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XML and Web Services In The News - 29 September 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by Innodata Isogen
HEADLINES:
W3C Introduces XProc: An XML Pipeline Language
Norman Walsh (ed), W3C Working Draft
W3C has announced the publication of a First Public Working Draft for
"XProc: An XML Pipeline Language." The draft was produced my members of
the XML Processing Model Working Group as part of the W3C XML Activity.
That working group was chartered to address a range concerns that are
not formally defined in the XML Recommendation itself, for example,
ability to specify the order, parameters, and expected results of
transformations in a standard way. XSLT, XML Schema, XInclude, XML
Canonicalization, and other specifications do define transformations
that operate on and produce XML documents. However, the order in which
these transformations are to be applied is not specified anywhere,
even though applying them in different orders will in general yield
different results. The draft "XProc: An XML Pipeline Language" document
begins to address concerns presented in the W3C "XML Processing Model
Requirements and Use Cases" specification, released in April 2006. From
the XProc Introduction: "An XML Pipeline specifies a sequence of
operations to be performed on a collection of input documents. Pipelines
take zero or more XML documents as their input and produce zero or more
XML documents as their output. Steps in the pipeline may read or write
non-XML resources as well. A pipeline consists of components. Like
pipelines, components take zero or more XML documents as their input
and produce zero or more XML documents as their output. The inputs to a
component come from the web, from the pipeline document, from the inputs
to the pipeline itself, or from the outputs of other components in the
pipeline. The outputs from a component are consumed by other components,
are outputs of the pipeline as a whole, or are discarded. There are two
kinds of components: steps and (language) constructs. Steps carry out
single operations and have no substructure as far as the pipeline is
concerned, whereas constructs can include components within themselves.
See also: Norm Walsh's blog
ebXML Registry Profile for Web Ontology Language (OWL)
Asuman Dogac, Y. Kabak, Gokce B. Laleci (eds), OASIS Committee Draft
Members of the OASIS ebXML Registry TC have approved an "ebXML Registry
Profile for Web Ontology Language (OWL)" specification as a Committee
Draft. This document is an OASIS ebXML Registry Semantic Content
Management Committee Working Draft Profile and the work by the Editors
is realized within the scope of the IST 2104 SATINE Project sponsored
by the European Commission, DG Information Society and Media, eBusiness
Unit. The CD defines the ebXML Registry profile for publishing,
management, discovery and reuse of OWL Lite Ontologies. The ebXML
Registry holds the metadata for the RegistryObjects and the documents
pointed at by the RegistryObjects reside in an ebXML repository. The
basic semantic mechanisms of ebXML Registry are classification
hierarchies (ClassificationScheme) consisting of ClassificationNodes
and the Association Types among RegistryObjects. Furthermore,
RegistryObjects can be assigned properties through a slot mechanism and
RegistryObjects can be classified using instances of Classification,
ClassificationScheme and ClassificationNodes. Given these constructs,
considerable amount of semantics can be defined in the registry.
However, currently semantics is becoming a much broader issue than it
used to be since several application domains are making use of
ontologies to add knowledge to their data and applications. One of the
driving forces for ontologies is the Semantic Web initiative. As a
part of this initiative, W3C's Web Ontology Working Group defined Web
Ontology Language (OWL). Naturally, there is lot to be gained from
using a standard ontology definition language, like OWL, to express
semantics in ebXML registries. This document normatively defines the
ebXML Registry profile for Web Ontology Language (OWL) Lite. More
specifically, this document normatively specifies how OWL Lite
constructs SHOULD be represented by ebXML RIM constructs without
causing any changes in the core ebXML Registry specifications.
Furthermore, this document normatively specifies the code to process
some of the OWL semantics through parameterized stored procedures that
SHOULD be made available from the ebXML Registry.
See also: the OASIS ebXML Registry TC
Guide to Versioning XML Languages Using XML Schema 1.1
David Orchard (ed)., W3C Working Draft
W3C's XML Schema Working Group has released a First Public Working
Draft for the "Guide to Versioning XML Languages using XML Schema 1.1."
The document has been developed by the W3C XML Schema Working Group, as
part of the W3C XML Activity, to illustrate the use of XML Schema 1.1
in defining XML languages. XML Schema 1.1 introduces a number of new
features intended to make it easier to define XML languages which are
flexible enough to tolerate later revision in a forward-compatible way.
The current draft is not complete, but it illustrates several techniques
important for the versioning of XML languages defined using XML Schema
1.1. It will be updated to make it more complete and to reflect further
technical changes in the development of XML Schema 1.1. The intended
audience of this document includes application developers whose programs
read and write schema documents, and schema authors who need to know
about the features of the language, especially features that provide
functionality above and beyond what is provided by DTDs. The text
assumes that you have a basic understanding of XML, Namespaces in XML,
and XML Schema. The guide is a non-normative document, which means that
it does not provide a definitive (from the W3C's point of view)
specification of the XML Schema language. The examples and other
explanatory material in this document are provided to help you
understand XML Schema, but they may not always provide definitive
answers. In such cases, you will need to refer to the XML Schema
specification. To help you do this, we provide many links pointing to
the relevant parts of the specification. The W3C TAG is working on a
versioning finding that provides a language-independent rationale and
description of languages, extensibility, versioning, and compatibility.
The TAG Finding suggested reading for these topics.
See also: Dave Orchard's Blog
What's New in WS-BPEL 2.0?
TC Members, OASIS WSBPEL TC Presentation
A presentation on new features in the Web Services Business Process
Execution Language Version 2.0 has been provided by the OASIS WSBPEL TC.
In terms of Data Access, the version 2.0 specification introduces an XSD
complex-type variable, simplifies the xpath expression by leverage of
the '$' syntax, simplifies message access on WSDL message, provides
clarification of the 'copy' operation behavior under 'assign', and adds
'keepSrcElement' option to 'copy' to deal with XSD substitution group
or choice... For Message Operations, the specification: (i) Adds
Join-style Correlation Set — to allow multiple participants to
rendezvous at the same process with a deterministic order; (ii) Adds
PartnerLink declaration local to a scope; (iii) Adds
'initializePartnerRole' switch to specify whether deployment step need
to specify an endpoint reference for the callee/partner; (iv) Adds
'messageExchange' construct to pair up concurrent 'receive' and 'reply'
activities. As to Abstract Process, v2.0: (1) Clarifies of the model
for Abstract Process and its usage patterns; (2) Introduces 'Abstract
Profile concept' to address different needs in Abstract Processes, with
two example profiles: Observable Behavior and Process Template.
See also: John Evdemon's blog
Time Ontology in OWL
Jerry R. Hobbs and Feng Pan, W3C Working Draft
Members of W3C's Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working
Group have released the First Public Working Draft for "Time Ontology
in OWL." The document presents an ontology of temporal concepts,
OWL-Time (formerly DAML-Time), for describing the temporal content of
Web pages and the temporal properties of Web services. The ontology
provides a vocabulary for expressing facts about topological relations
among instants and intervals, together with information about durations,
and about datetime information. It also demonstrates in detail, using
the Congo.com and Bravo Air examples from OWL-S, how this time ontology
can be used to support OWL-S, including use cases for defining input
parameters and (conditional) output parameters. A use case for meeting
scheduling is also shown. In the appendix we also describe a time zone
resource in OWL we developed for not only the US but also the entire
world, including the time zone ontology, the US time zone instances,
and the world time zone instances.
See also: the W3C news item
Sun Moves Grid Team into Software Group
Peter Galli, eWEEK
Sun Microsystems is hoping to revive the fortunes of its grid computing
initiative by moving that team into the software group under Rich Green,
its executive vice president for software. The move geared to bring
developers into the Sun grid fold. "We are very interested in stepping
up our activities and investments in the developer area. The rationale
behind bringing the team closer to the rest of the software organization
is also about alignment with our developers," Green said. As such, the
organizational structure is being looked at closely as Sun wants to
make sure that, in line with its increasingly "developer-centric,
developer-friendly, developer-active drive, we address the conspicuous
absence of the developer aspect in the grid program. You will certainly
see that part added," Green said. The grid team brings a wealth of
experience in a number of key areas to the software group — from those
who assembled and deployed the physical grid infrastructure to the
software team that built the management, billing and payment components,
as well as the management and administration capabilities. Sun's
involvement in this space spans several areas, he said, from the Sun
grid development and technology architecture to the company's operation
of development and deployment grids. But the company is also essentially
developing grid products that allow other companies to build and deploy
grid services and software as a service.
BEA Offers Glimpse of SOA Tool Set
Sumner Lemon, InfoWorld
BEA Systems this week offered a rare glimpse of its upcoming SOA
(service-oriented architecture) tool set, called WorkSpace 360, with
a demonstration of a prototype tool currently under development. The
heart of WorkSpace 360 is called WorkSpace Central, a set of tools
designed for developing and managing applications built using BEA's
upcoming SOA 360 platform. Scheduled to be introduced starting next
year, WorkSpace 360 is designed to bring business analysts, architects,
developers and IT operations executives together in a shared workspace.
WorkSpace 360 will cover BEA's entire product lineup, including a mix
of rich-client tools based on Eclipse and Web-based versions. "It
starts potentially with AquaLogic and leveraging AquaLogic business-
process management. There then will be a piece which we've previously
called AquaLogic Composer, which will evolve into a bunch of tools,
including a service assembly modeller," Roth said. The service assembly
modeller, which is based on the SCA (Service Component Architecture)
specification developed by BEA and IBM, gives users a view of how
different services are connected and how they communicate, Roth said.
The service assembly modeller can scan a set of services available
from a registry or a data-services platform and display the connections
that exist between them. The result, as demonstrated using a prototype
of the tool on Roth's laptop, is a flow chart of available services,
including SCA notations for each service.
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