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XML and Web Services In The News - 19 June 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by BEA Systems, Inc.
HEADLINES:
RDF/OWL Representation of WordNet
Mark van Assem, Aldo Gangemi, Guus Schreiber (eds), W3C Working Draft
The WordNet Task Force of W3C's Semantic Web Best Practices and
Deployment Working Group has released a First Public Working Draft for
"RDF/OWL Representation of WordNet. WordNet is a heavily-used lexical
resource in natural-language processing and information retrieval. More
recently, it has also been adopted in Semantic Web research community.
It is used mainly for annotation and retrieval in different domains such
as cultural heritage, product catalogs, and photo metadata. It is also
used to ground other vocabularies such as the FOAF schema, as background
knowledge in ontology alignment tools and other applications. The new
Working Draft draft proposes a conversion to RDF and OWL of WordNet. By
providing a standard conversion that is as complete as possible the
group aims to improve interoperability of SW applications that use
WordNet and simplify the choice between the existing RDF/OWL versions.
The document provides a Primer to the usage of the WordNet RDF/OWL
representation and is intended as a convenient starting point for users
and developers that have already worked with Princeton WordNet and have
basic knowledge of RDF(S) and OWL, or those who have already worked with
another RDF/OWL representation of WordNet. It also presents an
Introduction to the WordNet RDF/OWL schema. Those who are not familiar
with WordNet should read the third subsection: Introduction to the
WordNet datamodel. The Appendices contain detailed information on the
RDF/OWL representation, versioning strategy, and open issues.
See also: W3C Semantic Web
IODEF/RID over SOAP
Kathleen M. Moriarty and Brian H. Trammell, IETF Internet Draft
This Internet Draft from the IETF Extended Incident Handling Working
Group outlines the SOAP wrapper for all Incident Object Description
Exchange Format (IODEF) documents and extensions to facilitate an
interoperable and secure communication of documents. IODEF describes
an XML document format for the purpose of exchanging data between CSIRTS
or those responsible for security incident handling for network
providers. The defined document format provides an easy way for CSIRTS
to exchange data in a way which can be easily parsed. In order for the
IODEF documents to be shared between entities, a uniform method for
transport is necessary. SOAP will provide a layer of abstraction and
enable the use of multiple transport protocol bindings. IODEF documents
and extensions will be contained in an XML Realtime Inter-network
Defense (RID) envelope inside the body of a SOAP message. The RIDPolicy
class of RID (e.g., policy information that may affect message routing)
will appear in the SOAP message header. The SOAP wrapper allows for
flexibility in the selection of a transport protocol. The transport
protocols will be provided through existing standards and SOAP binding,
such as SOAP over HTTP(S) and SOAP over BEEP.
See also: INCH/IODEF references
Progress on XForms Submissions
John Boyer, IBM Blog
The author reports on rapid progress in the W3C XForms working group:
"Our work has been focused on modifications of the functionality of
XForms submission for XForms 1.1. Tomorrow we will address any details
that come up as the pieces of the spec are put together for the next
working draft, but here is an overview: (1) We're adding context
information to the xforms-submit-done event so that an XForm can access
the HTTP return code. (2) We're adding support for the DELETE method,
which is more reasonable can be done now that the return code will be
available. One practical result of this is that you will be able to
write an XForms that speaks ATOM. (3) We're allowing run-time
modification of the submission URL. We'll be adding a child element
called resource to the submission element, and it will be able to use
a single-node binding or value attribute to construct a URL that
includes data from an XForms instance. (4) We're allowing the ability
to set content headers for the submission so that, among other things,
an XForm can speak WebDAV... XForms 1.1 will also make available
submission response header information in the xforms-submit-done event
context, which helps complete the story about ATOM.
See also: XML and Forms
The Rise and Fall of CORBA
Michi Henning, ACM Queue
Michi Henning is chief scientist of ZeroC. From 1995 to 2002, he worked
on CORBA as a member of the OMG's architecture board and as an ORB
implementer, consultant, and trainer. He says "There's a lot we can
learn from CORBA's mistakes... After some experience with e-commerce
systems that used HTTP, HTML, and CGI, it had become clear that building
distributed systems in this way had serious limitations. Without a
proper type system, applications were reduced to parsing HTML to
extract semantics, which amounted to little more than screen-scraping.
The resulting systems turned out to be very brittle... Another important
factor in CORBA's decline was XML. During the late '90s, XML had become
the new silver bullet of the computing industry: Almost by definition,
if it was XML, it was good. After giving up on DCOM, Microsoft wasn't
going to leave the worldwide e-commerce market to its competitors and,
rather than fight a battle it could not win, it used XML to create an
entirely new battlefield. In late 1999, the industry saw the publication
of SOAP. Originally developed by Microsoft and DevelopMentor, and then
passed to W3C for standardization, SOAP used XML as the on-the-wire
encoding for remote procedure calls... A democratic process such as
the OMG's is uniquely ill-suited for creating good software. Despite
the known procedural problems, however, the industry prefers to rely on
large consortia to produce technology. Web services, the current silver
bullet of middleware, uses a process much like the OMG's and, by many
accounts, also suffers from infighting, fragmentation, lack of
architectural coherence, design by committee, and feature bloat. It
seems inevitable that Web services will enact a history quite similar
to CORBA's.
Public Review: OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.0, 2nd Edition
Patrick Durusau, Michael Brauer (eds), OASIS OpenDocument TC
OASIS announced a 15-day public review for the OpenDocument Version 1.0,
2nd Edition. "This is the specification of the Open Document Format for
Office Applications (OpenDocument) format, an open, XML-based file
format for office applications, based on OpenOffice.org XML. The document
defines an XML schema for office applications and its semantics. The
schema is suitable for office documents, including text documents,
spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings or
presentations, but is not restricted to these kinds of documents. The
schema provides for high-level information suitable for editing
documents. It defines suitable XML structures for office documents and
is friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based tools.
See also: ODF references
Sun Joins Efforts to Boost AJAX
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK
Sun Microsystems has announced new moves to bolster its support for and
its place in the world of AJAX development. The company announced that
it is deepening its involvement in the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and
XML) community by joining the OpenAJAX Alliance and the Dojo Foundation,
in order to help build standards for AJAX tooling and work to promote
and increase interoperability across AJAX implementations. The OpenAJAX
Alliance is a cooperative effort of about 30 companies trying to advance
the state of the art for AJAX-style development, while the Dojo
Foundation is an open-source effort based around a popular AJAX framework
known as the Dojo Toolkit. Sun also recently launched two new AJAX Web
portals, as well as several enhanced Sun BluePrints AJAX-enabled
JavaServer Faces components for the Sun Java Studio Creator tool set.
JMaki allows Java developers to use JavaScript in their Java-based
applications. Alex Russell, current president of the Dojo Foundation,
said: "Sun's support of the Dojo Foundation, inclusion of Rhino in the
upcoming Java Platform Standard Edition 6 and recent release of Project
Phobos underline a commitment to a better future for both users and
developers."
See also: the PR
Patent Overload Hinders Open Source Innovation
Neil McAllister, InfoWorld
Patents [...] can often be showstoppers for open source. One obvious
example is the patent minefield surrounding multimedia. There are so
many patents covering every aspect of digital audio and video that
without an industry consortium like MPEG it would be virtually
impossible to write any kind of multimedia software. MPEG mandates that
its members agree on RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing
terms for relevant patents: Anyone can use the technology so long as
they pay the same fee everybody else pays. But while that's a reasonable
compromise for software companies, it's little use to open source
projects. What good is it to release source code under a free software
license if anyone who compiles it will have to pay patent license fees?
In fact, many open source multimedia projects are on tenuous legal
ground. Similarly, this was the problem Sun Microsystems faced when it
launched the Open Media Commons, an effort to build an open source DRM
platform. I've been advocating such a project for a while now, and Sun
and I are in almost total agreement on goals and methods. Only it turns
out it's not that easy. Other than multimedia, few areas of software
are as heavily patent-encumbered as DRM.
See also: Sun's recent non-assertion covenant
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