Robin Cover

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 09 September 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:

* Services Mashups: The New Generation of Web Applications
* W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD): Component Designators
* Overlay Data on Maps Using XSLT, KML, and the Google Maps API,
Part 2: Transform and Use the Data
* Writing Functional Code with RDFa
* How Will We Interact with the Web of Data?
* OpenOffice.org 3 Edges Towards Release
* NYC's 911 System Upgraded to Accept Photos, Video
* Application Lifecycle Management Meets Model-Driven Development

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Services Mashups: The New Generation of Web Applications
Djamal Benslimane, et al (eds). IEEE Internet Computing

The Internet and related technologies have created an interconnected
world in which we can exchange information easily, process tasks
collaboratively, and form communities among users with similar interests
to achieve efficiency and improve performance. Use of lighter-weight
approaches to services, especially for Web applications, is increasing.
Here, the Web APIs and RESTful (Representational State Transfer) reign
supreme... Recently, in the context of the Web, the mashup concept
has emerged, and researchers have developed a huge number of Web 2.0
applications -- a way to create new Web applications by combining
existing Web resources utilizing data and Web APIs. Mashups are about
information sharing and aggregation to support content publishing for
a new generation of Web applications. By extension, service mashups aim
to design and develop novel and modern Web applications based on
easy-to-accomplish end-user service compositions. Combining Web service
technologies with fresh content, collaborative approaches (such as Web
2.0 technologies, tags, and microformats), and possibly Web data
management and semantic technologies (RSS, RDFa, Gleaning Resource
Descriptions from Dialects of Languages, and the Sparql Protocol and
RDF Query Language) is an exciting challenge for both academic and
industrial researchers building a new generation of Web-based
applications. Researchers have created different mashup tools and
platforms, letting developers and end-users access and compose various
data that Web applications can provide. IBM's QEDWiki, Yahoo Pipes,
Google Mashup Editor, and Microsoft's Popfly are some well-known
examples of mashup platforms that users have largely adopted. Yet these
platforms and associated tools represent only early and limited sets
of capabilities that are sure to be followed by more powerful and
flexible alternatives... Key issues must be considered in the future
to improve sharing (registration and publication), finding (search and
discovery), reusing (invocation), and integrating (mediation and
composition) services... The first key challenge is that of semantic
heterogeneity. Compared to data, services can present a broader form of
heterogeneity. Correspondingly, the Web services research community
has identified a broader form of semantics -- data (I/O), functional
(behavioral), nonfunctional (quality of service, policy), and execution
(runtime, infrastructure, exceptions). Several research projects have
looked at semantics for traditional (WSDL or SOAP) Web services to
help address heterogeneity and mediation challenges, and the community
took a step toward supporting semantics for Web services by adopting
Semantic Annotation for WSDL (SAWSDL) as a W3C recommendation in August
2003. Now, attention has shifted to using semantics for community-created
content, as with the Semantic MediaWiki, and for WebAPIs and RESTful
services, such as hRESTS, SA-REST (Semantic Annotation of RESTful
Services), and smart mashups. We believe that existing mashup approaches
and tools must move one step further in order to use semantics
approaches to deal with service interoperability and integration
(including mediatability). To do so, we must have an open eye on how
we might build new solutions upon existing semantic Web technologies
using appropriate Web 2.0 and Semantic Web approaches and technologies
that complement each other.

http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/pages/dsonline/2008/09/w5gei.xml
See also Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL): http://www.w3.org/TR/sawsdl/

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W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD): Component Designators
Mary Holstege and Asir S. Vedamuthu (eds), W3C Technical Report

Members of the W3C XML Schema Working Group have published "W3C XML
Schema Definition Language (XSD): Component Designators," updating an
earlier draft of 2005-03-29. This specification defines a scheme for
identifying XML Schema components as specified by W3C "XML Schema
Part 1: Structures" and "XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes." This version
incorporates all Working Group decisions through 2008-07-25. Some
twenty-four changes made since the last public Working Draft are
presented in the Status Section. The document has been reviewed by
the XML Schema Working Group and the Working Group has agreed to
publication as a Working Draft; comments on the document should be
made in W3C's public installation of Bugzilla. Part 1 of the W3C XML
Schema Definition Language (XSD) recommendation defines schema
components, and Section 2.2 lays out the inventory of schema components
into three classes: (1) Primary components: simple and complex type
definitions, attribute declarations, and element declarations; (2)
Secondary components: attribute and model group definitions,
identity-constraint definitions, and notation declarations; (3) "Helper"
components: annotations, model groups, particles, wildcards, and
attribute uses. However, a QName (prefix:localname) is not sufficient
to the task of designating any schema component. A key technical
challenge to obtaining a useful system of naming XML Schema components
where designators must either include full expanded names, or define
namespace bindings; designators must distinguish named components in
different symbol spaces from one another; designators must provide a
means of distinguishing locally scoped element and attribute
declarations with the same name; designators must provide for any
designatable unnamed components, such as anonymous type definitions,
wildcards, and the schema description component; and designators must
function in the face of redefinitions. The schema description schema
component may represent the amalgamation of several distinct schema
documents, or none at all. It may be associated with any number of
target namespaces, including none at all. It may have been obtained
for a particular schema assessment episode by de-referencing URIs
given in schemaLocation attributes, or by an association with the
target namespace or by some other application-specific means. In short,
there are substantial technical challenges to defining a reliable
designator for the schema description, particularly if that designator
is expected to serve as a starting point for the other components
encompassed by that schema. This specification divides the problem of
constructing schema component designators into two parts: defining a
designator for an assembled schema, and defining a designator for a
particular schema component or schema components, understood relative
to a designated schema.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-xmlschema-ref-20080910/
See also the W3C XML Activity: http://www.w3.org/XML/Activity

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Overlay Data on Maps Using XSLT, KML, and the Google Maps API, Part 2:
Transform and Use the Data
Jake Miles, IBM developerWorks

This two-part article series shows how to develop an application for a
real estate brokerage to display all available apartment listings as
clickable Placemarks on Google Maps. Part 1 showed an application
that collects the apartment listing information from the user, uses
the Google Geocoder Web service to turn the street address into its
geographical coordinates (longitude and latitude), and stores the
coordinates in the database along with the address information. In this
Part 2 article installment, you use this data to produce a KML overlay
document and display it in Google Maps and Google Earth. First, we use
store procedures to produce XML from MySQL. Then with XSLT and a
technique called Muenchian grouping, we transform the XML data into a
KML document containing the overlay information -- one Placemark for
each apartment building. The pop-up balloon for each Placemark displays
the available apartment listings in that building. Finally, we use the
Google Maps API to display the KML overlay in a Google Map embedded
within the Web site. These articles only touch the surface of what's
possible, especially since you can create 3D polylines and polygons
in KML, not just Placemarks displaying textual information. You can
leverage Google Maps, Google Earth, and the Google Geocoder on almost
any Web site that deals with address information, and with XSLT you
can transform any XML data that contains coordinate data into exciting
KML overlays.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-geomap2/
See also article Part 1: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-geomap1/

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Writing Functional Code with RDFa
Michael Hausenblas, DevX.com

RDFa is a current W3C Candidate Recommendation, and large organizations
such as Yahoo! are implementing RDF in their search engine technologies.
Now is an excellent time to learn how to use this set of XHTML extensions
to produce RSS news feeds. News feeds in all their manifestations --
both with and without RDF -- have a long tradition as structured data
on the web. RDF (the data model) can represent relations between certain
entities. For example, one relation between a human and a feed could be
conceived as creator. In contrast, HTML is about structure and
presentation, the semantics of the conveyed data is not -- and cannot --
be represented. Presentation-oriented formats such as HTML are useful
for users, but typically cause rather expensive back-end processing
(along with heuristics). However, the RDF data model is useless without
serialization syntaxes that are available to exchange representations
online. To date, RDF/XML is the only official RDF serialization syntax
that is available for developers to use... RDF serialization needs to
make a persistent graph structure (be it in XML or in another form), and
if the graph order is irrelevant, then interoperability issues can arise
for use cases where the order is important, for example, in news feeds.
However, when HTML is used as the container for RDF, structural elements
can be preserved while defining and carrying arbitrary vocabularies
(such as FOAF, SIOC, Dublin Core, DOAP, etc.) [...] Converting an RSS
1.0 feed into an XHTML+RDFa representation is likely of little value on
its own. However, using such a feed in a reader (such as netvibes.com)
would be a first step. SPARQLScript has a nice demo on how to create
semantic mashups. Further, linking the content (or specific metadata)
of a feed item to a dataset such as DBpedia or Geonames makes new use
cases possible. From integrating other sources (for example, mapping
hash tags from microblogs to DBpedia entities), to cross-site queries
regarding a certain user, the possibilities are limited only by your
imagination. The downside to using RDFa is that not every tool currently
supports it. For example, to query the example feed, you would naturally
use SPARQL. However, nowadays most SPARQL engines require RDF/XML as
input. Therefore, you'd need an RDFa processor such as the RDFa Distiller
to convert the RDFa serialization into an RDF/XML serialization.

http://www.devx.com/semantic/Article/39016
See also the SPARQLer general purpose processor: http://sparql.org

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How Will We Interact with the Web of Data?
Tom Heath, IEEE Internet Computing

This article discusses some ways in which our interaction with the Web
of data might differ from how we interact with the established Web of
documents, and what this might mean for both users and producers of
Web content. Machine-readable data, given explicit semantics and
published online, coupled with the ability to link data in distributed
data sets, are the Semantic Web's key selling points. Together, these
features allow aggregation and integration of heterogeneous data on an
unprecedented scale, and machines will do the grunt work for us. However,
without a human somewhere in this process to reap the rewards of these
new capabilities, the endeavour is meaningless. Far from removing
humans from the equation, a Web of machine-readable data (the Semantic
Web; we also call it the 'Web of data') creates significant challenges
and opportunities for human-computer interaction. To date, the Semantic
Web community has mostly been busy developing the technical
infrastructure to make the Web of data feasible in principle and
publishing linked data sets to make it a reality. RDF is a W3C
specification for making statements about things in machine-readable
form. These statements each consist of a subject, predicate, and object,
hence the name triples. In most cases, the subject of a triple is a
uniform resource identifier (URI) that can identify anything the data
publisher chooses, be that a person, a place, a document in the Web,
an abstract concept -- in short, anything... The document in which a
particular RDF graph is published becomes primarily an indicator of
provenance, rather than representing the definitive packaging of a
certain slice of data or content. Of far greater relevance than the
documents themselves are the things described in those documents: the
people, places, and concepts. It's at the level of 'things' that
browsers for the Web of data should operate. Providing simple browsers
for RDF triples, and the documents in which they're published, is one
option for enabling people to interact with this information space. The
one-page-at-a-time style of browsing, which we know well from the Web of
documents, would make nothing of the potential we now have for
integrated views of data assembled from numerous locations. So, Semantic
Web browsers must not simply echo the underlying representation of the
data. Instead, they must treat 'things,' in the broadest sense, as
first-class citizens of the interface.

http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/pages/dsonline/2008/09/w5web.xml

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OpenOffice.org 3 Edges Towards Release
Serdar Yegulalp, InformationWeek

OpenOffice.org's first release candidate for version 3.0 hit the tubes
yesterday. It's an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, edition
of the open source office suite. It isn't to OO.o 2 what, say, Office
2007 was to Office 2003 -- but it's solid, and most importantly,
noticeably faster. If there was one complaint I heard about OO.o more
than any other, it was "It's too slow!" On Windows, RC1 of version 3
opens all of its apps pretty snappily even without the Quickstarter
running in the system tray. A well-engineered program shouldn't need
a crutch like the Quickstarter in the first place, so I disabled it
to see how well things worked without it. Another major addition is
native (if not feature-complete) support for Microsoft Office macros,
something enormously useful to people trying to make a jailbreak from
the Office but find they can't due to the need to support legacy
macros. Financial houses and law firms seem to be two types of folks
most heavily dependent on Office VB macros -- so maybe some success
stories from their side of the fence will compel those with far less
ambitious needs to make the jump, too. One of the big [advances] for
me has been OO.o's native .PDF support. Version 3 adds in the ability
to import and edit .PDFs via a plugin, and a much more detailed and
powerful .PDF export dialog. Nominally I use a print driver to do .PDF
export, but anything that exports natively within an app gets precedence.
Version 3 also reads Office 2007's OOXML documents pretty transparently:
none of the Word docs I opened with it gave me problems. But on the
whole I'd rather convert to and use the standard OASIS document format
to avoid any cross-compatibility issues. On that note, since OO.o 3
uses the most recent version of the OASIS document format (1.2), don't
save anything as 1.2 if you intend to also open it in older versions
of OO.o. You can force saving documents in the older version of the
format through the menus.

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/09/openofficeorg_3.html
See also the web site: http://www.openoffice.org/index.html

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NYC's 911 System Upgraded to Accept Photos, Video
Steven Musil, CNET News.com

New York City is touting a new weapon in its war on crime: cell phone
cameras. Tipsters in New York City can now send photos and video from
computers and Web-enabled cell phones and PDAs to the city's 911 and
non-emergency hot lines to report crimes and quality-of-life issues
such as potholes, officials announced Tuesday. While many cities'
emergency systems are equipped to accept text messages, this is believed
to be the first system that also is able to process photos and video.
When 911 callers tell police operators that photos or video related to
their complaint are available, a detective with the New York Police
Department's Real Time Crime Center will call back to receive the images.
Depending on the case, the images may be shared widely with the public,
with police officers on patrol, individual detectives or other law
enforcement agencies, according to city officials. The images may also
be used to help in assessing and responding to emergencies... In
preparation for the upgrade, more than 12,000 new computers were
reportedly installed in precincts around the city and police operators
received special training on how to handle emergency calls that contained
images or video. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised the
technology's ability to deliver information instantaneously to the
city's 911 operators, who handle 11 million calls annually.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10037418-94.html

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Application Lifecycle Management Meets Model-Driven Development
John Carrillo and Scott McKorkle, DDJ

The combination of ALM and MDD gives you the connected workflow you
need to handle the development of even the most complex applications and
systems. Application lifecycle management (ALM) has evolved into an
ecosystem of integrated processes and domain technologies for the system
and software development lifecycle. ALM establishes a framework that
you can use to catalog and manage customer requirements, plan a
portfolio of development projects to address these requirements, manage
design, development, testing, and deployment, and manage change
throughout the entire process. MDD, on the other hand, lets you more
accurately design, simulate, and validate the complex behavior of
distributed, mission-critical systems. The model-driven process uses
visual aids to accurately describe and define system objectives and
solutions. Scientific and technical industries, such as aerospace,
defense, and telecommunications, depend on MDD to increase the quality
and efficiency of complex software and systems through modeling. The
combination of ALM and MDD creates a rich environment of connected
processes and interacting solutions that are proving invaluable for
successful systems and software development projects. This is a welcome
advance, given the state of today's complex development environments.
A major challenge for many organizations is finding a way of integrating
all aspects of the development lifecycle in an intuitive, yet formal
manner to deliver long lasting, business critical products, systems,
and applications. Moreover, in combination ALM and MDD provide
exponential gains in the optimization of development lifecycle processes.
MDD is a natural fit within the ALM framework. The integration of ALM
and MDD lets you optimize products and services and serves as a framework
for the fast, accurate, and coordinated design and development of
architectures, applications, and products... With MDD, traceability
is established throughout development. Each feature can be traced back
through the model to its originating requirement, while extraneous
features (those "thrown in" by well-intentioned developers) are quickly
exposed, eliminating the expense and bloat of unintended feature-creep.
You can also simulate and validate system behavior, which adds a whole
new dimension to constructing complex applications like those based on
service-oriented architectures (SOA).

http://www.ddj.com/architect/210300020

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XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 09 September 2008