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XML and Web Services In The News - 22 November 2006
Provided by OASIS |
Edited by Robin Cover
This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by BEA Systems, Inc.
HEADLINES:
IEC at Work on Material Global Content Declaration Standard
Rob Spiegel, Design News
The Swiss-based International Electrical Congress (IEC) has announced on
its website that it has started work on developing a worldwide material
declaration standard to aid companies in the electronics industry that
need to respond to environmental directives. Some believe the new
standard will be slightly easier to use than IPC-1752. Dr. N. Nagaraj of
Papros Inc., a company that has developed software that supports
materials declaration, notes that "companies that are keeping their data
exported in the XML format of their IPC-1752 material declarations might
find it a little easier to transition to the new standards which are
expected to include data reporting in non-proprietary XML, though the
schema most probably will be different." He notes that in the meantime,
"companies can continue to use their data in the IPC-1752 XML format for
their on-going country-specific and region-specific RoHS compliance work."
Experts in the electronics industry expect the standard to arrive soon
after February of 2007. At that time, industry insiders expect the IEC
standard will override the IPC-1752 materials declaration standard. One
of the goals for the IEC standard is to provide a common declaration
format that would work for a wide number of directives as they appear
across the globe in places such as China and Korea.
Atom Bidirectional Attribute
Jamed Snell, IETF Internet Draft
IETF has released a level -01 Internet Draft for the "Atom Bidirectional
Attribute" specification. This draft updates the Atom Syndication Format
by adding a new attribute that may be used to indicate the base
directionality of directionally-neutral characters. The "dir" attribute
specifies the base direction of directionally- neutral text, as defined
in the Unicode standard. Possible values for the attribute are "ltr" and
"rtl" indicating "left-to-right" and "right-to-left" respectively, "lro"
and "rlo" indicating explicit "left-to-right" and "right-to-left" overrides,
or an empty string indicating that no base-direction is specified. If the
"dir" attribute is not specified, the value is assumed to be an empty
string. The attribute can appear anywhere in an Atom document, except where
it is explicitly forbidden. The direction specified by "dir" applies to
elements and attributes whose values are specified as being "Language-
Sensitive" as defined by Section 2 of RFC 4287. The attribute is inherited
by descendent elements and may be overridden. The Unicode bidirectional
control characters may also be used within attributes and element values to
indicate the directionality of text. Implementers are reminded that
unexpected results could occur when using both the "dir" attribute and the
Unicode control characters within a single document.
See also: Atom references
SOA, Web services and BPEL Converge at AT&T Subsidiary
Rich Seeley, SearchWebServices.com
Sneakerware is no longer getting the application management job done for
Mike Rulf, vice president of advanced engineering at USinternetworking
Inc. (USi), so in recent months he has hit on an SOA approach combining
Web services and BPEL. Acquired this fall by AT&T, USi is an Application
Service Provider (ASP), hosting ERP applications, including Oracle
Application Suite as well as applications from Oracle's PeopleSoft, J.D.
Edwards and Siebel acquisitions. Besides providing the data center and
hardware for its Fortune 1000 customers, Rulf says the key value USi
provides is application management and help desk support. [In the case
of provisioning in the 'old world'] it doesn't work very efficiently and
the paperwork it produces as each department signs off on the forms carried
around the building creates a voluminous audit trail that auditors must
pore through when they come to check to see if provisioning is following
the regulations. That was what motivated Rulf to replace traditional
workflow processes, including sneakerware with a combination of SOA,
Web services, and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). "You can
almost think of BPEL as workflow on steroids," he said. In the multiple
steps of provisioning a customer, the BPEL coordination engine manages
the interactions between the various systems as tasks are completed and
the next task in line is begun, until provisioning is completed. It could
also generate a concise online audit trail to reduce paper work. Beginning
the conversion to an SOA, Web services powered the BPEL system for
provisioning. Rulf and his team of developers, looked at what could be
automated in the management system, based in legacy Perl applications.
The Wide Ranging Impact of the XML Paper Specification
Jonathan Allen, InfoQ
XML Paper Specification, or XPS, is a new XML-based format for creating
formatted documents. Seen as a direct competitor to Adobe's Portable
Document Format (PDF), it is one of the more controversial features in
Windows Vista. Because it touches so much of the Windows infrastructure,
it is expected to affect all users in one way or another. XPS shares many
of the same features as PDF. Both are positioned, or being positioned, as
the de-facto format for documents that need page based layouts. Both can
be created by having applications print to a special printer driver. Both
offer free readers. The key difference is that Adobe makes its money from
PDF editors, while Microsoft is practically begging developers to build
their own editors right into their applications. So if XPS takes off,
Adobe stands to lose. Ken Fisher of Ars Technica reports that Adobe did
file a complaint with the European Union over XPS. Rather than ordering it
removed from Vista, the EU has obtains assurances from Microsoft that XPS
will be handed over to a standards body. The end result is that XPS is in
a stronger position to become the new cross-platform standard for documents.
This isn't the first time Adobe went toe-to-toe with Microsoft over open
file formats. Earlier this year Adobe forced Microsoft to pull PDF support
from Office 2007 under the threat of a lawsuit. Microsoft is also targeting
IT professionals with XPS. One of the touted advantages is that it is a
safe format. Unlike Word documents and PDF files, which can contain macros
and JavaScript respectively, XPS files are fixed and do not support any
embedded code. The inability to make documents that can literally change
their own content makes this a preferable archive format for industries
where regulation and compliance is a way of life.
XForms Repeats: Managing Iteration Over Data Sets in Open-Standards Forms
Jan J. Kratky and Steve K Speicher, IBM developerWorks
XForms provides many powerful mechanisms for working with XML data. One
such mechanism is the "repeat" element, which allows you to quickly and
easily implement iteration over homogeneous data sets in your XML. A
"homogenous collection" is taken to be a series of nodes of the same
datatype at the same level in the document. In addition, you can format
the presentation of such sets as tables, as well as provide dynamic
behavior like the insertion and deletion of specific pieces of data
within the repeating set. It often makes sense to display data from a
homogeneous set in a table format. In the XForms Extension for Firefox,
formatting repeats into a display having the appearance of a table
requires some work with cascading stylesheets (CSS). The power of XForms
really shows itself when you have data that contains homogeneous data
sets at different levels, with one nested within the other. There are no
limits to the depth with which you can nest repeats. The only constraints
are renderer performance and the desire to maintain a clean,
easy-to-navigate interface for the end-user.
See also: XML and Forms
Trusted Computing Group Enables Platform Integrity Measurement and
Verification
TCG, Announcement
The Trusted Computing Group (TCG), an industry group of more than 140 members
creating open industry specifications for computing security, today released
a set of specifications to provide a foundation for platform integrity
measurement and verification. Effectively measuring and verifying the state of
the platform results in the assurance that the platform can protect its
information. Platforms can include PCs, servers, mobile phones and virtually
any computing device. The Integrity Schema specification provides a common
XML-based data format to facilitate information exchange within the Integrity
Management Architecture and integrates with Platform Trust Services Interface
specification. The schema specification covers the format for integrity data
to be collected and reported; the format for representing reference measurement
of known values; and the format for evaluating the results of platform
integrity assessments including reporting of the TPM platform configuration
registers (PCRs).
Raymond Kurzweil: Computers Will Enable People to Live Forever
Sharon Gaudin, InformationWeek
[At the edge, or over...] Raymond Kurzweil is a pioneer in the fields
of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis,
speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He
is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence,
transhumanism, and the technological singularity. The inventor, author,
and futurist predicts that in 15 to 30 years, nanobots will roam our
blood streams fixing diseased or aging organs, computers will back up
our human memories, and conference calls will be replaced by meetings
in virtual resorts. Kurzweil says he's simply looking back and measuring
the computational progress the human race has made over the last century
and then projecting that same line of progress forward into the near
future. According to Kurzweil, here's what we can expect in the not-so-
distant future: Doctors will be doing a backup of our memories by the
late 2030s; By the late 2020s, doctors will be sending intelligent bots,
or nanobots, into our bloodstreams to keep us healthy, and into our
brains to keep us young; In 15 years, human longevity will be greatly
extended. By the 2020s, we'll be adding a year of longevity or more for
every year that passes...
See also: Raymond Kurzweil via Wikipedia
Music and Metadata
Chris Mitchell, XML.com
This article introduces the problems of Shawn, a hapless guy who has managed
to get through a first date with a beautiful, charming, dance music fanatic.
He accidentally met her when his mates suggested they all go down to a sleek
new nightspot instead of their normal public house haunt -- beer-mats and
weekly fixes of the same down-to-earth people. How does the Semantic Web help
this indie music fan through the turmoil of planning that second date, while
knowing absolutely nothing about dance music and with less cash than he
appeared to earn when they first went out? The article looks at how the
solutions compare for the Web and the Semantic Web by using Semantic Web
tools produced by W3C, HP, and MIT under the SIMILE project. This includes a
Semantic Web browser, a screen scraper for producing Semantic Web data, and
a means of consuming and using the data to help our friend. The article builds
up to the ideas of a Semantic Web music browser and discusses how multimedia
description formats, such as MPEG-7, could be used to augment its
functionality. There is a way of describing recorded music that labels music
using RDF. A common format for doing this is known as MPEG-7, although the
principles are the same for a number of multimedia markup languages. This has
the functionality of describing music using subjective labels that rely on
frequency information in the music. These descriptions can be used to describe
how similar-sounding two bits of recorded music are, or even what musical genre
they are likely to be...
See also: XML and Music
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