XML and Web Services In The News - 12 June 2006

Provided by OASIS | Edited by Robin Cover

This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored by SAP


HEADLINES:

 CSS3 Module: Generated Content for Paged Media
 Frictionless Data: Let it Flow
 Hey Leading Microsoft into Grid, HPC
 Tim Bray: The Garibaldi of RSS
 DB2 Goes Hybrid: Integrating Native XML and XQuery with Relational Data and SQL
 Language Tags and Locale Identifiers for the World Wide Web
 SAMLv2: HTTP POST 'NoXMLdsig' Binding
 USPTO Reveals Updated Web Filing System
 Spirit IP Standard Moves to IEEE

CSS3 Module: Generated Content for Paged Media
Hakon Wium Lie (ed), W3C Working Draft
W3C's CSS Working Group has released a First Public Working Draft for "CSS3 Module: Generated Content for Paged Media." Companion to other CSS3 modules for multicolumn layout and paged media, this CSS module describes features often used in printed publications. In particular, the specification describes how CSS style sheets can express named strings, leaders, cross-references, footnotes, endnotes, running headers and footers, named flows, ad hoc counter styles, paged-based floats, hyphenation, change bars, named page lists, and generated lists. Along with the CSS3 modules for multicolumn layout and paged media, this module offer a way of presenting structured documents on paged media. Some of the proposed functionality (e.g., hyphenation and ad hoc counter styles) can also be used with other media types.
See also: W3C CSS resources

Frictionless Data: Let it Flow
Joab Jackson, Government Computer News
The idea of a specialized XML-based vocabulary is taking root in the financial community through the emerging Extensible Business Reporting Language. Like Global JXDM, XBRL offers both a dictionary -- one based on standard accounting terminology -- and a taxonomy that shows how terms are connected. It's also extensible, so new users can add their own definitions for specialized terms. XBRL offers a common, standards- based lingua franca to exchange data across different systems. Agencies with explicit financial missions are already migrating to the standard. The Securities and Exchange Commission offered private companies incentives to use XBRL for their SEC filings and mutual fund disclosures in order to help the agency more quickly analyze input from many different companies. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. uses XBRL for its call reports from nearly 8,400 banks and financial institutions. These are huge reports, with thousands of data fields and formulas. XBRL simplifies the process of data aggregation. But XBRL has wider application. The National Park Service is piloting XBRL for its Concession Data Management System, said Dom Nessi, chief information officer for the NPS. The agency manages 633 contracts throughout the country's parks, ranging from vendors who shuttle visitors to the Statue of Liberty to those who handle the lodges at Yellowstone National Park. Working with consultants at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP of New York, NPS developed an XBRL-based contract-oversight module and is in the process of automating its annual financial reporting process. Companies submitting data to NPS must submit XBRL-tagged data.

Hey Leading Microsoft into Grid, HPC
Derrick Harris, The Grid Today
From [the interview with] Tony Hey, Microsoft's vice president of technical computing: "With my appointment, nearly a year ago now, Microsoft is signaling its intention to engage more closely with the scientific and engineering communities. We will also soon have a Windows HPC Cluster product on the market and we wish to work with the HPC and Grid communities to better understand their requirements. Marvin Theimer of Microsoft's HPC Group is now actively engaged with the OGSA HPC Profile work. Grids, in the sense of utilizing "forests of clusters," are a natural evolution for Microsoft's HPC activity. [As to the reconciliation of the WSDM and WS-Management families of Web services specifications] I am very pleased with the proposed roadmap for reconciliation in the system management space. I think this is good for the whole IT industry and for the Web services approach to service-oriented distributed computing. This reflects broad agreement on several basic specifications (primarily WS-Eventing, WS-Transfer and WS-Enumeration) and a roadmap to develop additional functionality above them. However, it will take some time for the Web services community to agree and to implement the roadmap. I therefore think it unwise for the Grid community to base any standards on the parts of the roadmap that have yet to be completed. I therefore very much support the approach of defining profiles of a small number of simple but extensible OGSA services that do not depend on future system management Web Services.

Tim Bray: The Garibaldi of RSS
Andy Patrizio, InternetNews.com
Today, RSS 2.0 and Atom are both in use by RSS readers and sites offering syndication. "RSS 2.0 works fine, but everybody has agreed it should be stable and frozen and never changed again," said [Tim] Bray. "Everybody has agreed if there's further work to be done it should be done under a new name and a new project, and that's what Atom is." Atom "crystallizes what we've learned with RSS and unifies everything in one format, and secondly gives us a publishing protocol to empower anything to become a publishing engine and get more people online," said Bray. Dealing with the RSS/Atom feed protocol is only half the battle. Bray said that an even bigger headache is publishing. All of the popular blogging sites, such as Blogger, TypePad, and LiveJournal, just to name a few, use a different protocol and they aren't interoperable. Bray praised Microsoft's move to put one-click blog publishing in Word 2007, which will come with Office 2007 early next year. But the real killer app for blog publishing, he said, will be camera phones. People want to be able to take a photo with their camera phone and publish it to their blog with one click, he said, and the camera phone operators won't tolerate multiple protocols. "You know they won't be implementing LiveJournal and TypePad and Blogger in millions of cell phones. They're going to pick one protocol. The choice facing LiveJournal and the like will be easy. Do you want all the people with cell phones to access [your site]? Then adopt Atom and you're done," said Bray. At the moment, the IETF is close to finishing the Atom protocol and will begin interoperability testing. After that will come the Atom publishing protocol. Bray expects this to be done by the end of the year. Then comes the really hard part: getting application vendors and middleware vendors in particular to adopt it.
See also: Atom references

DB2 Goes Hybrid: Integrating Native XML and XQuery with Relational Data and SQL
K. Beyer, R. Cochrane, et al., IBM Systems Journal
Comprehensive and efficient support for XML data management is a rapidly increasing requirement for database systems. To address this requirement, DB2 Universal Database (UDB) now combines relational data management with native XML support. This makes DB2 a truly hybrid database management system with first-class support for both XML and relational data processing as well as the integration of the two. This paper presents the overall architecture and design aspects of native XML support in DB2 UDB and its integration with the relational data-flow engine. We describe the new XML components in DB2 UDB and show how XML processing leverages much of the infrastructure which is used for relational data. DB2 Universal Database has been enhanced with comprehensive native XML support to overcome the limitations inherent in mapping XML to relational tables or CLOBs. XML documents are stored as type-annotated trees on disk pages, indexed with path-specific indexes, and queried with XQuery, SQL/XML, or a combination of both. Schema validation is optional and performed on a per-document basis, which allows for flexibility and schema evolution. Enhancements to the major database APIs provide client applications with the required functionality to exploit new XML capabilities in the DB2 server. The native XML solution in DB2 includes XML support in utilities such as XML import and export and a visual XQuery design tool.
See also: Integration of SQL and XQuery

Language Tags and Locale Identifiers for the World Wide Web
Felix Sasaki (ed)., W3C Working Draft
W3C has issued an updated Working Draft for "Language Tags and Locale Identifiers for the World Wide Web." Developed by the Internationalization Core Working Group as part of the W3C Internationalization Activity, this document describes mechanisms for identifying or selecting the language of content or locale preferences used to process information using Web technologies. It describes how document formats, specifications, and implementations should handle language tags, as well as data structures that extend these tags to describe international preferences. Identification of language and locale has a broad range of applications within the World Wide Web. Existing standards which make use of language identification includes the xml:lang attribute in XML 1.0, the lang and hreflang atttributes in HTML 4.01, or the language property in XSL 1.0; locale identification is used for example within the CLDR project (e.g., Locale Data Markup Language - LDML). Recently a successor for RFC 3066 has been developed, called 'RFC 3066bis' which refers to language identification only. Locales can be identified in several ways. One method is by inference from language tags. For example, an implementation could map a language tag from an existing protocol, such as HTTP's Accept-Language header, to its locale model. Locales may also be identified directly by using the language tag syntax in data items (elements, attributes, headers, etc.) that explicitly serve the purpose of locale identification.
See also: Markup and Multilingualism

SAMLv2: HTTP POST 'NoXMLdsig' Binding
Jeff Hodges and Scott Cantor (eds), Draft Contributed to OASIS SSTC
The HTTP POST binding, defined in "Bindings for the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) V2.0.", defines a mechanism by which SAML protocol messages may be transmitted within the base64-encoded content of an HTML form control. When using that binding, SAML protocol messages and/or SAML assertions are signed using XML Signature, which is an XML-aware, XML-based, invasive digital signature paradigm necessitating canonicalization of the signature target. This document specifies an alternative HTTP POST binding where the conveyed SAML protocol messages, and their content -- i.e. any conveyed SAML assertions -- are signed as simple 'blobs' ('binary large objects', aka binary octet strings). This binding MAY be composed with the HTTP Redirect binding and the HTTP Artifact binding to transmit request and response messages in a single protocol exchange using two different bindings.
See also: the SSTC web site

USPTO Reveals Updated Web Filing System
Wade-Hahn Chan, Federal Computer Week
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office revealed an updated version of the Web-based Electronic Filing System, EFS-Web. The agency hopes the new system will cut down on the enormous amount of paper that the agency processes every day. The new system allows patent filers to submit PDF applications through the USPTO Web site. People submitting material get an immediate acknowledgement that it was received. Older versions of the system sent confirmation postcards through the mail. A previous approach to EFS-Web that was established in 2000 required users to install software on their own computers that translated applications into a XML format. Some applicants complained that this was a burden because of firewall and security issues with corporations. Only 14,000 of the 409,000 patent applications filed last year were sent electronically. With the new system, [Bill] Stryjewski said, paperwork won't get lost and there will be fewer transcription errors.
See also: earlier references

Spirit IP Standard Moves to IEEE
Richard Goering, EETimes
Making a move for widespread industry adoption, the Spirit intellectual property (IP) reuse specification has been submitted to the IEEE for standardization by the newly-formed IEEE P1685 working group. Spirit is contributing the current version of its chip metadata specification, version 1.2, also known as the IP-XACT design exchange format. Spirit ("Structure for packaging, integrating and re-using IP within tool flows") was launched by several founding companies at the Design Automation Conference in 2003. Spirit's goal is to develop a common specification mechanism for describing IP integration data, and to allow automatic IP configuration and integration using compatible tools. The Spirit Consortium has grown to include 54 members, and its 1.2 specification was released in May 2006. Steering committee members are ARM, Cadence Design Systems, Mentor Graphics, Philips Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, and LSI Logic. While most of the steering committee members are making use of the Spirit specification, backers believe IEEE standardization will pave the way to wider industry adoption. The IP-XACT specification describes an XML metadata schema for describing silicon IP, and an API to provide tool access to the schema. The schema provides a standard way to make IP compatible with automated integration techniques. Tools that implement the standard will be able to automatically interpret, configure, integrate, and manipulate IP blocks delivered with metadata that conforms to the standard.


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