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XML and Web Services In The News - 09 June 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP
HEADLINES:
Technical Context and Cultural Consequences of XML
Sharon Adler, Roberta Cochrane, et al., IBM Systems Journal
This lead article in IBM Systems Journal (Volume 45, Number 2, 2006)
"Celebrating 10 Years of XML" represents a landmark publication, as
well as a fitting overview of XML for the special issue. Abstract:
"The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is an open standard for
creating domain- and industry-specific markup vocabularies. XML has
become the predominant mechanism for electronic data interchange between
information systems and can be described as a universally applicable,
durable 'Code of Integration.' As we celebrate its tenth anniversary,
it is appropriate to reflect on the role XML has played and the
technical ecosystem in which it functions. In this paper, we discuss
both the environment from which XML arose and its technical
underpinnings, and we relate these topics to companion papers in this
issue of the "IBM Systems Journal". We discuss the broad consequences
of XML and argue that XML will take its place among the technical
standards having the greatest impact on the world in which we live.
We conclude with some reflections on the significant technical,
economic, and societal consequences that XML is likely to have in the
future."
See also: the special issue Preface
Emerging Patterns in the Use of XML for Information Modeling in Vertical Industries
S. Hinkelman, D. Buddenbaum, and L.-J. Zhang, IBM Systems Journal
The use of XML (Extensible Markup Language) for information modeling
within vertical industries has taken many diverse forms. Some, but not
all, of these forms have been influenced by the emerging service-
oriented architecture (SOA) XML infrastructures. Despite the diversity
of approaches taken by industry-level consortiums working with XML,
there is a great deal of commonality, as exemplified by four basic
patterns for XML business content design which have recently emerged
within vertical industry consortiums. These patterns are (1) Business
Content Envelope, (2) Web-Services-Based Infrastructure, (3) Wrapped
Content, and (4) Top-Down Modeling. This set of patterns, though limited,
provides a framework that can aid Web Services adoption efforts by
industry standards organizations. In this paper, we begin with a
review of the history of the development of a selection of XML
standards. Next, we focus on the emergence of the aforementioned
industry-level patterns in XML business content design and describe
these patterns in detail. We then describe the associated effects and
implication of mappings (i.e., 'bindings') of these patterns to a
Web Services infrastructure.
Generation of Efficient Parsers Through Direct Compilation of XML Schema Grammars
E. Perkins, M. Matsa, et al., IBM Systems Journal
With the widespread adoption of SOAP and Web services, XML-based
processing, and parsing of XML documents in particular, is becoming a
performance-critical aspect of business computing. In such scenarios,
XML is often constrained by an XML Schema grammar, which can be used
during parsing to improve performance. Although traditional grammar-
based parser generation techniques could be applied to the XML Schema
grammar, the expressiveness of XML Schema does not lend itself well
to the generic intermediate representations associated with these
approaches. In this paper we present a method for generating efficient
parsers by using the schema component model itself as the representation
of the grammar. We show that the model supports the full expressive
power of the XML Schema, and we present results demonstrating
significant performance improvements over existing parsers.
XHTML Basic 1.1 Adds Features for Small Devices
Mark Baker, Masayasu Ishikawa, Shinichi Matsui (eds), W3C Working Draft
Members of W3C's HTML Working Group have released the First Public
Working Draft for XHTML Basic 1.1. The draft adds four new features
for small devices which are the language's primary users. Version 1.1
is intended to be the convergence of the XHTML Basic 1.0 W3C
Recommendation for mobile devices, released in coordination with the
WAP Forum in 2000, and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) XHTML Mobile
profile. In this revision, four new features have been incorporated
into the language in order to better serve the small-device community
that is this language's major user: (1) Intrinsic Events; (2) The target
attribute; (3) The style element; (4) The inputmode attribute. The XHTML
Basic document type includes the minimal set of modules required to be
an XHTML host language document type, and in addition it includes
images, forms, basic tables, and object support. It is designed for
Web clients that do not support the full set of XHTML features; for
example, Web clients such as mobile phones, PDAs, pagers, and settop
boxes. The document type is rich enough for content authoring.
See also: the W3C news item
How do You Tell Humans and Computers Apart?
David L. Margulius, InfoWorld
While IT security pros have been working hard on systems to make sure
users are who they say they are, Web 2.0 developers have been studying
a related problem: how to make sure users are actually human beings,
rather than machines. The result is a variety of implementations of
CAPTCHA, which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to
Tell Computers and Humans Apart." You can see CAPTCHA at work in those
little boxes on large Web sites like Yahoo or Ticketmaster, where you
must input some distorted letters in a box before proceeding to buy
your concert tickets or open an e-mail account. It's a crude line of
defense against bulk spammers and their ilk. CAPTCHA, like many
authentication schemes, suffers from the childproof-cap problem: It
doesn't fully keep out unwanted intruders, while frustrating the heck
out of many legitimate users. As a W3C Working Group Note on CAPTCHA
reported, 'this system can be defeated by those who benefit most from
doing so ... spammers can pay a programmer to aggregate these images
and feed them one by one to a human operator, who could easily verify
hundreds of them each hour.' In the meantime, CAPTCHA schemes put off
whole groups of humans, primarily the visually impaired, but also
people with dyslexia and short-term memory problems. For financial
services firms, there may be some interesting learning here in the
run-up to compliance with the FFIEC two-factor authentication
guidelines later this year; for example, many sites are now offering
audio CAPTCHA for the visually impaired.
See also: Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA
Understand the Relationships of Web Standards
Peter V. Mikhalenko, ZDNet Asia
There are many debates on the Internet about relationships between
Resource Description Framework (RDF), Topic Maps and some ontology
expressing languages. Some fuel has been added to the fire with the
introduction of other ontology languages such as OWL and SKOS. The
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has made an attempt to establish
standard guidelines for RDF/Topic Maps interoperability by
consolidating the existing proposals of integrating RDF and Topic
Maps data. The primary goal of W3C was to achieve interoperability
between RDF and Topic Maps at the data level. This means that it
should be possible to translate data from one form to the other without
unacceptable loss of information or corruption of the semantics. It
should also be possible to query the results of a translation in
terms of the target model and it should be possible to share
vocabularies across the two paradigms. In this article I'll try to
analyze the development background of both standards, and give you an
overview of five different relationship proposals. These five proposals
have been chosen as being sufficiently complete and well-documented
to be suitable for detailed examination. Among the several possible
criteria for evaluating these proposals, two -- completeness and
naturalness -- have been selected as the most relevant and appropriate
for evaluating the qualities and limitations of each proposal. Analysis
of the proposals identified two main approaches towards translation,
which we dubbed "object mapping" (providing a translation of every
structural component of the source paradigm) and "semantic mapping"
(providing a structure corresponding to every conceptual structure of
the source model). The analysis of the options and solutions provided
in the literature, therefore, clearly shows the advantages of semantic
mapping, but at the same time lists the issues that need to be
addressed and solved in any future translation approach. However, now
that both RDF and Topic Maps have formal data models, and with the
help of RDF Schema and OWL, it seems likely that most, if not all, of
the issues we have listed here can be resolved without resorting to the
restricted interoperability offered by object mapping.
Google Office: It's About File Formats, Not MS Office
Ken Fisher, ars technica
Debates in the aftermath of the Google Spreadsheet announcement have
climbed the mountains and traversed the valleys of Google's supposed
master plan. They've covered the Google vs. Microsoft gorge, the
trickling AdSense stream. What they haven't discussed is the file
format war, and I suspect that this is far more important than it may
at first seem. These days it's not hard to pitch anything Google does
as part of some brilliant strategy to dethrone Microsoft. Despite the
fact that the two company's businesses touch at only a few points, the
meme is that the two giants are fighting over the same pot of honey.
While we marvel at the size of the web, we sometimes forgot about the
mountains of word processor, spreadsheet, and database information
housed "offline." And much of that is proprietary to some extent,
stored in file formats that are not accessible or only semi-accessible
to your average PC user with a web browser. This is where the Open
Document format (ODF) steps in. As you may know, ODF is an open format
for word processor, spreadsheet, database, and presentation files,
based on XML. Google's Writely can import Microsoft Word's DOC files,
supports viewing and editing HTML documents, and ODF conversion is
already supported as well. Google Spreadsheet will support CSV and
Excel's file format, XLS, at launch. ODF support is only a matter of
time. In my view, Writely and Google Spreadsheet are ultimately about
promoting open file exchange and, eventually, the ODF file format.
Openize Denmark, Parliament Orders
gotze.eu, John Goetze's Blog
On Friday (June 2, 2006), the Danish Parliament (Folketinget) had its
last session before the Summer break, and on a very long agenda, the
very last issue (#57) was the second and last reading of Morten
Helveg's Proposal for Parliamentary Resolution on Open Standards (B103).
Earlier this week it was still pending, and [we stated] that it was
opposed by the Government. That was accurate information as of a week
ago. But politics is the art of changing things, and over the last
week, crafty politicians have been at work, and changed things. Morten
Helveg pushed for settlement, and then Danish People's Party's Morten
Messerschmidt and Joergen Dohrman put their fingerprint on the
resolution with an ammendment, so a majority vote would be reached.
And to cut a long story short, on Friday afternoon, the Parliament
voted [for approval of the resolution.] In conclusion, the vote in
Parliament ended in an unanimous decision, but not in fence-mending.
Quite the contrary, actually. But at the end of the day, and that's
what counts, Denmark is now a nation who has a parliamentary mandate
for open standards. Thank you to the three Mortens: Morten Helveg,
Morten Messerschmidt and Morten Oestergaard, and to Joergen Dohrman
and Anne Grete Holmsgaard for carrying this through, and thanks also
to Michael Aastrup Jensen and Helge Sander, and all other MPs for
voting for this historic resolution.
Prepare for the Coming of RFID
John Blau, InfoWorld
It's not a question of if but when RFID (radio frequency identification)
technology will dominate the supply chains of manufacturers, retailers,
and just about any company or organization that needs to trace products,
parts and other items, according to senior executives at SAP. Prices
have been dropping, down to below $0.10 per tag in large numbers from
around $0.30, thanks in large part to the introduction the new Gen-2
standard, said Eric Donski, RFID solution director at SAP. Even if the
day when every yogurt container is tagged with a smart chip is still a
few years away, a tag on numerous pharmaceutical drugs could be just
around the corner, according to Donski. "Of all the industries looking
at RFID, pharmaceutical has the best business case," he said. "The
tracking and tracing of drugs from the manufacturer right up to the
pharmacy is important for recalls and building consumer confidence."
Pharmaceutical companies are among the 450 customer RFID projects that
SAP has running in 15 industries and 16 countries. To date, one of the
biggest users of the wireless identification technology is the retail
sector, and one company in particular: Wal-Mart Stores. By the end of
2006, Wal-Mart plans to add more than 300 suppliers to its list of
companies shipping products with RFID tags, bringing its total to
nearly 600. In addition, the retailer aims to have RFID in 1,000 of
its more than 5,600 stores, beginning in the southern half of the U.S.
See also: PML for RFID
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