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XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 07 August 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:

* W3C First Public Working Draft: VoiceXML 3.0 Requirements
* WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance as an Exposed Constraints Engine
* NIEM Year in Review: Looking Back and Looking Forward
* Is AMQP on the Way to Providing Real Business Interoperability?
* X3D: The Real-Time 3D Solution for the Web
* Text Retrieval for XML-Encoded Corpora: A Lexical Approach
* OGF Secure Addressing Profile 1.0 Published in the Recommendation Track
* OGSA Basic Security Profile 2.0

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W3C First Public Working Draft: VoiceXML 3.0 Requirements
Jeff Hoepfinger and Emily Candell (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced publication of the First Public Working Draft for "The
Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0 Requirements." The W3C
Voice Browser working group aims to develop specifications to enable
access to the Web using spoken interaction. VoiceXML 2.0 is designed
for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized
audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording of spoken
input, telephony, and mixed initiative conversations. VoiceXML 3.0 is
the next major release of VoiceXML. Its purpose is to provide even
more powerful dialog capabilities that can be used to build advanced
speech applications and to provide these capabilities in a form that
can be easily and cleanly integrated with other W3C languages. The
main goal of the activity presented in this WD is to establish the
current status of the Voice Browser Working Group Activities relative
to the requirements defined in Previous Requirements Document and define
additional requirements to drive future Voice Browser Working Group
activities based on Voice Community experience with existing standards.
(1) Modality requirements concern the types of modalities (media in
combination with an input/output mechanism) supported by the markup
language for user input and system output. (For the Voice Browser
Working Group, the modalities supported are speech, video and DTMF.
Requirements regarding other modalities will be handled by the
Multimodal Interaction Working Group.) (2) Functional requirements
concern the behavior (or operational semantics) which results from
interpreting a voice markup language. (3) Format requirements constrain
the format (or syntax) of the voice markup language itself. The
environment and capabilities of the voice browser interpreting the
markup language affects these requirements. There may be differences
in the modality and functional requirements for desktop versus
telephony-based environments (and in the latter case, between fixed,
mobile and Internet telephony environments). The capabilities of the
voice browser device also impacts on requirements. Requirements
affected by the environment or capabilities of the voice browser
device are explicitly marked as such.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-vxml30reqs-20080808/
See also the W3C Voice Browser Activity Statement: http://www.w3.org/Voice/Activity.html

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WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance as an Exposed Constraints Engine
D. Colonnese, A. Klevitsky, and U. Manohar; IBM developerWorks

IBM WebSphere DataPower Appliance has a powerful set of extension
functions that you can use within a policy rule action. This article
shows you to integrate DataPower extension functions into ISO
Schematron rules, and how to repurpose Schematron-based rules for
different representations and contexts. Part 1 of this article series
described a sample policy rule with a Transform action using a
Schematron validation stylesheet to validate the incoming data and a
Filter action that filtered out the invalid requests. You can also
integrate DataPower extension functions with the Schematron basic
stylesheet to generate a validation stylesheet with the DataPower
extension functions built into it. DataPower Extension elements and
Extension Functions are a potent supplement to XSLT and Schematron.
They let you control requests and responses as well as intermediate
processing data on DataPower. Additionally DataPower has cryptography
extension functions that you can use in various ways to enforce
enterprise security at the edge. This article shows you how to
integrate DataPower extension functions into ISO Schematron rules,
and how to repurpose Schematron-based rules for different
representations and contexts, in order to validate data at the
enterprise edge. You should have some familiarity with DataPower,
ISO Schematron, and XSLT.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0808_colonnese/0808_colonnese.html
See also ISO Schematron: http://www.schematron.com/spec.html

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NIEM Year in Review: Looking Back and Looking Forward
Staff, NIEM Newsletter

The National Information Exchange Model (www.niem.gov) Program was
launched on February 28, 2005, as a partnership between the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Department of
Justice (DOJ). For the next two and one-half years, NIEM experienced
a rapid development phase with several releases and homeland security
and justice pilot projects conducted at the federal, state, and local
levels... The NIEM leverages both the Global Justice XML Data Model
(GJXDM) reference model and the GJXDM XML-based framework and support
infrastructure. The NIEM model incorporates reference schemas (Core,
code lists, domains, wrappers for external standards, as well as the
schemas for those standards, or profiles or adaptations); it also
contains a cumulative change log and the spreadsheet. NIEM provides
practitioners and developers with a baseline set of XML Schema
components for building Information Exchange Package Documentation
(IEPDs). Among the NIEM 2.0 XML Schemas is a 'NIEM Domain Schema' for
Emergency Management... NIEM Information Exchange Packages (IEPs) are
the foundation of NIEM's business value as an enabler for nationwide
information interoperability and sharing. Broad adoption with
collaborative sharing of adoption and use experience, best practices,
lessons learned, IEP Documentation (IEPD) reuse, and cooperative
development IEPDs for nationwide information exchange are critical
for achieving the full potential of NIEM. Since the release of NIEM 2.0,
there has been a groundswell of IEP development. There are now more
than 70 NIEM IEPs registered in the GJXDM/NIEM IEP Documentation (IEPD)
Clearinghouse. In addition, the DHS has more than 50 IEPDs, most of
which are in development or operational... The NIEM Program expects
to see continuing growth in IEPD development in the coming year and
will continue to expand support to the IEPD developer community. As
more and more NIEM IEPs are deployed in operational systems, the program
will also expand support to the IEP implementer community. With the
rapid pace of NIEM adoption and use, the NIEM program anticipates more
industry products and services providing support for NIEM, which will
further increase the NIEM value proposition. It is expected that new
domains will join the NIEM Program, and there will be expanded
collaboration across federal agencies and with international partners...
Within the next few months, the NIEM PMO will be publishing several
document revisions and new documents to support NIEM domain managers
and developers and IEPD developers, including a revision to the NIEM
Naming and Design Rules [September 2008], a new NIEM User Guide, and
other documents on NIEM quality assurance, NIEM domain governance and
versioning, and other topics of interest to NIEM stakeholders." Note:
XML schemas developed by the OASIS Emergency Management TC have been
incorporated into NIEM: Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL),
Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), EDXL Distribution Element, EDXL
Hospital AVailability Exchange (HAVE).

http://www.niem.gov/newsletter20080731.php#n1
See also NIEM (National Information Exchange Model) Emergency Management: http://xml.coverpages.org/emergencyManagement.html#niemEM"

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Is AMQP on the Way to Providing Real Business Interoperability?
Steven Robbins, InfoQueue

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) came from inside of JPMorgan,
thanks to John O'Hara. But his vision was bigger than just a new way to
do things internally. The standard and open source technologies around
it have been gaining momentum. Jeff Gould and others shed some light on
where AMQP came from, who is driving it, and where it might be going.
In a three part series, Jeff Gould talked about the history of AMQP and
John O'Hara's decision to go open source with it. After hiring iMatix
to implement an AMQP project for JPMorganChase in 2003, the beta went
live in 2006 and processed around 300 million messages per day. "O'Hara's
plan for AMQP was far more ambitious. From the start he wanted the new
protocol to match the functionality of the high-end proprietary MOMs.
It had to handle all the major use cases, including queue-style
store-and-forward messaging, Tibco-style publish and subscribe, and
reliable file transfer. The protocol had to be capable of carrying any
kind of message, but the focus was on more efficient binary formats rather
than text, because in app-to-app messaging human readability is not a
paramount concern." Gould went on to point out that it was O'Hara's
quest to have an open standard that really pushed AMQP out of the bank
and into the wild. The open standard was what brought players like Red
Hat, Apache, WSO2, IONA, and Cisco to the table. Red Hat's MRG Messaging
inside of its MRG initiative is an implementation of, and the core
contributor to, the Apache Qpid project. LShift and CohesiveFT are
jointly developing RabbitMQ, a "complete and highly reliable Enterprise
Messaging system" that can be used to build an AMQP network or to
enhance an established network. OpenAMQ from iMatix is another AMQP
implementation product available. OpenAMQ was described as a product
that "provides you with a framework on which to build distributed
business applications which communicate using messages."

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/08/amqp-progress
See also AMQP references: http://xml.coverpages.org/reliableMessaging.html#amqp

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X3D: The Real-Time 3D Solution for the Web
Staff, Web3D Consortium Announcement

"SIGGRAPH 2008 the biggest graphics industry gathering is just weeks
away, and Web3D Consortium is geared up to showcase innovative X3D
content and applications and wow the 3D graphics community. This year,
the consortium celebrates its 10th anniversary with a bigger presence
in the 3D graphics industry. We will have our best ever tech talk with
over 10 presenters showcasing their innovations. The Web3D Consortium
is a member-funded industry consortium committed to the creation and
deployment of open, royalty-free standards that enable the communication
of real-time 3D across applications, networks, and XML web services.
The Consortium works closely with the ISO, MPEG and W3C standardization
bodies to maximize market opportunities for its membership... Ecosystems
of tools and techniques are evolving for standards-driven technologies.
Web 3D technologies leverage the latest informatics tools such as
XML-based solutions, web services applications, and graphics hardware
innovations to deliver solutions across many domains. Topics include
languages, tools, rendering techniques, human-computer interaction,
networked and mobile devices and innovative applications. Thirteenth
in the series, the Web3D 2008 International Symposium co-located with
SIGGRAPH 2008 [Los Angeles, California, USA - Aug 9 and 10, 2008] will
address this wide range of topics covering 3D Hypermedia on the Web.
The annual Web3D Symposium is a major event, which unites researchers,
developers, experimenters, and content creators in a dynamic learning
environment. Attendees share and explore methods of using, enhancing,
or creating new 3D Web and Multimedia technologies, such as (but not
limited to) X3D, VRML, COLLADA, Croquet, MPEG4, MPEG7, Java3D, and
Canvas3D. The symposium will also focus on recent trends such as
interactive 3D graphics and applications on mobile devices... X3D is a
royalty-free open standards file format and run-time architecture to
represent and communicate 3D scenes and objects using XML. It is an
ISO ratified standard that provides a system for the storage, retrieval
and playback of real time graphics content embedded in applications,
all within an open architecture to support a wide array of domains and
user scenarios. X3D has a rich set of componentized features that
can tailored for use in engineering and scientific visualization, CAD
and architecture, medical visualization, training and simulation,
multimedia, entertainment, education, and more. The development of
real-time communication of 3D data across all applications and network
applications has evolved from its beginnings as the Virtual Reality
Modeling Language (VRML) to the considerably more mature and refined
X3D standard.

http://www.web3d.org/events/details/web3d-at-siggraph-2008/
See also the X3D FAQ document: http://www.web3d.org/about/faq/

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Text Retrieval for XML-Encoded Corpora: A Lexical Approach
Liam R. E. Quin, Paper Prepared for Balisage 2008

The W3C XML Query Working Group has published a specification for
performing full-text queries over instances of the XPath and XQuery Data
Model using an extension of the XQuery syntax. This is a text retrieval
facility that operates on an abstract representation of XML trees,
rather than on text files that happen to contain markup. Elements and
their attributes are reified into hierarchies of nodes, text leaps into
the lacunæ and swims between them, and not a pointy bracket in sight.
This paper compares the XQuery Full Text Facility with a more traditional
open source text retrieval system, lq-text, and also explores the work
done to make lq-text become more suitable to the processing needs of
people who work with XML... Informally, a full text search is a search
to find all documents in a collection, or all elements of some specific
type (for example) containing one or more specific words. For example,
one might want to find all occurrences of the phrase 'warm socks' in a
multi-gigabyte corpus of text. The underlying assumption of full text
is that the implementation uses an index that has been constructed
separately in advance, although this is not necessarily true. XQuery 1.0
and XPath 2.0 Full-Text 1.0 extends XPath 2.0 (and XQuery 1.0 in turn,
which itself extends XPath 2.0) to add support for explicit syntax for
full text searches. XPath 2.0 is node-based, matching text nodes which
are contained by element nodes in a collection of XML document trees.
The result is a Boolean value (when used in an XPath predicate) together
with an optional numerical score or ranking. The Full-Text facility
includes a large number of possible modifiers, many of which are optional
features and may or may or be available in any given implementation.
These include (for example) both query expansion through a thesaurus and
also query narrowing using a different sort of thesaurus. One can search
for two tokens (words, for English) within a certain number of tokens,
sentences or even paragraphs. The optional features are marked as being
'at risk' in W3C parlance, meaning that unimplemented (or unimplementable)
features will be dropped from the draft specification before it is
published as a W3C Recommendation... Lq-text is an open source text
retrieval package that was first released in 1989. It has had sporadic
development since then. Its main claims to fame are high precision,
good performance (particularly when the data does not fit into available
virtual memory), flexible concordance generation and an open, extensible,
multi-process architecture... The author's original goal in adding XML
support to lq-text was to use lq-text to help optimise an XQuery
implementation. After experimenting with an XQuery implementation that
supported Full-Text, the author decided instead to focus on enhancing
lq-text to see if the results would be useful. It turns out that they
are indeed useful, and development is continuing. It must be admitted,
however, that any advantage of lq-text over sophisticated XQuery
implementations is likely to diminish over time.

http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/html/2008/Quin01/Balisage2008-Quin01.html
See also W3C XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/CR-xpath-full-text-10-20080516/

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OGF Secure Addressing Profile 1.0 Published in the Recommendation Track
Greg Newby, OGF Editorial Announcement

The OGF Recommendation "Secure Addressing Profile 1.0" was produced by
members of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) Working Group,
and edited by Duane Merrill. This document provides a recommendation
to the Grid community on how to bind WS-SecurityPolicy policy documents
within WS-Addressing endpoint references, and how such endpoint
references can be made to be tamper-evident. This profile describes
precisely the requirements placed on the structure and handling of such
endpoint references to ensure interoperability. From the Introduction:
"This profile refines the WS-Addressing 1.0 - Core specification in
order to provide a means for advertising and discovering secure
communication requirements using WS-Addressing endpoint references (EPRs).
The EPR data structure is a useful construct because it provides an
'invocation context': the necessary information required by a client to
establish meaningful communication with a resource exposed by a Web
service endpoint. The EPR is an important data-structure that is
incorporated into many Web service interfaces, particularly those adopted
into and developed by the OGF. In many cases, these service interfaces
follow a 'factory' design pattern in which one Web service endpoint is
used to dynamically create and service many stateful resources, such as
job activities or logical data files. Unfortunately the core EPR definition
is not sufficient to describe a complete invocation context for a Web
service resource that has been configured to require particular secure
communication requirements (i.e., authentication, integrity, and
confidentiality). As specified by WS-Addressing, the EPR does not provide
a normative approach for advertising any resource-specific secure
communication requirements, actions, or the security tokens that would
be needed by a client. This Profile remedies this deficiency by describing
the mechanism by which WS-SecurityPolicy security policies should be
included within an EPR to describe such communication requirements of
the referenced resource... In addition to the WS-Addressing extensions
designed to advertise secure communication requirements, this document
also profiles the XML digital signature of the EPR document to ensure
trust of the minter and to deter tampering."

http://www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.131.pdf
See also OGF Grid Final Documents (GFDs): http://www.ogf.org/gf/docs/?final

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OGSA Basic Security Profile 2.0
David Snelling, Duane Merrill, Andreas Savva; OGF Recommendation

Members of the Open Grid Services Architecture Working Group published
"OGSA Basic Security Profile 2.0" (GFD-R-P.138) as a a recommendation
to the Grid community on securing OGSA services. In this specification,
existing security profiles are combined to define a basic level of
security for OGSA based services. An OGSA basic profile is a profile in
the style of WS-Interoperability (WS-I) that defines recommended usage
of infrastructure-level standards for Grid scenarios. OGSA services are
expected to use one such profile for each infrastructure capability needed.
This document defines such a basic profile for security by bringing
together two general, non-OGSA specific, profiles on secure addressing
and secure communication. This profile can be composed with other basic
profiles. In particular this profile satisfies the security requirements
of the WSRF Basic Profile 1.0 and can be composed with it. The OGSA
Basic Security Profile 2.0 described in this document is an OGSA
Recommended Profile as Proposed Recommendation, as defined in the OGSA
Profile Definition. The Profile links two other profiles to define an
OGSA Basic Security Profile. Specifically the Profile requires
implementations to conform to the two following profiles: (1) Secure
Addressing Profile 1.0 (GFD.131), and (2) Secure Communication Profile
1.0 (GFD.132). The Profile fulfills the requirements of the OGSA WSRF
Basic Profile 1.0 [GFD.72], Section 8, and can be used in combination
with it. The Profile can also be used with other OGSA Basic Profiles.

http://www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.138.pdf
See also The Open Grid Forum (OGF) web site: http://www.ogf.org/

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XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

IBM Corporation http://www.ibm.com
Oracle Corporation http://www.oracle.com
Primeton http://www.primeton.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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