XML and Web Services In The News - 29 August 2005

The Semantic Web in One Day
York Sure, et al., IEEE Intelligent Systems
To determine just how far Semantic Web technologies have come, the authors created a snapshot of what you could do by applying and assembling existing Semantic Web technologies -- in one day. During the 24 hours, each team had to perform a project cycle with requirements analysis, specification, implementation, and presentation. The six teams comprised members of the Institute AIFB at the University of Karlsruhe, the Research Center for Information Technologies (FZI), and the company Ontoprise. The members share an interest in the Semantic Web, but they all have their own competency profiles and contexts in which they develop and apply Semantic Web technologies. The competencies include, for example, logic, machine learning, natural language processing, and software engineering; the contexts range from basic research and prototype development to industrial strength product development. After 24 hours the group presented a working system: the interplay among the Bibster, TextToOnto, and query refinement techniques yields an intelligent query-answering system that performs semantic searches even though the input comprises only nonsemantic BibTex data and text corpora. In other words, the user must provide only BibTeX entries, while the system autonomously performs a semantic analysis of the input data, generates a suitable ontology, and classifies the input data accordingly. Queries posed to the system are also processed intelligently over the generated semantic metadata, taking query refinement techniques into account.
See also: The project materials

Why Do Developers Need an Enterprise Service Bus?
Bobby Woolf, IBM developerWorks
The SOA model (service consumers invoking service providers) may seem simple, but it introduces two ignificant problems: [1] How does a consumer find the providers of the service it wants to invoke? [2] How can a consumer invoke a service quickly and reliably, because the network is actually slow and unreliable? It turns out there's a fairly straightforward answer to both these problems, an approach called the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). An ESB makes service invocation simpler for both the consumer and the provider by handling all of the complexity in between. a service can be invoked in any of following three ways: Directly and synchronously; Synchronously through a broker; Asynchronously through a broker. An Enterprise Service Bus is a broker that supports synchronous and asynchronous service invocation. It also enables data transfer and event notification between applications. It helps consumers find providers and handles the details of communication between them. A synchronous ESB is a services gateway that acts as a central coordinator of a variety of services. An asynchronous ESB is a message bus whose services also support the Web service capabilities of being self-describing and discoverable. Standards and patterns exist today for implementing a synchronous ESB and a message bus that is a simplified asynchronous ESB. Additional standards are needed for asynchronous ESBs to reach their full potential.

Beyond Quick-and-Dirty RFID
Rajeev Kasturi, Intelligent Enterprise Information Management
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is fast becoming pervasive in the plans of many companies and industries. It's not difficult to comprehend the potential benefits; RFID can provide accurate, real-time data about the location of goods and the state of manufacturing, physical assets and logistics. The challenge lies in integrating the technology in a well-thought-out way and, most importantly, tapping into the data for analytics and business intelligence. There are industry-specific demands, as in consumer packaged goods, pharmaceutical and defense mandates. Technology requirements include integration with ERP and legacy systems as well as Electronic Product Code (EPC), Uniform Code Council (UCCNet) and Web services standards. Once you've nailed the basic data collection problems, the more involved device control and data management challenges emerge. Device control software is the layer that integrates with edge devices. The software gathers data, converts it to standard formats, such as XML, and pushes it or posts it to applications and enterprise systems. Some view the middleware device controller software that stands between devices and applications as expensive and difficult to deploy. Thus, SAP and Intel have announced a partnership whereby Intel will incorporate features in RFID hardware that will enable direct communication with SAP's RFID software applications in plug-and-play fashion. RFID process integration is a vast domain that can touch almost all aspects of a business. From a vendor perspective, companies large and small see RFID as an opening to boost revenues. Given its strength in manufacturing, SAP was an early proponent of the technology, and it's already rolling out the second generation of its RFID solution, called Auto-ID Infrastructure (AII), based on the Netweaver platform.
See also: RFID readings

Denmark Leads the Way With Electronic Billing
Jon Bosak, Borsen [Danish Stock Market Journal]
Denmark has the potential to be an international locomotive in the adoption of electronic ordering and billing between the public sector and the private sector. The Danish initiative is on the right track with its foundation in an international standard like Universal Business Language (UBL), whose purpose is to bridge the gap between sector specific electronic business languages. The unique facet of the "Danish model" is the combination of a deliberate choice of an international standard and a legislative initiative. That a whole public sector by law is required to receive electronic invoices in a standardized format ensures that a critical mass of customers will ask suppliers of ERP-systems to implement the standard. Future initiatives will hopefully ensure the adoption of electronic billing in the private sector as well as the public sector.
See also: Danish OIOXML Project

Zend, Oracle Move Ahead on PHP Development
Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Zend Technologies and Oracle are releasing a beta version of a product linking Oracle's database to PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) programming, which is becoming a prominent alternative or supplement to the Java and .Net application development paradigms. PHP serves as a platform for developing Web applications and Web services, according to Zend. The final production version is due in late September. It also will be a free offering, with Zend to sell supplemental support services and tools. As part of the popular open source LAMP (Linus, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP Python) stack, PHP has caught the eye of not only Oracle but also IBM, which is linking its databases to Zend's environment. Zend acknowledges that Java is better suited for more heavy-duty transactional applications such as banking systems than what could be done with PHP. But PHP could provide a front end for these applications. Included in Zend Core for Oracle is an OCI8 (Oracle Call Interface) driver; the driver provides the C code-level API for working with the Oracle API.