages (messaging interfaces) to facilitate emergency
communication and coordination particularly when more than one
profession or governmental jurisdiction is involved. The primary
purpose of the Emergency Data Exchange Language Resource Messaging
(EDXL-RM) Specification is to provide a set of standard formats for
XML emergency response messages. These Resource Messages are specifically
designed as payloads of Emergency Data Exchange Language Distribution
Element- (EDXL-DE)-routed messages. Together EDXL-DE and EDXL-RM are
intended to expedite all activities associated with resources needed
to respond and adapt to emergency incidents. The Distribution Element
may be thought of as a "container". It provides the information to
route "payload" message sets (such as Alerts or Resource Messages),
by including key routing information such as distribution type,
geography, incident, and sender/recipient IDs. The Resource Message
is constrained to the set of Resource Message Types contained in this
specification. The Resource Message is intended to be the payload or
one of the payloads of the Distribution Element which contains it.

http://docs.oasis-open.org/emergency/edxl-rm/v1.0/pr03/EDXL-RM-v1.0-PR03.html
See also OASIS Emergency Management TC specifications: http://xml.coverpages.org/emergencyManagement.html#oasis

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Make Use of WS-I Resources to Test for Web Service Interoperability
Klaus Berg, Java World Blog

In theory, Web services are especially designed to offer "reusable"
features that are discovered and bound at runtime using technical
"loose coupling." The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) has been formed
expressly to help speed the creation and adoption of integrated,
interoperable business applications based on open source. The OSA
recommends that each vendor or project lead should carefully think
about which functions in their to need to be triggered by other
applications, and ensure that they are exposed in a loosely coupled
way so customers and integrators can take care of implementing the
process. These functions should be exposed as a service and should be
implementation language neutral, so for example a PHP application
can invoke a feature in a Java application. Having in mind that Web
services are used by consumers unknown at design-time, and looking at
the "Publish-Discover-Invoke-Paradigm" based on standards it will
become evident that Web services are fundamentally about
"interoperability". In reality, however, the "standard" protocols
are not standard enough to ensure automatic interoperability... WS-I
is an open industry organization "chartered to establish Best
Practices for Web services interoperability, for selected groups of
Web services standards, across platforms, operating systems and
programming languages". The organization is a consortium of Web
services companies to provide guidance, recommended practices, and
supporting resources for developing interoperable Web services in
the SOA world... WS-I testing tools are used to determine whether
the messages exchanged with a Web service conform to WS-I guidelines.
These tools monitor the messages and analyze the resulting log to
identify any known issues, thus improving interoperability between
applications and across platforms. Together with the tools WS-I
offers: Implementation and testing guidance with respect to
interoperability, sample programs, and, of course, Web service profiles.
WS-I Profiles are addressing the interoperability issues by prescribing
a set of specifications or standards at specific version levels, and
by adding guidelines and conventions for using these specifications
together. The most fundamental profile is the Basic Profile (BP),
which addresses the integration of the following specifications and
standards: SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 2.0, XML Schema, XML 1.0 (Second
Edition), HTTP 1.1, TLS 1.0 or SSL 3.0 (HTTPS). More than 200
interoperability issues have been resolved by adoption of this Basic
Profile. However, WS-I offers also other profiles, some of them are
already finalized, others are currently still in progress...

http://www.javaworld.com/community/?q=node/828
See also the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I): http://www.ws-i.org/

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WS-Transfer, WS-Enumeration, WS-MetadataExchange, WS-ResourceTransfer
W3C Members, Public Posting

A memo to W3C from W3C AC Representatives Steve Holbrook (IBM), Jeff
Mischkinsky (Oracle), Kazunori Iwasa (Fujitsu), and Paul Lipton (CA)
recommends the creation of new Working Group "Web Services Resource
Access Working Group (suggested) to four Web services specifications:
WS-Transfer, WS-Enumeration, WS-MetadataExchange, WS-ResourceTransfer.
The proposers express the belief that "it is time for the next step
in the open standardization of [these] key specifications that address
this issue. We believe that [the] four specifications, in particular,
work together to provide mechanisms for accessing and manipulating the
XML representation of a resource as well as any metadata associated
with that resource." According to the text of the proposed Working
Group Charter, the anticipated submission specifications "define
mechanisms for accessing and updating the XML representation and
metadata of Web Service resources." WS-Transfer defines base CRUD
(Create, Read, Update, Delete) type of operations against Web Service
resources. Specifically, it defines two types of entities: 'Resources',
which are entities addressable by an endpoint reference that provide
an XML representation and 'Resource factories', which are Web services
that can create a new resource from an XML representation.
WS-ResourceTransfer enhances these operations, through the extensibility
points of WS-Transfer, with the addition of fragment and batched
access. WS-Enumeration provides a protocol that allows a resource
to provide a session abstraction, called an enumeration context, to
a consumer that represents a logical cursor through a sequence of data
items. In its simplest form, WS-Enumeration defines a single operation,
Pull, which allows a data source, in the context of a specific
enumeration, to produce a sequence of XML elements in the body of a
SOAP message. Each subsequent Pull operation returns the next N elements
in the aggregate sequence. WS-MetadataExchange defines a mechanism by
which metadata about a Web Service resource can be retrieved. When
used in conjunction with WS-Transfer, WS-ResourceTransfer and
WS-Enumeration, this metadata can be managed just like any other Web
Service resource.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws/2008Jun/0001.html
See also on WS-MetadataExchange: http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2004-09-21-a.html#ws-mex-200608

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Preservation DataStores: Storage Paradigm for Preservation Environments
S. Rabinovici-Cohen, M. Factor (et al., eds), IBM Systems Journal

Today we are facing a paradox. We can read and interpret the Dead Sea
scrolls created two millennia ago, but most of us no longer have the
means to read or interpret data we may have generated ourselves two
decades ago on a 5.25-inch floppy disk. Nevertheless, long-term
preservation of digital data is being required by new regulations, such
as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA),
Sarbanes-Oxley, Occupational and Safety Health Administration (OSHA)
regulations, and other federal securities laws and regulations. These
rules can require keeping medical data for the life of a patient or
financial data for the life of an account. In addition to regulatory
requirements, there are business, cultural, and personal needs to
preserve digital information for periods longer than the lifetime of
the technology that was used to create the data. For example, earth
observation data from the European Space Agency and cultural heritage
data from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization) must be kept for decades and centuries. Finally, the
amount of long-lived data is expected to grow even more with the vast
amounts of digital data being generated by emerging digital devices...
In this article, the authors describe Preservation DataStores, an
innovative storage architecture that facilitates robust and optimized
preservation environments. It is a layered architecture that builds
upon open standards, including Open Archival Information System (OAIS),
XAM (Extensible Access Method), and Object-based Storage Device. They
also describe the integration of Preservation DataStores with existing
file systems and archives and discuss some design and implementation
issues. They are developing Preservation DataStores as an infrastructure
component of the European Union CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific
knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval) project, where it will
be used to preserve scientific, cultural, and artistic data. PDS is an
innovative storage architecture for OAIS-based preservation-aware storage.
We described some of the design and implementation issues encountered
while developing the PDS prototype. The preservation layer, the compound
object layer, and the stored-object layer are based on the OAIS, XAM,
and OSD open standards, respectively. Each layer provides object
abstraction using AIP, XSet, and OSD objects, linked by generic mappings.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/524/rabinovici.html
See also the U.S. LOC PREMIS presrevation project: http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletter/news2008-05-15.html#cite5

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Project Concordia Shows Important Step in Federation Interoperability
Felix Gaehtgens, Blog

At the recent RSA conference in San Francisco in the second week of
April [2008], several vendors demonstrated new interoperability between
previously incompatible federation protocols. Through Project Concordia,
a new project co-sponsored by the Liberty Alliance and several other
vendors, several profiles were shown that showed seamless integration
of SAML, WS-Federation, and CardSpace. This demonstration is significant,
because it shows that vendors, especially Microsoft, are bowing to
increased pressure from customers to focus on interoperability. It also
highlights the challenges that are still ahead and yet to be solved...
At the interop, FuGen Solutions, Internet2, Microsoft, Oracle, Ping
Identity, Sun Microsystems and Symlabs showed several use cases that
combined these technologies. At the forefront of the demonstration was
to show that integration of federation scenarios using a mixture of
SAML2 and WS-Federation protocols was now possible. Those companies that
managed to implement support for both of these protocols in their products
showed how a server running the vendors' federation software could
transparently (for the user) bridge between systems using the SAML2
protocol, and the WS-Federation protocol. For example, a user that had
previously federated successfully using SAML2 technology could now
seamlessly access a Resource Partner (federation client) such as
Microsoft SharePoint. The vendors' federation server acts simultaneously
as a SAML2 Identity Provider (IdP) and a WS-Federation Account Partner
(AP), and translates authentication tokens from one protocol to the other.
Another interesting demonstration was the use of SAML2 tokens within
the WS-Federation protocol. Even though this feature has always been
foreseen from the specification, Microsoft and IBM, the main drivers
behind the WS-* specification including WS-Federation, had never
implemented support for SAML2 tokens within their implementation, instead
opting to support only SAML1 security tokens embedded within WS-Federation
protocol messages. A month ago, Joe Long from Microsoft made a
groundbreaking announcement at Netpro's Directory Experts Conference
in Chicago. He mentioned that it was already possible to include SAML2
tokens with ADFS, Microsoft's Active Directory Federation Services, and
that Microsoft was currently re-evaluating whether to support SAML2 as
a native protocol. Previously, Microsoft had steadily refused to support
SAML2, pointing out that WS-Federation was the intended standard for
federating within the Microsoft ecosystem.

http://www.kuppingercole.com/articles/concordia_200608
See also the Project Concordia web site: http://projectconcordia.org/

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DITA Open Platform Version 1.0.0
Claude Vedovini, Blog

Members of the DITA Open Platform Project announced the first milestone
of the DITA Open Platform version 1.0.0. This milestone is a test
release in order to see if there is interest in the DITA community for
what the DITA Open Platform project plans to offer. It is also a mean
to collect suggestions and ideas from the community. The goal of this
project is to provide the DITA community with a free and easy-to-deploy
DITA oriented production platform. It is targeted at small companies or
teams that do not need a complete CMS solution. The key deliverable of
this milestone is the DITA-OP Editor, an Eclipse-based set of plugins
featuring: (1) The complete DITA architecture and language specification
available through the Eclipse help system; (2) A DITA project nature
which enables DITA files validation pure XML validation and hyperlink
references validation) and problem markers; (3) Wizards and templates
to create new DITA files -- topics, concepts, references, tasks, maps,
bookmaps and processing profiles; (4) A processing profile (ditaval)
form editor; (5) A topic editor which leverage the power of the Eclipse
XML editor (content assist, templates, as you type validation, formatting)
with a dedicated preview page; (6) A launch configuration dedicated to
the DITA Open Toolkit which enables setting up the toolkit scripts,
saving your configuration for later reuse or sharing and even adding
automatic build to your DITA project. Next step will be to provide a
server packaging enabling, for example, configuration management of the
DITA files, management of the authoring process, and management of the
publication process.

http://www.dita-op.org/2008/06/22/dita-op-100-m1-announcement/
See also DITA XML.org resources: http://dita.xml.org

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NYS Open Records Discussion Must Recognize Technical Requirements
Jon Bosak, Public Policy Technical Contribution

"The normally somnolent world of computer data format standards has been
roiled over the last year by a clash between the biggest names in the
computer business, a struggle that has spread to include not just
industry giants but also national governments and large sectors of the
programming community as well. Everyone agrees that it's time to move
beyond the dominant, proprietary Microsoft Office formats (the
familiar .doc, .xls, and .ppt files) and into the new world of open,
accessible XML-based formats. The question is, which one? On one side:
ODF (Open Document Format), backed by a group of companies that includes
IBM, Google, and Sun Microsystems (my employer), plus most of the
'open-source' software community. ODF was approved as an International
Standard (ISO 26300) in 2006. On the other side: OOXML (Office Open XML),
backed by Microsoft, its industry partners, and a vast army of Microsoft
developers. OOXML was rushed into standardization in order to preserve
Microsoft's historic domination of office productivity formats. It has
been tentatively approved as ISO 29500 pending the resolution of appeals
lodged by several national standards organizations. The struggle to
establish one or the other of these competing standards as the single
format for office productivity software (a generic term that means
Microsoft Office and its competitors, most notably the free open-source
OpenOffice suite) has gone beyond the technical questions to raise
larger issues ranging from European antitrust policy to the validity of
the standards process to the ability of governments to provide universal
data access for their citizens. In the U.S., no fewer than seven states
have introduced legislation seeking to define public policy in this
area. The most notable activity has taken place in Massachusetts, which
mandated 'open standards' and found itself in the end supporting both
ODF and OOXML as overlapping formats... The state of New York has not
been lagging in its own efforts to resolve the issue... Which editable
format to adopt for document creation remains an open question. I
believe that there are strong reasons for standardizing on ODF as the
document creation format across all [New York] state agencies, but this
is an issue separate from which format to use for the electronic
publication of state documents that are not intended to be filled out
and sent back. For the publication of the ordinary run of state
documents there is only one sensible choice -- PDF/A. As a New York
State resident, I call upon the Legislature to recognize this technical
reality before mandating a broken policy that we will have to live with
long into the future."

http://www.ibiblio.org/bosak/pub/nys-open-records-policy.html

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Some AIR in Adobe's Web Services?
Erin Joyce, InternetNews.com

Adobe Systems has updated its software for Web services, LiveCycle
Enterprise Suite (ES), with the integration of its Flex platform and
AIR runtime environments. The additions are designed to juice up Web
applications and improve end users' experience with Web applications,
such as filling out accident forms online. Speed is also a factor in
the upgrades. Brian Wick, director of Adobe's LiveCycle product
marketing, said the LiveCycle ES Update 1 adds components designed to
help developers build content-rich applications at a rapid clip...
The upgrade to the LiveCycle ES comes about a year after Adobe
integrated its Flex development environment, PDF technologies, its
Flash Player and Adobe Reader with the tools in LiveCycle Enterprise
Suite. Now, the addition of AIR to the suite helps developers build
more Web applications that function much like the more sophisticated
applications that often only reside on desktops. AIR is shorthand for
Adobe Integrated Runtime, which is the company's foundation for
building rich Internet applications (RIA). Like the addition of Flex,
the developer framework that exists in Adobe's Dreamweaver authoring
software for Web application development, the AIR platform helps
developers reuse code that was used for a Flash-based animation and
deploy in a Web application. The AIR runtime enables developers to
use HTML, Ajax , Flash and Flex to add more whiz bang to rich Internet
applications that work across operating systems. As for whether the
upgrade is a competitive response to Microsoft's Silverlight platform,
the well-received cross-browser technology that competes with Adobe's
Flash platform... "we'll have to see how that plays out."

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/print.php/3753896
See also Adobe AIR: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

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XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

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