October 2002

• [October 31, 2002] "Analyze Schemas with the XML Schema Infoset Model." By Shane Curcuru. From DevX XML Zone. October 2002. ['IBM's new XML Schema Infoset Model provides a complete modeling of schemas themselves, including the concrete representations as well as the abstract relationships within a schema or a set of schemas. Learn how to use this powerful library to perform complex queries on your own schemas.'] "As the use of schemas grows, so does the need for tools to manipulate those schemas. IBM's new XML Schema Infoset Model provides a complete modeling of schemas themselves, including the concrete representations as well as the abstract relationships within a schema or set of schemas. This library easily queries the model of a schema for detailed information. You can also use it to update the schema to fix any problems found and write the schema back out. Although there are a number of parsers and tools that use schemas to validate or analyze XML documents, tools that allow querying and advanced manipulation of schema documents themselves are still being built. The XML Schema Infoset Model (AKA the Java packages org.eclipse.xsd.*, or just 'the library') provides a rich API library that models schemas -- both their concrete representations (perhaps in a schema.xsd file) and the abstract concepts in a schema as defined by the specification. As anyone who has read the schema specs knows, they are quite detailed. The XML Schema Infoset Model strives to expose all the Infoset details within any schema. This allows you to efficiently manage your schema collection, and empower higher-level schema tools such as schema-aware parsers and transformers... The XML Schema Infoset Model also includes the UML diagrams used in building the library interfaces themselves; these diagrams show the relationships between the library objects, which very closely mimic the concepts in the schema specifications..." Note: The IBM XML Schema Infoset Model "is a reference library for use with any code that examines, creates, or modifies XML Schemas (standalone or as part of other artifacts, such as XForms or WSDL documents." On October 23, 2002 IBM released a downloadable Version 1.0.1 stable build (20021023_1900TL); see the Developer FAQ and complete documentation. The earlier news item: "IBM Publishes XML Schema Infoset API Requirements and Development Code." General references in "XML Schemas."

• [October 31, 2002] "DAML+OIL: An Ontology Language for the Semantic Web." By Deborah L. McGuinness (Stanford University), Richard Fikes (Stanford University), James Hendler (University of Maryland), and Lynn Andrea Stein (Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering). In IEEE Intelligent Systems [ISSN: 1094-7167] Volume 17, Number 5 (September/October 2002), pages 72-80. "By all measures, the Web is enormous and growing at a staggering rate. This growth has made it both increasingly difficult and increasingly important for humans and programs to quickly and accurately access Web information and services. A semantic Web-in which meanings of terms are captured and exploited-can provide the foundation for convenient Web content access. The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program aims to provide a language and toolset that enables the Web to transform from a platform that focuses on presenting information to a platform that focuses on understanding and reasoning with information. In this article, we describe the DAML language; its goal is to capture term meanings, and thereby providing a Web ontology language. In addition to a brief history of the language's evolution, we introduce the ontology language DAML+OIL by way of examples and include an axiomatization of the language... We're developing DAML+OIL in stages. Our initial aim was to capture term descriptions, as we've described here. The DAML program is now working on a query language and the integration of a rule-encoding option. The next major language enhancement, DAML-Logic (DAMLL) will address encoding inference and general implications. The DAML Services group also built a Web service ontology, DAML-S, which uses DAML+OIL to provide a foundation for Web agents. DAML+OIL was submitted as the starting point for the W3C Semantic Web Activity's OWL. The W3C's Web Ontology Working Group has produced a set of requirements for OWL, as motivated by a collection of use cases. DAML+OIL meets the current requirements draft reasonably well, and the initial OWL language description is quite similar to DAML+OIL. We believe that DAML+OIL is a useful starting point for describing Web content, building on decades of research in framebased systems, description logics, and Web languages. Given this foundation, and the research benefits into languages, complexity, and usability it provides, DAML+OIL could serve as a sound foundation for the next evolution of Web access. Researchers have already accepted DAML+OIL as a starting point for Web semantics representation and used it for applications ranging from military intelligence to medical and genetic database integration. Among the current development efforts are those focusing on using DAML+OIL for managing large Web sites and document and image collections, integrating disparate databases, and providing Web services' interoperability..." General references in "DARPA Agent Mark Up Language (DAML)" and "Ontology Interchange Language (OIL)." Related topics in "Markup Languages and Semantics."

• [October 31, 2002] "Web Ontology Language (OWL) Test Cases." W3C Working Draft 24-October-2002. Edited by Jeremy J. Carroll (HP) and Jos De Roo (AGFA). Latest version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-test/. Produced by the members of the W3C Web-Ontology (WebOnt) Working Group. Part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity. The WD document "contains and presents test cases for the Web Ontology Language (OWL) approved by the Web Ontology Working Group. Many of the test cases illustrate the correct usage of the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and the formal meaning of its constructs. Other test cases illustrate the resolution of issues considered by the working group... OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, providing accurate Web search, intelligent software agents, and knowledge management... it facilitates greater machine readability of web content than XML, RDF, and RDF-S support by providing a additional vocabulary for term descriptions. The OWL Web Ontology Language is being designed by the W3C Web Ontology Working Group as a revision of the DAML+OIL web ontology language." This document is subsidiary to the other Web Ontology Language recommendation track documents, including OWL Web Ontology Language 1.0 Reference [W3C Working Draft 29 July 2002], OWL Web Ontology Language 1.0 Abstract Syntax [W3C Working Draft 29 July 2002], and OWL Formal Semantics. For an introduction to OWL, see Feature Synopsis for OWL Lite and OWL [W3C Working Draft 29 July 2002]. See "OWL Web Ontology Language."

• [October 31, 2002] "Ontologies Come of Age." By Deborah L. McGuinness (Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA). [WWW] Published in Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential [edited by Dieter Fensel, Jim Hendler, Henry Lieberman, and Wolfgang Wahlster; MIT Press, 2002]. "Ontologies have moved beyond the domains of library science, philosophy, and knowledge representation. They are now the concerns of marketing departments, CEOs, and mainstream business. Research analyst companies such as Forrester Research report on the critical roles of ontologies in support of browsing and search for e-commerce and in support of interoperability for facilitation of knowledge management and configuration. One now sees ontologies used as central controlled vocabularies that are integrated into catalogues, databases, web publications, knowledge management applications, etc. Large ontologies are essential components in many online applications including search (such as Yahoo and Lycos), e-commerce (such as Amazon and eBay), configuration (such as Dell and PC-Order), etc. One also sees ontologies that have long life spans, sometimes in multiple projects (such as UMLS, SIC codes, etc.). Such diverse usage generates many implications for ontology environments. In this paper, we will discuss ontologies and requirements in their current instantiations on the web today. We will describe some desirable properties of ontologies. We will also discuss how both simple and complex ontologies are being and may be used to support varied applications. We will conclude with a discussion of emerging trends in ontologies and their environments and briefly mention our evolving ontology evolution environment..." See related topics in "Markup Languages and Semantics." General references in "XML and 'The Semantic Web'."

• [October 31, 2002] "Microsoft .NET Speech SDK 1.0 Beta 2: New Features and Enhancements." Microsoft Corp. Product Fact Sheet. October 2002. 4 pages. "The Microsoft .NET Speech SDK is a set of ASP.NET controls, a Microsoft Internet Explorer Speech Add-in, sample applications and documentation that allows Web developers to create, debug and deploy speech-enabled ASP.NET applications. The tools are integrated seamlessly into Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, allowing developers to leverage the familiar development environment. Microsoft Corp.'s approach to speech-enabled Web applications is built around a newly emerging standard: Speech Application Language Tags (SALT). SALT has been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for adoption as a standard for telephony and multimodal applications, which incorporate speech-enabled elements within a visual Web interface. The beta 2 release of the Microsoft .NET Speech SDK includes a complete tool set for creating and testing SALT-based voice-only telephony applications. It also supports the development of multimodal speech applications on clients such as desktop PCs or Tablet PCs using Internet Explorer browser software... The Microsoft .NET Speech SDK supports SALT 1.0. SALT extends HTML and other markup languages with tags and scriptable objects to perform voice output, spoken-language input, telephony management and messaging. With the new speech add-in for Internet Explorer, developers can type SALT code directly into the browser. [The SDK ] includes a set of robust grammar libraries, written in the W3C-approved Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) format, is included in the SDK, which helps developers obtain abstract, complex concepts from the user. For example, gathering recognizable date or time input is quite complex. If the user says 'Thanksgiving' or 'Monday the 5th,' applications can use grammar libraries to make an intelligent determination of the exact date and year... In beta 1 of the SDK, Microsoft implemented its own grammar format. With this release, the Grammar Editor now opens and saves files only in the W3C-approved SRGS format. All elements, properties and validations have been updated for SRGS..." See: (1) the associated announcement; (2) "Intel and Microsoft Collaborate on SALT"; (3) "SALT Forum Contributes Speech Application Language Tags Specification to W3C"; (4) general references in "Speech Application Language Tags (SALT)." [source .DOC]

• [October 31, 2002] "Microsoft Preps .Net Speech Platform." By Mary Jo Foley. In eWEEK (October 30, 2002). On Wednesday [2002-10-30], Microsoft Corp. took another step toward delivering its .Net platform that will allow developers, customers and integration partners to write and deploy speech-enabled applications and Web services. Microsoft announced at the SpeechTEK Expo here an early beta, or technical preview, of its .Net Speech Platform, which it will make available to fewer than 100 selected testers participating in the company's Joint Development Program. The official Beta 1 release of the platform is due out by next summer, with the final .Net Speech Platform offering due by the end of 2003. The .Net Speech Platform -- a bunch of technologies running on top of Windows Server -- includes a Microsoft speech-recognition engine, a text-to-speech engine, the SALT (Speech Application Language Tags) interpreter, a SALT browser and a telephony interface, among other elements. Microsoft's own product groups are dabbling with the .Net Speech Platform, said James Mastan, director of marketing for .Net speech technologies. He declined to offer specifics, but confirmed that business-to-consumer speech applications might be of interest to the MSN team, while business-to-employee, voice-activated, self-service applications might appeal to the Business Solutions unit that oversees MSCRM, Great Plains and Navision products. Microsoft also announced at SpeechTEK the Beta 2 release of the .Net Speech software development kit. The SDK can integrate directly into Visual Studio .Net and provide developers with pre-built speech components they can use to develop multimodal (a k a, speech plus visual) speech applications that can run on desktop PCs, the soon-to-be-released Tablet PCs and any other device running Internet Explorer. The Beta 2 release includes support for the W3C's SALT 1.0 specification, as well as support for SALT-based, voice-only telephony applications. Microsoft officials said they expect the final .Net Speech SDK to ship by mid-2003..." See references in the preceding bibliographic entry.

• [October 31, 2002] "Create Flexible and Extensible XML Schemas. Building XML Schemas in an Object-Oriented Framework." By Ayesha Malik (Senior Consultant, Object Machines). From IBM developerWorks, XML zone. October 2002. ['XML schemas offer a powerful set of tools for constraining and formalizing the vocabulary and grammar of XML documents. With XML rapidly emerging as the data transport format of the future, it is clear that the structure of the XML, as outlined by schemas, must be created and stored in an organized manner. Developers experienced in object-oriented design know that a flexible architecture ensures consistency throughout the system and helps to accommodate growth and change. This instructional article uses an object-oriented framework to show you how to design XML schemas that are extensible, flexible, and modular.'] "When leveraging established patterns of object-oriented programming in constructing XML schemas, I use the three main principles of object-oriented design: encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. To help discuss object-oriented frameworks in this context, I use an example of a fictitious company, Bond Publishing... Design patterns for decoupling: Recently, some design patterns have emerged that address decoupling and cohesiveness in XML schemas. We have already discussed how to create reusable components. Now, you'll learn how to vary the granularity of datatypes. This is similar to trying to answer the question 'How can I refactor my code and how much refactoring is appropriate for a given situation?' There are currently three design patterns that represent three levels of granularity when creating components... Object-oriented programming places a great deal of emphasis on packaging classes according to their services. The package structure organizes the code and facilitates modularity and maintenance. You can achieve similar benefits by organizing your XML schemas according to their functions... If your system is going to use XML to transport data information, either internally or externally, then you should seriously consider how to properly design your XML schemas. In this article, you have seen how to create schemas that use inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism, and even had a glimpse of emerging design patterns in XML schema design. Leveraging these object-oriented frameworks helps you design XML schemas that are modular and extensible, maintain data integrity, and can be easily integrated with other XML protocols..." Related references in "XML Schemas."

• [October 31, 2002] "Creating Web Services with AXIS. Apache's Latest SOAP Implementation Bootstraps Web Services." By Martin Streicher. In Linux Magazine ('August 2002'). "Apache AXIS is a substantial and comprehensive open source Java (and eventually C++) toolkit for building and deploying Web service clients and servers. Based on standards (HTTP, the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and XML), AXIS includes APIs, tools, and lots of sample code that you'll find invaluable whether you're deploying your first simple Web service, a full-blown commercial service, or a Java applet that interacts with another vendor's Web service. For example, if you're developing a Web service client, you'll need to know how to communicate with a remote Web service. Specifically, you'll need to know the service's URL, its service and method names, and the types and number of parameters for each method. In the realm of Web services, all of that information is captured in a service's WSDL file. AXIS offers a tool, called WSDL2java, that interprets WSDL files and emits Java code that encapsulates all Web service intercommunication. Where you previously wrote tens of lines of code to send SOAP messages manually with Apache SOAP, AXIS can reduce the effort to invoke a remote procedure to just two or three calls to create and initialize two objects. On the other hand, if you're developing the server code for a new Web service, AXIS can help there, too. As mentioned above, all Web services describe themselves with WSDL files. Rather than write WSDL files from scratch (which have to accurately reflect the public methods of your Java classes), AXIS's java2WSDL tool can generate WSDL files directly from Java source code... Finally, AXIS makes deploying and managing Web services a snap. The fastest way to create an AXIS Web service is to simply drop a Java source file into the AXIS Web applications directory. The other technique, Web Services Deployment Descriptors (WSDD), are about as easy to use, but give you more control and more flexibility. For example, WSDD files can enable or disable individual methods in your Web service. AXIS also offers a number of system administration tools that make management of Web services more tractable. Services can be deployed and un-deployed using AXIS's AdminClient tool, and to help others consume your Web services, AXIS automatically generates WSDL files from any service deployed on your site..."

• [October 30, 2002] "Microsoft Unveils .Net Speech Platform." By Ephraim Schwartz. In InfoWorld (October 30, 2002). "Microsoft unveiled Wednesday the first technical preview of its .Net Speech Platform and also announced availability of the second beta release of its .Net Speech Software Developer Kit (SDK) at the Speech TEK conference in New York. As unveiled, the speech platform contains the Microsoft speech recognition engine, the middleware to connect into a telephony system, the SALT (Speech Application Language Tags) interpreter, a SALT voice browser, and the SpeechWorks text-to-speech engine. The .Net Speech Platform will give developers and customers a foundation to design a single application that can run a speech-enabled application in a variety of venues, including telephony, desktops, and in a multimodal format on mobile devices. The platform is expected to enter beta testing next summer and ship by the end of 2003. The integration also allows an application that incorporates speech to run on any Web server running Microsoft ASP.Net (Active Server Pages), according to [Microsoft's] Mastan. The kit's toolset includes the grammar development tool, a prompt creation tool for creating and managing prompts, a debugging tool, the ASP.Net SALT Web controls, and the add-ins for Internet Explorer for multimodal clients. The SDK will also include a tool for creating and testing SALT-based telephony-only applications, and will use the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) formats for speech grammar... Recent Microsoft partnerships with Intervoice, a leading IVR (Interactive Voice Response) designer, and Intel, a supplier of Dialogic speech boards for telephony, also indicate that Microsoft's speech technology is moving toward mainstream acceptance..." See: (1) the announcement: "Microsoft Releases New Features, Enhancements to .NET Speech SDK. Announces Technical Preview of .NET Speech Platform And Joint Development Program. Ongoing Product Development Efforts Ready Market for Mainstream Adoption of SALT-Based Applications and Solutions."; (2) "Intel and Microsoft Collaborate on SALT"; (3) "SALT Forum Contributes Speech Application Language Tags Specification to W3C"; (4) "Speech Application Language Tags (SALT)."

• [October 30, 2002] "Character Entities: An XML Core WG View." By [Paul Grosso] for the W3C XML Core Working Group. 'A consensus statement from the XML Core WG as of 2002-October-23.' 2002-10-23 or later. "Character entities is an informal name for XML internal general entities (whether internally or externally declared) that provide a name for a single Unicode character. Character references, whether decimal or hexadecimal, offer the same power as character entities, but not the same ease of use. Therefore the ability to use character entities is recognized as important. However, there is absolutely no need to introduce a new mechanism into XML to declare them. ... character entities are important [but] there is absolutely no need to introduce a new mechanism into XML to declare them. The existing mechanism, DTDs, is entirely adequate to the purpose. Although some subsets of XML have outlawed DTDs in the name of interoperability, all conforming XML processors (parsers) must be able to recognize at least some DTD information, specifically including the declaration of character entities in the internal subset. In addition, all but the most limited XML processors can also process the external DTD subset at least to the extent of being able to recognize and act on character entity declarations. At worst, then, the character entities actually used in a given document (generally a small subset of those available) can be declared in the internal subset, and are 100% interoperable across processors... People have sometimes asked for a more general character naming mechanism, equivalent in power to SGML SDATA declarations, allowing for the use of characters that are not encoded in Unicode (either by policy or because the encoding effort has not yet reached them). There is no need for such a facility, because of the Unicode Private Use Area (PUA). This provides a supply of 6400 + 65534 * 2 characters, far more than any application will need..." Note of 2002-10-30 from John Cowan on XML-DEV: "In light of ongoing discussions relating to "character entities" including suggestions that a future version of XML should be augmented to include some new syntax to accommodate them, the XML Core Working Group has developed a public statement describing the current consensus within the WG on certain aspects of this topic..."

• [October 30, 2002] "Developing Grid Computing Applications, Part 1. Introduction of a Grid Architecture and Toolkit for Building Grid Solutions." By Liang-Jie Zhang, Jen-Yao Chung, and Qun Zhou (IBM). From IBM developerWorks, Web services. October 2002. ['According to Gartner, many businesses will be completely transformed over the next decade by using Grid-enabled Web services to integrate across the Internet to share not only applications but also computer power. In this article, Liang-Jie Zhang, Jen-Yao Chung, and Qun Zhou from IBM introduce developers to the basic idea of Grid computing and the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). They describe how developers can use the latest Globus Toolkit (Open Grid Services Infrastructure technology preview) to discover a Grid service, create a Grid service interface, and invoke a Grid service instance. Some ideas to help developers integrate Web services and Grid computing are also described.'] "The driving force behind Grid technology standardization is the Global Grid Forum. The integration of Grid and Web services is technically complicated, but natural. The GGF is a community-initiated forum of individual researchers and practitioners who work on distributed computing, or 'grid' technologies. GGF is the result of a merger of the Grid Forum, the eGrid European Grid Forum, and the Grid community in the Asia Pacific. GGF efforts are also aimed at the development of a broadly based Integrated Grid Architecture that can serve to guide the research, development, and deployment activities of the emerging Grid communities. The Open Grid Service Interface Working Group of the GGF is defining the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). OGSA is a distributed interaction and computing architecture based around the Grid service to assure interoperability on heterogeneous systems so that different types of systems can communicate and share information. It leverages the emerging Web services to define the Web Services Definition Language interfaces. All services adhere to specified Grid service interfaces and behaviors. The Grid can be defined at three levels: (1) Enterprise (Enterprise Grid); (2) Partner (Partner Grid); (3) Service (Service Grid). However, the following components in the OGSA specification are still in the early stages of development: Factory, Registry, Discovery, Lifecycle, Query service data, Notification, and Reliable invocation. On the other hand, OGSA is a model for system composition to perform a specific task or solve a challenging problem by using distributed resources over the network... Conclusion: Grid computing uses the Internet to connect clusters of computers or business processes into the force of one single 'supercomputer.' Eventually, the Internet will become a single, unified computing platform, providing faster access to infrastructure and other business application resources. This is the era of Service Computing. In this article, we have introduced developers to Service Computing. We have shown how to use the latest Globus Toolkit to discover a Grid service, create a Grid service interface, and invoke a Grid service instance. Some ideas to help developers integrate Web services and Grid computing have also been described... The second installment of this series will focus on the Grid solution creation process including Grid architecture design, Grid service development, and Grid service deployment." See: "Web Services Description Language (WSDL)."

• [October 30, 2002] "Building Multi-Platform User Interfaces with UIML." By Mir Farooq Ali, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Marc Abrams, and Eric Shell. Published in Proceedings of CADUI 2002, May 2002. 12 pages, with 21 references. "There has been a widespread emergence of computing devices in the past few years that go beyond the capabilities of traditional desktop computers. However, users want to use the same kinds of applications and access the same data and information on these appliances that they can access on their desktop computers. The user interfaces for these platforms go beyond the traditional interaction metaphors. It is a challenge to build User Interfaces (UIs) for these devices of differing capabilities that allow the end users to perform the same kinds of tasks. The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) is an XML-based language that allows the canonical description of UIs for different platforms. We describe the key aspects of our approach that makes UIML successful in building multi-platform UIs, namely the division in the representation of a UI, the use of a generic vocabulary, a process of transformations and an integrated development environment specifically designed for transformation-based UI development. Finally we describe the initial details of a multi-step usability engineering process for building multiplatform UI using UIML... [We show] some of our research in extending and utilizing UIML to generate multi-platform user interfaces. We are using a single language, UIML, to provide the multi-platform development support needed. This language is extended via the use of a logical model, alternate vocabularies and transformation algorithms. Our approach allows the developer to build a single specification for a family of devices. UIML and its associated tools transform this single representation to multiple platformspecific representations that can then be rendered in each device. We have presented our current research in extending UIML to allow building of interfaces for very-different platforms, such as VoiceXML, WML and desktop computers." See: (1) the 2002-10-29 news item "OASIS Members Propose TC for User Interface Markup Language (UIML)."; (2) "XML Markup Languages for User Interface Definition" [cache]

• [October 30, 2002] "WS-I Release Profile for Building Web Services." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (October 29, 2002). "The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) on Tuesday announced availability of the WS-I Basic Profile Working Draft, which features specifications and guidelines for developing interoperable Web services. The Basic Profile consists of implementation guidelines recommending how a set of core Web services specifications, including SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, UDDI 2.0, XML 1.0, and XML Schema, are to be used for developing interoperable Web services. The WS-I Basic Profile Working Group is seeking public feedback on the draft, with plans to release a final version in early 2003. 'The Basic Profile is the first deliverable from the WS-I and it's essentially a set of guidelines for people building Web services applications to follow to make their applications interoperable,' said Steven VanRoekel, director of Web services marketing at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash., and a member of the WS-I marketing committee. WS-I is looking to follow up on work being done at standards bodies such as OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and bring Web services interoperability to fruition, VanRoekel said. 'We're looking to take work from standards bodies downstream,' he said. 'We coalesce [standards] into a way to build applications that are interoperable.' Component technologies are found within the scope of the Basic Profile for messaging, description, discovery, and security. Messaging is defined as the exchange of Web protocol elements, usually over a network, while description involves the enumeration of messages associated with a Web service and implementation details. Discovery includes metadata that enables advertisement of a Web service's capabilities, while security is intended to provide integrity, privacy, authentication, and authorization. The security element of the profile describes Secure HTTP, for example, but not the proposed WS-Security standard from OASIS, VanRoekel said. 'We're just not there yet. You have to solve the foundational issues first,' said VanRoekel..." See: (1) the text of the announcement, "WS-I Publishes Basic Profile Working Draft. Now Available for Public Comment."; (2) more detailed references in the news item of 2002-10-18: "Web Services Interoperability Organization Publishes Basic Profile Version 1.0."; (3) "Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)." [PR source .DOC]

• [October 29, 2002] "UDDI and WSIL for e-Science." By Rob Allan, Dharmesh Chohan, Xiao Dong Wang, Mark McKeown, John Colgrave, and Matthew Dovey. Technical Report from the CLRC e-Science Centre and Distributed Computing Programme. October 14, 2002. 19 pages. ['A UK e-Science UDDI registry is being developed to integrate e-Science projects and Virtual Organisations into a Web and Grid services framework. This paper provides the technical background to this project, which complements other sources of information such as the NeSC project database.'] "In this paper we describe how an private UK e-Science UDDI registry or Web Services Inspection document hosted by the Grid Support Centre might be used to register information about e-Science Virtual Organisations and to enable inter-working between them by exposing their contacts and service points. We propose using UDDI and WSIL to provide APIs for information about UK e-Science projects and also show how individual projects might use the same technology. Examples of the latter are the CLRC Integrated e-Science Environment project (IeSE) and EPSRC's MyGrid. These show how UDDI could be used within a single e-Science project for discovery of its own businessEntities and services by high-level components such as applications and portals. We believe that by providing interfaces to e-Science projects using (proposed) Web services standards, such as UDDI and WSIL, it will facilitate commercial uptake. A partly moderated top-level service will build confidence, allow for testing but still provide the capability to register with the worldwide Universal Business Registry via the publisherAssertion capability as projects become more mature and wish to expose their services to international partners. It nevertheless remains to be seen how the proposed services could be used to enable electronic contract negotiation via the so-called 'tModels'. Finally, appendices describe UDDI and WSIL implementations and a proposed architecture for accessing Web services through a firewall using a proxy service. Implementations of this architecture will show if the performance is acceptable for a variety of purposes... We outline how UDDI might be used as a programmatic Web services information directory for e-Science projects and for services within a single project providing its community with multiple 'views' of sub-projects. UDDI will probably need to be supplemented with a 'top-level' WSIL document accessible from the UK Grid Support Centre Web site. The UDDI and WS-Inspection sources can be cross referenced. A private UDDI for the projects of the UK e-Science Programme offers the chance to test the publication of Web services and provide some degree of assurance that the published services will be acceptable to the wider community. Services may also be published to the Universal Business Registry and the publisherAssertion mechanism of UDDI v3.0 can be used to guarantee that they do belong to the programme..." See: (1) "Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)"; (2) "Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL)." [PDF format, cache]

• [October 29, 2002] "An Introduction to WSIL." By Timothy Appnel. From O'Reilly OnJava.com (October 16, 2002). "The Web Service Inspection Language (WSIL) is an XML document format to facilitate the discovery and aggregation of Web service descriptions in a simple and extensible fashion. While similar in scope to the Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification, WSIL is a complementary, rather than a competitive, model to service discovery. Since its release, UDDI has been widely criticized for its implementation, and its relevance questioned repeatedly at this stage of Web services architecture development. Created by a group of IBM and Microsoft engineers and released in November 2001, WSIL is significant because of its simpler document-based approach, which is more lightweight and straightforward and better leverages existing Web architectures. This approach could lead to this specification's rise to prominence. In this article, I will cover the core elements of the WSIL specification, including how WSIL inspection documents are located. Additionally, I will take a cursory look at the specification's extensibility with service descriptions such as WSDL, and point out some problematic issues in the specification. First, let's return to the complementary and contrasting approaches UDDI and WSIL employ in service discovery. UDDI implements service discovery using a centralized model of one or more repositories containing information on multiple business entities and the services they provide. You could compare UDDI to the Yellow Pages in your phone book, where multiple businesses are grouped and listed with a description of the goods or services they offer and how to contact them. The specification provides a high level of functionality through Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) by requiring specifically an infrastructure to be deployed with substantial overhead and costs associated to its use... WSIL approaches service discovery in a decentralized fashion, where service description information can be distributed to any location using a simple extensible XML document format. Unlike UDDI, it does not concern itself with business entity information, nor does it specify a particular service description format. WSIL works under the assumption that you are already familiar with the service provider, and relies on other service description mechanisms such as the Web Services Description Language (WSDL)....WSIL is a simple, lightweight mechanism for Web service discovery that complements, rather then competes with, UDDI. WSIL's model is a decentralized one that is document-based, and leverages the existing Web infrastructure already in place. While UDDI can be seen as a phone book, WSIL is more like a business card. Looking at it in another way, WSIL is like the RSS of Web services..." See: "Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL)."

• [October 29, 2002] "Streamline Your Code and Simplify Localization Using an XML-Based GUI Language Parser." By Paul DiLascia. In MSDN Magazine (October 29, 2002). .NET GUI Bliss. ['MotLib.NET is a library of C# classes that bring many MFC goodies to Windows.Forms. MotLib.NET implements the amazing MGL ("miggle", mot's gui language), a baby XUL-like GUI definition langauge that lets you code your UI in XML.'] "While Windows Forms in .NET has lots of cool features, if you're used to MFC, there are a couple of things you'll find missing, like doc/view, command routing, and UI update. The .NET answer to this is a code generator that writes new code for every single element. But there's a better way. In this article, Paul DiLascia shows how to develop an XML-based GUI language parser for .NET that lets you code resources, menus, toolbars, and status bars in XML instead of with procedural code. He also shows how a user interface based on XML can easily be localized using standard .NET techniques, and introduces his very own library, MotLib.NET, with lots of GUI goodies for your programming pleasure... when it comes to GUI, .NET has a weak spot. Windows Forms has all the essentials, and many welcome improvements like anchor points, docking, and automatic recreation when you change window styles... In the pages that follow, I'll show you how to build a system that closes the GUI gap in Windows Forms. I'll show you how to have your Windows Forms and favorite MFC goodies, too. You'll learn to localize with ease and flair by coding your GUI in XML. This article covers resources, commands, menus and toolbars; a future article will deal with forms... I knew I wanted something like RC files that would let me express menu and other UI definitions in a separate and therefore more easily translatable file, using some kind of special language. What better language to use than XML? In fact, such a language already exists: XUL ('zool'), the XML User-interface Language. XUL is a dialect of XML for describing user interfaces. XUL was developed by the Java language folks for Mozilla (the Netscape engine). XUL is quite extensive, with commands for menus, toolbars, buttons, edit controls, and all sorts of widgets, well beyond the scope of this article. But it's not hard to write a mini-XUL that supports only the widgets you need. XUL -- or something like it -- is just the ticket to GUI greatness! In the end, I wrote a new library, MotLib.NET, with classes to parse GUI definitions in my own invented XML dialect, MGL (pronounced "miggle"). MGL stands for Mot's GUI Language. Having already named my earlier MFC class library PixieLib to emphasize its smallness, I decided to continue the tradition of cutesy pet names to underline my emphasis on small, tight code... MGL is a dialect of XML and follows the usual XML semantics, with case-sensitive elements and attributes that are, by convention, lowercase. Commands are represented by Command objects, which have properties such as Id, Prompt, Tip, and Tag. Command IDs are strings, not integers... MGL elements generally mirror .NET classes. For example, whereas XUL has <popup> to create submenus, MGL uses <menuitem> the same way as .NET. To build a submenu, create menuitems within menuitems... MGL does <toolbar> and <statusbar> too... " General references: "XML Markup Languages for User Interface Definition."

• [October 28, 2002] "Sun Unveils Upgraded App Server." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (October 28, 2002). "Sun Microsystems on Monday will release two editions of the Sun ONE Application Server, featuring integration with the Sun ONE Studio for Java Enterprise Edition Web services tools. Sun ONE Application Server 7 features an implementation of J2EE 1.3 and Java Web Services Developer Pack (WSDP) to provide standard implementations of Web services standards including WSDL, SOAP, ebXML, and UDDI... Version 7 is integrated with Sun ONE Studio for Java 4.1, an updated toolset that includes support for WSDP. This integration, plus pre-built components provided in the Sun ONE Application Framework 2.0, helps streamline development of Java Web services and increase developer productivity, according to Sun. 'This is actually the first application server that's both J2EE 1.3-compliant and also supports the complete Java WSDP,' said Rich Schultz, group product marketing manager for Sun ONE Java Web Services, in Santa Clara, Calif. The two editions being released include the core Platform Edition and Standard Edition. The Platform Edition is available as a free download on Solaris and Windows platforms. This edition is expected to be integrated into the Solaris 9 operating environment in January. Versions for SunLinux, HP-UX, and AIX are expected to be available in 60 to 90 days. Maintenance and support are available for an additional cost..." See other references in the announcement: "Sun Microsystems Radically Changes Application Server Market With Release of Sun One Application Server 7. Free Platform Edition With New Integrated Java Tools Makes Creating Web Services Faster and More Economical. Sun ONE Application Server 7 is More Than 50 Percent Faster than IBM WebSphere in JSPs, Servlets, and JDBC."

• [October 28, 2002] "Sun One Application Server 7 Debuts." By Clint Boulton. In InternetNews.com (October 28, 2002). "Sun Microsystems Monday launched a refresher of its application server platform geared toward leveraging the Java language into its product line for more fluid Web services deployment. The Palo Alto, Calif. concern said Sun One Application Server 7 is J2EE 1.3 compliant and supports the Java Web Services Developer Pack to provide tools and platform for Web services such as SOAP (define) and WSDL (define). Rick Schultz, Grid Marketing Manager for Sun One Java Web Services, told internetnews.com that the release marks a new modular approach, complete with new codebase and architecture for Sun's application server development. Sun One Application Server 7 will unfold in three versions, including a platform and standard edition, which are available immediately, and an enterprise edition, slated for a March 2003 release. The Sun One Application Server 7 Platform edition is free and will be tightly integrated into the company's flagship operating system offering Solaris 9 in January, according to Schultz. Its architecture consists of J2EE 1.3, Web Services and an HTTP Server. This package is available in Solaris and Windows today; Linux within 60 days; and HP-UX and AIX in 90 days. The standard addition, complete with remote managing capabilities and multi-tier deployment, will cost $2,000 per CPU. As the company's fullest Web services software package yet, the enterprise edition will feature higher functionality through clustering features, courtesy of the company's acquisition of Clustra Systems last March, as well as Web tier load balancing and advanced session replication..." See details in the announcement.

• [October 28, 2002] "XML Watch: Exploring Alternative Syntaxes for XML. Weighing the Pros and Cons." By Edd Dumbill (Editor and publisher, xmlhack.com). From IBM developerWorks, XML zone. October 2002. ['XML's syntax has brought many benefits due to its interoperability, yet it can be tiresome to author XML documents. Edd Dumbill examines a range of alternative syntaxes for XML, and discusses their benefits and drawbacks.'] "One of the paradoxes of XML is that despite having a heritage from the document-creation community, it can often be remarkably frustrating to author by hand. The extra typing required to open and close tags and escape special characters not only wastes time, but introduces more possibility for error. If you don't want to buy an editor to help you get around this -- and many people don't, for various reasons including taste, principle, and the sheer intractibility of creating a general-purpose XML editor -- then you're stuck editing in longhand. SGML, the document-oriented ancestor of XML, had a way round this. SGML included ways of adding shortcuts to reduce the amount of tagging required, and could even completely redefine document syntax. However, when XML was created, this functionality was omitted to simplify the language and increase interoperability. Over time, though, many of the features in SGML have been reimplemented for XML -- either by standards organizations, or just by community efforts. This is somewhat ironic as, in the early days of XML, its proponents took great delight in proclaiming the simplicity of XML over SGML. Now, with all of XML's bolt-ons, the complexities of the two technologies are at least comparable! The purpose of this article is to survey some of the most popular alternative syntaxes developed for XML, and highlight their areas of usefulness. I will not attempt to list them all, as many people have already made endeavours in this area. Alternative syntaxes have been created for various reasons: to save effort, to mimic favorite environments, to better illustrate the underlying data model, or to work better with existing tools. In answer to the obvious question about decreasing interoperability through other syntaxes, note that none of these syntaxes purport to be an exchange syntax -- that is still left to the XML 1.0 syntax... The main motivation for creating non-XML syntaxes is the difficulty inherent in authoring XML. As Scott Sweeney noted, even the best commercial XML editors require a degree of point and clicking that gets in the way of rapid, free-form content creation. At the end of the day, the contracted general XML syntaxes such as SOX and SLiP have very little to differentiate between them: Their main benefit seems to be in the ability to omit closing tags. One downside to such contracted syntaxes is in the loss of interoperability and future-proofing. Most of the efforts come from single third-party sources. It's not entirely clear what support there is for diverse character encodings, as well as the less frequently used parts of XML such as processing instructions. Also in most cases there is only one tool originator in place, so the ideas may well just die out..."

• [October 28, 2002] "XML and Database Mapping in .NET." By Niel Bornstein. From XML.com October 23, 2002. ['Niel Bornstein looks at XML database binding in ADO.NET. Continues the series approaching Microsoft .NET's XML APIs from a Java programmer's perspective.'] "The designers of the .NET runtime put a lot of thought into the issue of binding XML to a database. The path from XML to database and back again starts with ADO.NET, .NET's database persistence layer, which can be thought of as analogous to Java's JDBC. The System.Data.SqlClient namespace has all the classes you'd expect to see... There is an entire suite of classes in the namespace System.Data.OleDb, whose names start with OleDb, which work with any OLE DB provider. If you've used JDBC, you already know basically how to use these classes. Along with these classes, ADO.NET also introduces the DataSet. A DataSet instance represents an entire database, including the ability to track changes made to individual data elements and to persist them to the underlying database when necessary. The DataSet can maintain its state while disconnected from the actual database. The DataSet can be used to build a data model without writing any SQL. It can also be used to persist the data model to an XML Schema or to read an existing XML Schema and dynamically build the data model. The DataSet can also read and write its data to XML..."

• [October 28, 2002] "Whither Web Services?" By Edd Dumbill. From XML.com October 23, 2002. ['A view on the changing nature of web services. The mainstream tech media, once so keen to hype up web services, is now starting to take a more skeptical view. Does this mean that web services are on the way down? Not at all... things are just getting started.'] "...the concept of web services is basically what got a lot of us excited about XML in the first place, and that the state of web services as a whole has never been better. Let me expand on this a little. First, attempts to take control of a top-down architecture have failed. Despite numerous proposals, there's been no global 'eureka!' moment. You can still deploy a web service and have it implemented pretty much as you like. There's no license fee to access a web service superhighway. Second, since the world hasn't changed overnight, developers are able to investigate alternatives. While I'm not in any particular camp in the protocols debate, it has been heartening that plain old XML & HTTP (aka REST) and BEEP have had a hearing alongside the bigger initiatives, as well as grass roots inventions like Jabber. Heterogeneity rules, for the moment at least, giving us hope of better technical solutions in the long run. Third, and most excitingly, any developer that wants to create a web service, invent an ad hoc application protocol, and do useful work can do so -- and can share this with others by making their protocol open. All of these points apply equally well to XML: you can choose from different architectural styles, different schema languages, and invent your own schemas to your heart's content. Apart from the immediacy of document exchange, it's hard to draw the line between creating an XML vocabulary and a web service..."

• [October 28, 2002] "XML 1.1: Here We Go Again." By Kendall Grant Clark. From XML.com October 23, 2002. ['Recently, the W3C released XML 1.1 as a Candidate Recommendation: this is the stage of a specification where testing and trial implementation is invited. As might be expected, this cause no small stir in the XML community.'] In this week's XML-Deviant column I report on developments in XML, the base layer of the Web's architecture. XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation: We find XML at or near the bottom of the stack. Stability in the base is crucial to any sound architectural design. That is, turbulence in the base is harmful, not just to a design but to its implementation, too. We should expect, then, XML to change very slowly, if or when it changes at all. The ideal outcome for 1.0 version of the XML specification was for it to have been left untouched, forgotten in some dusty corner of the W3C for a good five years. We almost made it. The fifth anniversary of the first edition of XML 1.0 is next February. Of course the XML Namespaces specification should count as a change to XML 1.0. It being promulgated as a separate document didn't minimize significantly the turbulence caused by its adoption. And the only sort of change namespaces can reasonably be thought to be is a major one. So, while it's clear that XML 1.0 has flaws, a good argument can be made that, for the sake of stability and maturity at higher levels, XML 1.0 should be left alone for, say, another three years... So in this case, as in many technological cases, making a decision is a matter of balancing costs and benefits. There are at least three questions to answer -- first, should XML 1.0 be revised now; second, having been revised, should anyone implement it; third, having been implemented, should anyone adopt it? There isn't a single logic covering each of these questions. The cost-benefit analysis is significantly different depending on whether you're a specification writer, a parser or other tool supplier, or an XML end user... In some sense the success or failure of XML 1.1 rests with the middle group, the vendors and tool makers. As Michael Kay said, 'A lot depends on the major parsers, though. If they decide their users aren't interested in XML 1.1 so they're not going to rush to implement it, then obviously XML 1.1 is dead. If they decide they're going to implement it whether users want it or not, then people will gradually adopt it without really noticing they have done so'..." See "W3C Publishes Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 as a Candidate Recommendation."

• [October 28, 2002] "Captured in XML." By Jon Udell. In InfoWorld (October 25, 2002). "XML documents, encapsulated in SOAP messages, are the packets of the business Web. Standards efforts under way focus on how to create, transform, interpret, sign, and encrypt these packets as they flow among communicating applications and services. Because XML documents will often model the real business documents that support business processes, such as purchase orders, it's clear that people will need to be able to write them, too. Sadly, the tools that capture nearly all of our keystrokes -- e-mail, word processors, Web pages -- can't compose valid XML. Solving this problem is as critical as any challenge facing Web services today. Ideally every operating system would offer a standard XML editing component, embeddable in Web pages and GUI applications. Wired to a DTD (Document Type Definition) or XML Schema, this component would allow users to interactively create or modify valid instances of the DTD or schema. Microsoft is taking several steps in this direction. In Office 11, both Word and Excel (but not Outlook) can display and edit schema-defined XML. A recent demo of these features left us with questions that only the beta code (expected shortly) can answer, but the basic strategy is laudable in one way and flawed in another... Ektron, has made a business out of improving [MS DHTML edit control]. Ektron's eWebEditPro enables the Microsoft control to embed in Netscape as well as IE; wraps a JavaScript API around the control so that developers can add or subtract features to customize it for specific applications; and can reduce the awful HTML generated by the control to nice, clean XHTML (Extensible HTML). This format, which combines the familiarity of HTML with the mechanical regularity of XML, is a great way to simplify the management of semistructured and unstructured content... Separately, and not yet integrated with CMS200, Ektron offers eWebEditPro+XML. In this version of the edit control, XML content is displayed in nested frames (defined in an XML configuration file), and made available for structured editing. The XML content is associated with a DTD or schema whose constraints are expressed in the UI. The available choices for the "city" pick-list, for example, are controlled by an XML Schema simpleType that enumerates them. This is a tour de force that pushes the edit control far beyond its intended use. Predictably, the results are not always seamless... A co-chair of the W3C XForms working group, Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer is CEO of a company that offers a transitional product that tracks this emerging standard. Mozquito Technologies' Web Access 2.0 makes XForms-like technology deliverable in today's browsers. An XForms form, for example, uses XML Schema data types to constrain the values permitted in a form. As rendered by Web Access 2.0, the form is defined in HTML, uses generated JavaScript to handle validation, and returns valid XML... We like the concepts that Ektron and Mozquito are developing. XML data capture is too important to be siloed within applications such as Word and Excel. It's a capability that needs to be readily accessible to developers and deployable everywhere."

• [October 28, 2002] "Authoring Challenges for Device Independence." Edited by Rhys Lewis (Volantis Systems). W3C Working Draft 18-October-2002. Latest version URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/acdi/. First public Working Draft. Produced by members of the W3C Device Independence Working Group (DIWG), part of the Interaction Domain. "The document provides a discussion of several challenges that web site authors commonly face when making content and applications available to users with devices of various capabilities The document examines the effects on authors and the implications for authoring techniques that assist in the preparation of sites that can support a wide variety of devices." See also the DIWG charter and mailing list archives.

• [October 28, 2002] "Migratable User Interface Descriptions in Component-Based Development." By Kris Luyten, Chris Vandervelpen, and Karin Coninx (Expertise Centre for Digital Media, Limburgs Universitair Centrum, Belgium). Presented at the Ninth International Workshop on Design, Specification, and Verification of Interactive Systems (DSV-IS 2002), Rostock, Germany, June 12-14, 2002. 15 pages, with 14 references. "In this paper we describe how a component-based approach can be combined with a user interface (UI) description language to get more exible and adaptable UIs for embedded systems and mobile computing devices. We envision a new approach for building adaptable user interfaces for embedded systems, which can migrate from one device to another. Adaptability to the device constraints is especially important for adding reusability and extensibility to UIs for embedded systems: this way they are ready to keep pace with new technologies... To describe a UI on a suffciently abstract level the Extensible Markup Language (XML) is used. Listing 1.1 provides an example of how a UI can be described in XML. A list of advantages is given in ['An XML-Based Runtime User Interface Description Language for Mobile Computing Devices,' Proceedings of the Eight Workshop of Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems, June 2001]. One of the major advantages is that XML does not force any level of abstraction, so this level can be adapted to the requirements of the situation. Note that an XML document can be presented as a tree which turns out to be a great advantage in our approach. There are other approaches for describing User Interfaces, but we believe that an XML-based description offers the best solution in our component-based approach because of it heavily relies on hierarchical structures. [XML syntax goals: platform independent, declarative, consistency, constraints, extensible, reusable, transformations]... the component-oriented approach suggested in this paper has several advantages for developers of embedded systems and mobile computing devices in particular. It is (1) Flexible: changing the UI can be done by another renderer component or letting components provide another UI description; (2) Reusable: providing a high level description of the UI related to the functionality a component offers, allows easier reusability of previously designed UIs in contrast with hard-coded UIs; (3) Adaptable: by abstracting the UI, device constraints can be taken into account when rendering the concrete UI..." See also the presentation slides. General references: "XML Markup Languages for User Interface Definition" [cache]

• [October 28, 2002] "Specifying User Interfaces for Runtime Modal Independent Migration." By Kris Luyten, Tom Van Laerhoven, Karin Coninx, and Frank Van Reeth. Paper presented at CADUI 2002, Fourth International Conference on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces, Université de Valenciennes, France, May 15-17, 2002. 12 pages, with 18 references. "In this paper an approach will be presented which provides a uniform interface to such services, without any dependence on modality, platform or programming language. Through the usage of general user interface descriptions, presented in XML, and converted using XSLT, a uniform framework is presented for runtime migration of user interfaces. As a consequence, future services will become easily extensible for all kinds of devices and modalities. An implementation serving as a proof of concept, a runtime conversion of a joystick in a 3D virtual environment into a 2D dialog-based user interface, is developed... At runtime a user interface description is generated by means of XML as a description language. The XML description provides an abstraction of the user interface using Abstract Interaction Objects (AIO) which can be mapped onto Concrete Interaction Objects (CIO)... Our work does not aim to extract a Task-based description of the User Interface but merely tries to abstract the 'contents' of the user interface, not the presentation. Although we acknowledge the idea of splitting the interface model into a User-task model, a domain model, a user model, a presentation model and a dialog model for getting a better mapping of AIOs on CIOs, we do not consider it to be useful when focusing on runtime migration of existing user interfaces. A working user interface is 'serialized' into an XML description at runtime and this description can be transported to another system using for example the Internet or an infrared communication protocol. Once arrived at the target system the XML document can be parsed and converted in a working user interface ('deserialized'). An advantage of this approach can be found in the abstraction of the original user interface that the XML document provides. While parsing the XML document that contains an abstraction of the user interface, the renderer of the target platform is free to choose other ways to present the same functionality in the user interface... As an abstraction of the user interface we have defined a DTD. This DTD restricts the possible elements and ordering used in the XML document. Our current DTD is inspired by [Müller/Forbrig/Cap 'Model-Based User Interface Design Using Markup Concepts'] and enriched by a subset of interactors... We are planning to replace it with an equivalent XML Schema as soon as there are more mature tools available to use this... The transformation of the original user interface description into a higher level description is realized using the XSLT. Every system or user interface toolkit has to define a conversion providing the appropriate XSLT. Once the higher level description is produced a system specific XML document for the target system has to be produced. For every system a XSLT is defined which maps the AIOs defined in the abstract user interface description to CIOs for that particular system..." See also the presentation slides. General references: "XML Markup Languages for User Interface Definition" [cache]

• [October 26, 2002] "Jabber, WebMethods Tackle Enteprise Integration." By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek (October 21, 2002). "Integration specialist WebMethods on Wednesday said it was partnering with Jabber Inc., best known for its instant messaging technology, to develop real-time event notification services for the financial services industry. The deal highlights that Jabber's XML-based platform, though perhaps best known as an open-source and commercial alternative to public instant messaging services, can also act as a platform for any app that needs real-time messaging... WebMethods will provide the integration technology to tie multiple applications together to enable STP; Jabber's messaging technology will deliver real-time event notification to give customers a window into the process. The Jabber Communications Platform offers an XML-based platform for instant messaging and presence-enabled applications..." See: (1) the announcement: "Jabber and webMethods Form Strategic Alliance. webMethods and Jabber Team to Provide Real-Time Information to Financial Services Companies Using webMethods' Market-Leading Integration Platform."; (2) general references in "Jabber XML Protocol."

• [October 26, 2002] "XSL-FO Inline Elements." By Dave Pawson. Sample Chapter 6 (pages 112-125) in XSL-FO: Making XML Look Good in Print (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, August 2002). "[Extensible Style Language-Formatting Objects, or XSL-FO, is a set of tools developers and web designers use to describe page printouts of their XML (including XHTML) documents. If you need to produce high quality printed material from your XML documents, then XSL-FO provides the bridge.] In this chapter, we will cover what is perhaps the simplest area of XSL-FO: styling the inline content. This is analogous to the word processor's application of bold or italics to particular words. Inline content can be defined as content that, when formatted, does not extend beyond the formatted line extent, i.e., it does not wrap into a new line. Typical source content that may need marking for fo:inline might include content that needs to be emphasized for a specific purpose, such as emphasis, computer commands, instructions, and cross-references. The formatted output might be italicized, underlined, boldface, or hyperlinked. Other visual forms of emphasis include font changes and nontext output, such as inline graphics, horizontal lines, or dot leaders. These are all possible within fo:inline..." Note also: (1) the document "XSL Frequently Asked Questions" maintained by Dave Pawson; (2) "Printing from XML: An Introduction to XSL-FO," by Dave Pawson. General references in "Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL/XSLT)." [cache]

• [October 26, 2002] "EMC Adopts SMI Standard." By Scott Tyler Shafer. In InfoWorld (October 25, 2002). "Hoping to keep momentum alive around its WideSky initiative, EMC has announced it will incorporate open-standards specifications into its developer suite by early next year. The announcement this week follows the development of an industry standards initiative known as the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Storage Management Initiative (SMI), which was previously referred to as the CIM (Common Information Model)/WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Model)/Bluefin specification. The SMI standard addresses a number of critical enterprise storage concerns in that it allows storage management software platforms, or clients, to discover, collect data from, and manage multivendor devices of all types, called providers, in a SAN. Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC's decision to support open standards in its WideSky platform gives it the capability of collecting data from the SMI-compliant storage devices that are likely to come to market early next year from most vendors after the SMI standard is ratified, which is estimated to happen in March or April. ['the new WideSky Developers Suite now supports two new interfaces: Java Native Interface (JNI) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) along with current support of a C interface. This allows developers to create applications in their choice of industry-standard languages and reduce their time-to-market in introducing new innovative software products'] In the same vein, Burlington, Mass.-based startup AppIQ this week released its own SDK that assists hardware vendors to speed the development of SMI-complaint products... The activity comes as the semi-annual Storage Networking World conference in Orlando, Fla., kicks off next week. Vendors, including Hewlett-Packard, EMC, and AppIQ, will demonstrate a SAN managed through a single management platform built on the SMI standard..." References: (1) "Storage Vendors Announce CIM Product Rollout and Joint Interoperability Testing"; (2) SNIA Storage Management Initiative; (3) "DMTF Common Information Model (CIM)."

• [October 26, 2002] "Web Services Key To Groove 2.5." By Barbara Darrow. In CRN (October 25, 2002). "Groove Networks is working on the next version of its collaborative software, adding support for important Web services protocols and integration with Microsoft SharePoint Team Services... Groove 2.5, slated to ship by year's end, will add support for SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, cornerstone Web services protocols. Groove already supports XML. The company, founded by Lotus Notes guru Ray Ozzie, made its name by offering an easy-to-use way for people to chat in near-realtime and share documents and images privately and securely. With version 2.5, the company is bringing Web services into Groove and allowing interoperability, said Dana Gardner, an analyst at The Aberdeen Group..."

• [October 26, 2002] "Liberty, WS-Security Uniting Over SAML Standards." By Vance McCarthy. From Integration Developer News. October 21, 2002. Case Study. "Last month, the Liberty Alliance Project elected a new president Michael Barrett, vice president for Internet strategy at American Express. Since coming to office, Barrett has left little doubt that he will push those vendors sparring over identity and security standards -- notably Sun, IBM and Microsoft -- to reach an agreement on interoperability. So far, the 'peace talks' between Liberty and Microsoft Passport seem to be going well, thanks in large part to all-party discussions on security taking place under the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) umbrella, and some XML-based security brokering technology being specified inside OASIS called SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). 'It's pretty obvious that we'll use SAML as a glue between different identity approaches [such as Liberty and Passport], the SAML technical committee co-chair for OASIS Jeff Hodges told Integration Developer News. 'And while SAML is not an authentication technology in and of itself, SAML can be used as a tool to glue together disparate authentication domains.' For its part, Liberty is built on SAML, but does not define any authentication mechanisms. SAML is a framework and one needs to profile it to put into context to make use of it. Further, the Java Community Process (JCP) has a proposal to natively support SAML (JSR 155) for use in J2EE... Of good news to developers worried about interoperability issues, SAML is also being endorsed by Microsoft execs. 'Members of the OASIS security committee wants to see all our work reconciled, and we want to see SAML token support in WS-Security.' Adam Sohn, a product manager for Microsoft .NET platform strategy group told IDN in an interview this summer. Sohn added that WS-Security's decision to support SAML (and Liberty) will not prompt WS-Security to 'downplay' plan to support a variety of security mechanisms already at work within the enterprise, including PKI, Kerberos and even SSL. WS-Security will look at Liberty and SAML as just another credential type, and we expect to have support in WS-Security this year' Sohn added... 'There are a lot of touching points across Liberty, SAML and WS-Security, and it's hard to look at a crystal ball to see exactly what will happen. But we are starting to see some convergences and rapprochement between all these groups, ' Slava Kavsan, Chief Technologist at RSA Security, and chairman of the Liberty Alliance's Trust and Security Group told IDN. Notably, RSA has been a key figure in pushing compatibility among Sun, Microsoft and IBM approaches. 'There is good news. First, WS-Security will mention SAML is its next draft.' Kavsan looks at the interoperability issues on identity as similar to other compatibility questions that exist on a number of web services fronts between IBM, Microsoft and Sun. 'We're still in a basic architectural world of the Microsoft client needing to talk to a Java or Sun server,' he said. 'Even though Liberty is working on its own browser-based client spec, Liberty needs to and intends to support Microsoft's client base'..." See: (1) "Web Services Security Specification (WS-Security)"; (2) "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization."

• [October 26, 2002] "Tip: Traversing an XML Document with a TreeWalker. Navigate your DOM tree while maintaining parental relationships." By Nicholas Chase (President, Chase and Chase, Inc). From IBM developerWorks, XML zone. October 2002. ['XML's Document Object Model provides objects and methods that enable a developer to navigate a document's tree, but typically the process involves NodeLists and recursive methods that make it easy to get lost within the structure. The DOM Level 2 Traversal module provides a new object, the TreeWalker, which simplifies this process and makes navigation more reliable. This tip demonstrates the process of determining whether a TreeWalker is available and how to use it to extract information from a document. This tip uses JAXP, but the sample application will also work with Xerces-Java 2 and the concepts are applicable for any XML parser environment.'] "The Document Object Model (DOM) provides interfaces such as Node, which includes methods such as getFirstChild() and getNextSibling(). Along with methods such as getChildNodes(), these methods provide a way to navigate an XML document, typically using recursion to analyze each set of children. A TreeWalker does much the same thing, but in a more organized way. Rather than recursing through a method, a TreeWalker actually navigates the structure, using methods such as nextNode(). Each time it moves, the currentNode property changes to the new node, so the TreeWalker always knows where it is within the document..." See also Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Traversal and Range Specification Version 1.0 (W3C Recommendation 13-November-2000).

• [October 26, 2002] "Adding Custom Functions to XPath." By Prajakta Joshi (Microsoft Corporation). MSDN Library. October 8, 2002. ['Guest author Prajakta Joshi discusses how to create custom functions for XPath using System.Xml APIs from the .NET Framework SDK. Topics include adding extension functions to XPath 1.0, a look forward to XPath 2.0, and using extension functions in XSLT.'] "Requests for extension functions are a commonly discussed topic on the XML and XSL public newsgroups. The motivation to write this article arose from observing a large number of user posts on this topic. An XPath expression in XPath 1.0 can return one of four basic XPath data types: String, Number, Boolean, Node-set. XSLT variables introduce an additional type into the expression language, result tree fragment. The core function library in XPath and a few XSLT specific additional functions offers basic facilities for manipulating XPath data types... As W3C XML Schema data types become more integrated with XPath 2.0, the Xquery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 functions and operators will offer a richer function library to XML developers than what currently exists in XPath 1.0. This does not completely eliminate the need for user-defined functions in XPath 2.0. Mechanisms for extensions will be indispensable for powerful and extensible query languages for XML... "

• [October 25, 2002] "Adobe Fires Server Barrage." By [Seybold Staff.] In The Bulletin: Seybold News and Views On Electronic Publishing Volume 8, Number 4 (October 23, 2002). "This week Adobe unleashed a torrent of both new and re-branded products that strengthen the company's commitment to introduce server-based products for large organizations. Five server products -- two new and three acquired from Accelio -- join Adobe Graphics Server in creating a suite of server products that Adobe will sell through OEM, indirect and direct sales channels. In addition, Adobe announced an unusual point release of Acrobat Reader, a special update aimed primarily at review-and-approval processes in large organizations... The new Document Server is an amalgamation of Adobe's Graphic Server, Acrobat Distiller, parts of the FrameMaker engine, and a PDF form processor, all packaged together into a batch-formatting engine accessed through an API. Think of it as Distiller on steroids. It can manipulate PDF files (add and delete pages, add overlays, add or extract comments), assemble custom booklets from PDF pages (renumber, generate headers and footers) and extract or populate Acrobat forms. Using a new XSLFO-to-MIF converter and the FrameMaker processor, it can create PDF pages documents from XML source files (if they've been transformed to XSLFO). Using the embedded Adobe Graphics Server, it can grind up graphics (in PSD, EPS, SVG, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, or BMP formats) into PDF files... The second server product is a special version of the Document Server that applies 'usage rights' to individual PDF files or forms. These usage rights are not specific to individuals (as they are in the usage rights for e-books); rather, they are specific software features that the server turns on or off for that document, and recognized, for now, only by the new 5.1 version of Acrobat Reader... Adobe is targeting all of these products at government, financial and manufacturing sectors, where review-and-approval processes are complex and frequently involve people outside as well as inside the organization. For example, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is testing the Reader Extensions server and Reader 5.1 with tax forms, which citizens could digitally sign and return to the government agency... Adobe's server volley countered last week's Microsoft Xdocs announcement that left some analysts worried that Adobe's PDF franchise was in jeopardy. Adobe has built the PDF/Acrobat franchise over a decade, and Xdocs, while competitive with Accelio's products, do not directly counter PDF's inherent fidelity to sophisticated print layouts. Adobe's message is that 'PDF is not just final form,' and its new emphasis on document processes and electronic forms applications will prove its case..." See other details in "Enhanced Adobe Document Servers Support XML-Based Workflow and Digital Signature Facilities."

• [October 25, 2002] "Use Recursion Effectively in XSL. An Introduction to Recursion in XSL and Techniques for Optimizing Its Use." By Jared Jackson (Researcher, IBM). From IBM developerWorks, XML zone. October 2002. ['Using XSL transformations effectively and efficiently requires understanding how to use XSL as a functional language, and this means understanding recursion. This article introduces the key concepts of recursion and its particular use in XSL. Techniques for optimizing XML translations and avoiding errors while using recursion are also explained. Each concept and technique is accompanied with example code for the reader's reference.]' "Today's programming world is one dominated by imperative programming languages. All of the most popular languages -- Java technology, C (and its various flavors), Visual Basic, and others -- at a high conceptual level, work in basically the same way: You set some variables, call functions or operations that change those variables, and return the result. It is a powerful approach to programming, but it is certainly not the only one. Another breed of programming languages, while less familiar, are at least equally as powerful as their procedural counterparts. These languages are termed functional or declarative languages. Programs written in these languages may only declare variables once and can never change the value stored by a variable once it's declared. XSL as a programming language is both declarative and functional. This means that developers accustomed to writing in Java code or C and learning XSL often find themselves in foreign territory when using XSL's more advanced features. Due to the growing importance to both application and Web developers of XML and the related XSL technology, the effective use of XSL transformations cannot be ignored. Thus, it is increasingly important to learn how to program in the declarative fashion. This means becoming intimately familiar with recursion, both its basic usage and the methods for using it effectively and efficiently for the problems at hand... Once you've gained an understanding of the use of recursion, the declarative style of programming in XSL should no longer be an obstacle, but an efficient way of expanding the abilities of XML transformation. The only question remaining is which type of recursion is best for any individual situation... If your XSL engine recognizes tail recursion, then that is the best technique to use; if you cannot be assured that the transformation technology will recognize tail recursion, then the combination technique is generally preferred... Recursion can be a difficult concept to understand at first, but its usefulness and elegance becomes clearer with use..." [Sidebar: 'Is XSL a functional language?': "... Dimitre Novatchev, author and XSL developer, has written an article demonstrating how functions (templates in XSL) can indeed be passed as a data type using XML namespaces in clever manner. Whether this qualifies templates as first class data types is certainly debatable, but Novatchev's technique makes it clear that XSL can operate as a weakly-typed functional language..."] General references in "Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL/XSLT)."

• [October 24, 2002] "OASIS Tees Up Digital Signatures, Time Stamping." By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek (October 24, 2002). "The OASIS standards group Thursday formed a new technical committee to develop XML protocols for digital signatures and cryptographic time stamping in a Web services transaction. OASIS has become a font of XML standards, housing specs ranging from ebXML to WS-Security to SAML. Their latest work, somewhat surprisingly, appears to overlap work being done at the W3C on XML digital signatures. However, the W3C's work is on baseline XML standards such as XML Signatures and XML Encryption, both of which will ultimately play a role in the new OASIS standards, according to Karl Best, director of technical operations for OASIS. The OASIS digital signature standard will be more application-oriented and focus specifically on the use of the technology within a Web services context, the group said... Specifically, the work of the new OASIS Digital Signature Services Technical Committee will enable Web services to produce and verify digital signatures and provide techniques for proving that a given signature was created within its private key validity period..." See details in the news item "OASIS Members Propose Digital Signature Services Technical Committee."

• [October 24, 2002] "OASIS Group Forms to Tackle Digital Signature Quagmire." By Brian Fonseca. In (October 21, 2002). "Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium members on Thursday set about to build standards to enable trusted and simplified digital signature processing for Web services environments by forming a new OASIS Digital Signature Services Technical Committee. The new OASIS group will work to develop open XML protocols to centrally control, pass along, and validate digital signatures and provide cryptographic time-stamping services as well as to ensure a presented signature was created within its private key validity timeframe, said Robert Zuccherato, chair of the newly formed OASIS committee. "We saw a need for standards dealing with signature processing. The W3C has done a lot of good work of defining syntax of XML signatures and a lot of management around that, but actual signature processing, creating or verifying signatures, pass and validation around that is a hard problem to solve," said Zuccherato, a research scientist at Dallas-based Entrust. He said the OASIS Digital Services Technical Committee hopes to have the complete work on the new standard within a year. The group's first meeting is scheduled for December 2, 2002 and application for membership is still open. Companies signed to the Web services digital signature crusade so far include Entrust, Tibco Software, VeriSign, WebMethods, Iona, and NIST, among others..." See: (1) the news item "OASIS Members Propose Digital Signature Services Technical Committee"; (2) the TC website; (3) "Digital Signatures."

• [October 24, 2002] "Microsoft Promises Arbitrary XML in Office 11." By [Seybold Staff.] In The Bulletin: Seybold News and Views On Electronic Publishing Volume 8, Number 4 (October 23, 2002). "Microsoft has begun delivering advance test copies of the next version of Microsoft Office, code-named Office 11, and revealed that it includes XML-enabled versions of Microsoft Word and Excel. We expect the new version, which is due out in mid-2003, to have a profound impact on the authoring-technology aspects of the publishing community... The XML support is built into the base product, with color-coded tag markup and a pane for viewing the structure of the XML element tree. Users can turn tags on or off, and can trim the list of available elements to only those that are valid... Office 11 is separate from Xdocs, Microsoft's forthcoming XML-based forms application. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, the company has not decided whether Xdocs will be included as part of Office 11 or sold as a separate product, like Visio or MapPoint... for most of the professional publishing community, Office 11 will be a must-evaluate product in 2003. Ever since the demise of SGML Author (Microsoft's SGML add-in that fizzled in the mid-1990s), the publishing community has wished for native SGML, and subsequently XML, support within Word. Although other new collaborative features of Office 11 look compelling, native XML support is the one feature that, by itself, could make the upgrade worthwhile..." See: (1) the announcement: "Microsoft Releases First Beta of 'Office 11'. Next Version of Office to Connect People, Information and Business Processes."; (2) general references in "Microsoft 'XDocs' Office Product Supports Custom-Defined XML Schemas."

• [October 24, 2002] "MS Office XML." By Tim Bray. Posting to XML-DEV. October 24, 2002. "I got an extended (hours-long) demo of ['Office 11'] Word & Excel & XDocs from JeanPa [Jean Paoli] and a product manager whose name I don't have handy, two or three months ago, so things may have changed but here's what I saw: Both Word and this new XDocs thing can edit arbitrary XML docs per the constraints of any old XSD schema. No DTD supprt. There are some of the usual XML editor goodies such as suggesting what elements can go here and picking attributes. They have pretty cool facilities for GUIfied schema customization. Neither of them can help much with mixed content, which has always separated the men from the boys in the *ML editing sweepstakes. I'm not sure that either of them are really being positioned as general-purpose XML content creation facilities up against Arbortext, Altova, and Corel. I'm not sure that market is big enough to interest MS anyhow. XDocs is (strictly my opinion) an attempt to build a desktop application constructor at a level that is a bit more declarative and open than VB, but richer and more interactive than a Web browser. I'm not really convinced yet - I think MS would agree there's still quite a bit of product management to do - but it does seem to be a pretty clever piece of software. I'm pretty sure it's safe to interpret the advent of XDocs as MSFT's declaration that they're not going to do anything with XForms. What actually turns my crank is that you can save word docs as XML and they have their own 'WordML' tag set that gets generated. I took a close look at this and it's pretty interesting. Very verbose - every word on the page gets its own markup. Suppose you have the word 'foo' in bold with single-underline, the WordML looks something like [...] When you get something like a Word table or floating text box the markup gets really severely dense and ugly, but I didn't see anything that seemed egregiously wrong, it's not pretending to do anything more than capture all the semantics that Word carries around inside, which are correspondingly severely dense and ugly. And HTML tables get pretty hideous too. Why did I like this? I didn't see anything that I couldn't pick apart straightforwardly with Perl, and if someone asked me to write a script to pull all the paragraphs out of a Word doc that contain the word 'foo' in bold, well you could do that. Which seems pretty important to me. The idea is that you can have a Word document with all that formatting and then you can mix that up pretty freely with your own schema stuff, and have validation, then you can save it as Word (your markup plus Word's) or as pure XML (discards Word's markup, leaving just yours). The old Corel WPerfect SGML editor used to be able to do this too. WordML and VML (for graphics) and your own schemas all get namespaces and they seem to use them sensibly. JeanPa even talked to me about using real HTTP URIs pointing at schemas.microsoft.com and having RDDL or equivalent there. This gave me an opportunity for sarcastic remarks about 'Imagine that, a URL on microsoft.com that stays stable for more than a week...' ... Anyhow, if they really do something like what they showed me, I'd call it a positive step..." See the Microsoft announcement and "Microsoft 'XDocs' Office Product Supports Custom-Defined XML Schemas."

• [October 24, 2002] "Co-Inventor of XML Says Office 11 is 'A Huge Step Forward for Microsoft'." By Tim Bray and XML-J Industry Newsletter. In XML Journal (October 24, 2002). ['Now that the newly XML-enabled version of Microsoft Office, code-named "Office 11," is in its first official beta release, XML-J Industry Newsletter went straight to Tim Bray, co-inventor of eXtensible Markup Language, and asked for his exclusive views on this improvement... Bray did receive extended hands-on demos of the alpha and beta software, he says, which gave him the opportunity to test-drive and evaluate the suite.'] "When asked how XML-enabling will make a difference in MS Office, Bray quickly zeroes in on what in his view is the key differentiator in an XML-enabled Office suite vs the current one. 'The important thing,' he explains, 'is that Word and Excel (and of course the new XDocs thing) can export their data as XML without information loss. It seems Word can also edit arbitrary XML languages under the control of an XML Schema, but I'm actually more excited by the notion of Word files also being XML files.' So it's a breakthrough? Bray has no doubts whatsoever: 'The XML-enabling of Office was obviously a major investment and is a major achievement,' he declares, without hesitation. 'Built around an open, internationalized file format,' he continues, warming to his theme, 'Office 11 is going to be a huge step forward for management, independent software developers, and Microsoft'..." See also the announcement: "Microsoft Releases First Beta of 'Office 11'. Next Version of Office to Connect People, Information and Business Processes."

• [October 24, 2002] "Sun Joins WS-I." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (October 24, 2002). "Sun Microsystems, which had been shut out of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) board and thus had refused to join the organization, is joining WS-I as a contributing member and intends to run for the group's policy-making board in March 2003. Founded in February, WS-I is intended to be an open industry effort to promote Web services interoperability across platforms, applications, and programming languages... 'From Day 1, we've been supportive of WS-I and the work they're doing with interoperability. That hasn't been the issue. Our issue has been the governance model that has not allowed Sun to participate in WS-I,' said Ed Julson, Sun group marketing manager for Web services standards and technologies, in Santa Clara, Calif. 'I think we're a credible player in the industry. We have a long history of innovation in the standards arena and driving network computing,' Julson said. Sun intends to promote Web services standards at organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and then align that work on converged standards with WS-I profiles, Julson said. 'Over the past six to eight months, Web services standards [have] completely exploded in terms of complexity so we have a situation now where we have this tremendous number of specifications, [which] in many cases are overlapping. We have to reduce this complexity and converge the overlapping specifications,' said Julson..." See: (1) the announcement: "Sun Microsystems Joins WS-I. Web Services Leader Plans to Run for Board Election."; (2) "Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)."

• [October 23, 2002] "The Goals Are Clear -- How To Get There?" By Katherine Burger. From CMP Insurance and Technology Magazine (October 23, 2002). "If insurers want to succeed and profit in today's competitive, cost-conscious financial services arena, they are going to have to transform the ways they do business. Industry-specific standards are a key aspect of any strategy for getting closer to customers and becoming more efficient, but deploying them has been a challenge. Strategies for standards success were revealed at last month's Insurance Standards Leadership Forum in New York City, co-produced by CMP Insurance & Technology and ACORD. 'A shared vision is important,' warned keynote speaker Richmond Waller, executive vice president of e-business, Zurich North America (Schaumburg, IL). That vision includes a 'shared business mind-set, shared logic, shared language, shared processes, and shared measurement of your business value.' ... When it comes to collaboration within the insurance industry among different parties, 'if we don't change, we are in trouble,' says speaker Chris Milton, vice president and reinsurance officer at AIG (New York) -- referring to the insurance industry's need to adopt Internet standards to increase transparency. A 'new economy' and 'new business models for self service' require that carriers adopt Internet standards, such as ACORD's XML standards, in order to improve efficiency, create strategic partnerships, improve customerretention, expand into new markets and increase transparency -- 'which is vital for future success,' Milton told the conference attendees. Central to overcoming some of the obstacles, Milton says, are XML standards, which will allow carriers to first create transparency in their internal business silos by allowing the creation of enterprise data warehouses. Carriers will then eventually be able to interact with business partners, such as reinsurance companies, by being able to transmit data in XML-standard format -- eliminating the need for re-keying of data... One organization that has made a serious commitment to implementing XML is New York-based MetLife, and the firm' director, enterprise technology, Charlie Dietz, told attendees 'XML is a recent development but already an integral part of our business,' in areas such as agent portal links, institutional business portals and key infrastructure systems. Dietz describes himself as 'an XML evangelist' and he advised executives to develop a corporate strategy 'for how to use standards, which ones you are going to use, and how you are going to use them'..."

• [October 23, 2002] "Phaos Looks to Boost Liberty Single Sign-On." By Paul Krill. and James Niccolai. In InfoWorld (October 22, 2002). "Phaos Technology this week [has] the Phaos Liberty Toolkit to enable developers to build applications adhering to the Liberty Alliance single sign-on specification for federated network identity. With the toolkit, Java developers can build applications that enable single sign-on capabilities, support the consolidation of enterprise authentication schemes, and allow migration from legacy infrastructure to XML-based Web services, Phaos said. The toolkit features integrated XML digital signatures and XML encryption as well as privacy and identity mechanisms by integrating hardware operations. The toolkit is expected to be used for federated authentication applications, such as those used for trading relationships among buying entities, manufacturers, and end-consumers, said Roger Sullivan, president of Phaos. It represents an advancement over PKI, according to Sullivan. 'The problem with PKI is that, in order to proliferate PKI, everybody's got to have a card, a certificate,' Sullivan said. 'Until everybody has certificates it can't begin to initiate my trading relationship. The SAML component [of Liberty] provides assistance with this. It is to some degree self-authenticating -- if we agree on a relationship and some rules and you and I can set up a trading relationship with our subordinate employees who are authenticated by the rules that you and I have set up -- I don't have to ping that third-party every transaction. The user presents their credentials as part of the buying transaction. I believe this will help proliferate authentication.' The toolkit expands on the earlier Phaos Liberty SDK with a fully integrated security library. It supports XML, SAML, and SSLava toolkits... Phaos this week also announced Phaos XML Toolkit 2.0, a Java toolkit for building interoperable and secure XML-based applications that benefit from code portability and scalability of Java. Also released was Phaos SAML 1.0, providing a protocol consisting of XML-based request and response message formats to communicate assertions of an entity's attributes, authentication, and authorization..." See: (1) the Phaos Technology Corp. announcement: "Phaos Technology Releases Liberty Toolkit 2.0. e-Security Provider Offers Developer Toolkit for Liberty Alliance Specifications."; (2) "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization."

• [October 23, 2002] "Phaos Releases Liberty Identity Toolkit." By Richard Karpinski. In InternetWeek (October 22, 2002). "Phaos Technology [has] released a toolkit that lets developers build applications based on the digital identity specifications of the Liberty Alliance. Liberty is a multi-vendor consortium building federated identity management and single sign-on specifications. The group released its first specifications earlier this year. The Phaos Liberty Toolkit supports Liberty's sign-on authentication and authorization specifications. The Java-based toolkit lets developers build single sign-on support into apps, and supports the consolidation of multiple enterprise authentication schemes via new XML-based Web services architectures. The toolkit also supports XML digital signatures and XML encryption... Phaos also announced today the release of the Phaos XML Toolkit 2.0, a Java toolkit for building secure XML-based apps, as well as Phaos SAML 1.0, which provides a protocol to communicate assertions of an entity's security attributes, authentication, and authorization..." See: (1) the Phaos Technology Corp. announcement: "Phaos Technology Releases Liberty Toolkit 2.0. e-Security Provider Offers Developer Toolkit for Liberty Alliance Specifications."; (2) "Liberty Alliance Specifications for Federated Network Identification and Authorization."

• [October 22, 2002] "Carriers Worry about XML Fragmentation." By Gregory MacSweeney. From CMP Insurance Technology. October 22, 2002. "XML may be powerful, easy to work with, and could change business transactions forever, but even with XML standards being developed in many industries -- including ACORD's standards for insurance -- the rapid adoption may lead to XML fragmentation as many companies are developing first and checking standards later. With all of the XML hype, it is no wonder that many companies -- such as MetLife, Fidelity, Reuters and FedEx -- have already launched enterprise-wide XML initiatives. But since many standards are not finalized, and many executives 'can't afford to wait' as business pressures mount, it is important to take a closer look at how XML is being used... And even with the ACORD (Pearl River, NY) XML standards, which Wroe describes as 'very strong,' rapid development may lead to fragmentation. 'One of XML's strengths is it is so easy to work with,' Wroe adds. 'It may allow people to be overly creative. There can be semantic fragmentation that can start to cut back on capability.' Susan Ousey, senior vice president, ACORD, adds, 'You can enable a lot of applications very quickly with XML. But there could be fragmentation in the corporate XML infrastructure. Companies need to find a way to take advantage of XML as a developing technology and at the same time build and manage it so there are no problems down the road.' ... To address some of the concerns in insurance, ACORD's Ousey recently attended the Lighthouse Council Summit, an event sponsored by Swingtide, where leaders from AON Corp., Chubb Corp., MetLife and Northwestern Mutual Insurance, among others, gathered to discuss issues related to developing with XML... The attendees concluded that although there is a definite ROI case for using XML, there were come concerns. The attendees worried about the future interoperability of XML, security and compliance and performance measurement activity between/among XML services, according to Swingtide's Wroe..." For information on XML-based standards in the insurance industry, see the XML.org Focus Area on Insurance.

• [October 22, 2002] "The XPointer xpath1() Scheme." By Simon St.Laurent (O'Reilly & Associates). IETF Network Working Group, Internet-Draft. Reference: 'draft-stlaurent-xpath-frag-00.txt'. October 20, 2002, expires April 20, 2003. Also in HTML format. "This document specifies an xpath1() scheme for use in XPointer-based fragment identifiers. This scheme, like other XPointer Framework schemes, is designed primarily for use with the XML Media Types defined in RFC 3023, to identify locations within a given XML representation of a resource. The xpath1() scheme uses XPath 1.0 syntax... As the W3C's xpointer() scheme already provides a superset of the functionality provided by the xpath1() scheme, some consideration of why the xpath1() scheme is useful seems worthwhile. The xpointer() scheme, designed to support the out-of-line linking capabilities of XLink, provides support for character ranges which may arbitrarily cross node boundaries. While this is extremely useful for many hypertext applications, it is unnecessary for a wide variety of simpler projects, and XPath 1.0 is generally far more widely supported than the xpointer() scheme. While the XPointer Framework explicitly supports multiple levels of conformance, the xpointer() scheme states that 'Conforming XPointer processors claiming to support the xpointer() scheme must conform to the behavior defined in this specification and may conform to additional XPointer scheme specifications.' Conforming xpointer() processors must implement both XPath and the xpointer() scheme's own extensions, and while applications might use only the subset of xpointer() that is pure XPath, processors built for that approach are non-conformant. The XPointer set of specifications also includes shorthand pointers (based on ID values with their own complications) and support for an element() scheme that is effectively a subset of XPath, but these offer considerably less functionality than XPath. The xpath1() scheme strikes a balance between the simple implementation but limited functionality of shorthand pointers and the element() scheme, and the complex implementation but great capabilities of the xpointer() scheme. Perhaps more importantly, it strikes that balance using processing capabilities that are already widely deployed..." Simon notes: "Future drafts will include examples, but I suspect the readers of this list know what XPath 1.0 expressions look like. This Internet-Draft has no connection to the W3C XLink WG except insofar as it builds on the XPointer Framework and uses other W3C work as references." See "XML Linking Language." [cache]

• [October 22, 2002] "Understanding WS-Security." By Scott Seely (Microsoft Corporation). From MSDN Library. October 2002. ['This article looks at how to use WS-Security to embed security within the SOAP message itself, exploring the concerns WS-Security addresses: authentication, signatures, and encryption. This article assumes that you are already familiar with XML Canonicalization, XML Signature, and XML Encryption.'] "... the bigger problems involve sending the message along a path more complicated than request/response or over a transport that does not involve HTTP. The identity, integrity, and security of the message and the caller need to be preserved over multiple hops. More than one encryption key may be used along the route. Trust domains will be crossed. HTTP and its security mechanisms only address point-to-point security. More complex solutions need end-to-end security baked in. WS-Security addresses how to maintain a secure context over a multi-point message path. WS-Security addresses security by leveraging existing standards and specifications. This avoids the necessity to define a complete security solution within WS-Security. The industry has solved many of these problems. Kerberos and X.509 address authentication. X.509 also uses existing PKI for key management. XML Encryption and XML Signature describe ways of encrypting and signing the contents of XML messages. XML Canonicalization describes ways of making the XML ready to be signed and encrypted. What WS-Security adds to existing specifications is a framework to embed these mechanisms into a SOAP message. This is done in a transport-neutral fashion. WS-Security defines a SOAP Header element to carry security-related data. If XML Signature is used, this header can contain the information defined by XML Signature that conveys how the message was signed, the key that was used, and the resulting signature value. Likewise, if an element within the message is encrypted, the encryption information such as that conveyed by XML Encryption can be contained within the WS-Security header. WS-Security does not specify the format of the signature or encry