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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
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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