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OASIS Identity Metasystem Interoperability TC Advances Information Card Use. OASIS announced the formation of a new Identity Metasystem Interoperability (IMI) Technical Committee, chartered to increase the quality and number of interoperable implementations of Information Cards and associated identity system components to enable the Identity Metasystem. The goal of the IMI TC specification development work to provide the interoperability support that will enable Information Card use to become ubiquitous.

Open Web Foundation Formed to Support Community Specification Development. Open source community leaders announced a new Open Web Foundation which seeks to apply a hybrid open source model to community-based specification development. OWF will focus on: (1) Incubation: lightweight process for creating open web specifications; (2) Licensing: or really no licensing, through non-assertion covenants; (3)Copyright: Creative Commons model; Community: collaboration of individuals and companies held accountable to support the Open Web.

Vendors Publish Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Standard. EMC, IBM, and Microsoft have published "Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)", distributed as four prose documents with supporting XML schemas. The CMIS standard defines a domain model and set of bindings, such as Web Service and REST/Atom, that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management repositories/systems. Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP collaborated on CMIS, now proposed for submisssion to an OASIS TC.

W3C Member Submission for Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL). W3C has published the text of a Member Submission from Creative Commons: "ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language." ccREL builds upon the astronomical success of Creative Commons licenses, which are embeddable machine-readable legal instruments allowing authors to express permissions for others to share, remix, and reuse content. ccREL is a new XML/RDF machine-readable language to express copyright licensing terms and related information.

OASIS/ITU-T Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Receives Support from FEMA and WMO. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announcements highlight adoption of the XML-based Common Alerting Protocol. CAP defines a format for exchanging all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings over multiple networks. FEMA announced a CAP Profile for the Integrated Public Alert and Warnings System. WMO issued a CFP for a December 2008 CAP Implementers Workshop in Geneva, co-sponsored by OASIS and ITU-T.

Balisage 2008 Conference in Montreal Continues Extreme Markup Tradition. "Balisage 2008: The Markup Conference" continues the popular Montreal series (formerly "Extreme Markup Languages") under a new title "Balisage." Organizers have published the complete program for the main conference (August 12-15, 2008) and for the "International Symposium on Versioning XML Vocabularies and Systems" (August 11). Topics: Semantic Web, ontology design, schema mashups, constraint management, topic maps, annotating overlap, digital libraries...

W3C Publishes Approved TAG Finding on Associating Resources with Namespaces. W3C has published "Associating Resources with Namespaces" as an Approved TAG Finding from the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). The document addresses the question of how ancillary information (schemas, stylesheets, documentation) can be associated with an XML namespace. It offers guidance on how a namespace document can be optimally designed for humans and machines such that information at the namespace URI conforms to web architecture good practice.

Information Card Foundation Formed to Support User-Centric Digital Identity. Equifax, Google, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and Paypal have announced the formation of the Information Card Foundation (ICF) as an independent, not-for-profit organization designed to advance the adoption and use of Information Cards across the Internet. ICF's mission is to advance the use of the Information Card metaphor as a key component of an open, interoperable, royalty-free, user-centric identity layer spanning both the enterprise and the Internet.

New OASIS Standard: XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) v1.2. OASIS has announced the approval of the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) specification v1.2 as an OASIS Standard. It was produced by the OASIS XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) TC. The purpose of the XLIFF vocabulary is to store localizable data and carry it from one step of the localization process to the other, while allowing interoperability between tools. XLIFF is tool-neutral and supports the entire localization process.

OGC Approves Sensor Web Observations and Measurements Encoding Standard. The Open Geospatial Consortium announced the approval of the Observations and Measurements Encoding V1.0 specification as a final OpenGIS Implementation Standard. The standard defines an abstract model and an XML schema encoding for observations and measurements as part of a framework required for use by other OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards and for support of OGC compliant systems dealing in technical measurements in science and engineering.

Public Draft for HTML 5: A Vocabulary and Associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. W3C announced a First Public Working Draft of "HTML 5: A Vocabulary and Associated APIs for HTML and XHTML" as a major revision of the World Wide Web's core language. HTML 5 is intended to replace HTML4, XHTML 1.x, and DOM2 HTML. New features are introduced for Web application authors; new elements are introduced based on prevailing authoring practices; processing models and clear conformance criteria are defined for user agents to improve interoperability.

W3C Publishes SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language Semantic Web Standard. SPARQL (recursive acronym for "SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language") has been released as a standard by W3C. The three-part specification was produced by the RDF Data Access Working Group as part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity. SPARQL defines a standardized query language for RDF enabling 'joining' of decentralized collections of RDF data. SPARQL queries hide the details of data management to lower costs and increase robustness of Web data integration.

OASIS Members Propose Charter for WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People) TC. OASIS member companies have submitted a charter proposal for a WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People) Technical Committee. Companies sponsoring the proposal include Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems. Building upon the June 2007 two-part industry BPEL4People specification, this TC would define extensions to WS-BPEL 2.0 to enable human interactions, along with a model enabling the definition of human tasks.

W3C Forms Emergency Information Interoperability Framework Incubator Group. W3C announced the formation of the Emergency Information Interoperability Framework Incubator Group, chartered through 01-December-2008 to review and analyze the current state-of-the-art in vocabularies used in emergency management functions and to investigate the path forward via an emergency management systems information interoperability framework. Initiating Members include National ICT Australia, Google, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and IBM.

OASIS Members Propose New TC for Testing and Monitoring Internet Exchanges. OASIS issued a charter for a new Testing and Monitoring Internet Exchanges TC. The proposed TaMIE TC will define an event-centric test case scripting markup and execution model for systems that use Internet-based messages or events in collaborations between partners, or between components, where collaboration is achieved via choreographed exchanges of discrete units of data. Deliverables include requirements, specification, examples, and an implementation.

W3C Web Services Policy 1.5 Primer and Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors. W3C has published WS-Policy "Primer" and "Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors" documents supporting the recently approved Web Services Policy 1.5 Recommendations (Framework, Attachment). WS-Policy defines a general policy framework for expressing Web service capabilities and requirements, including a policy data model, processing model (for combining/comparing Web service capabilities), and XML Information Set representation for the policy data model.

SNIA Demonstrates Extensible Access Method (XAM) Interoperability. SNIA announced successful interoperability demonstrations of the Extensible Access Method (XAM) specification. XAM addresses management of reference information, viz., fixed content, as distinct from transactional content. XAM defines an XML-based XSet Canonical Format to support interoperability. XAM features globally unique names for objects, metadata as a first class object, pluggable storage architecture, and a standard XAM storage provider interface.

XForms 1.0 Third Edition Published as a W3C Recommendation. W3C has published "XForms 1.0 (Third Edition)" as a W3C Recommendation based upon positive feedback from W3C Members, software developers, and other interested parties. XForms is an XML application representing the next generation of forms for the Web. It splits traditional XHTML forms into three parts: XForms model, instance data, and user interface. The separation of presentation from content enhances reuse, strong typing, accessibility, and usability.

Muradora GUI for Fedora Repository Uses SAML and XACML for Federated Identity. The DRAMA team at Macquarie University has released Muradora V1.0, described as a turnkey GUI for the Fedora Repository supporting federated identity and flexible access control. Key Muradora modules include Shibboleth (SAML) authentication for federated identity/single-sign-on, a Fedora authorization framework based on XACML, an extended XACML engine using DB XML for policy enforcement, and web service interfaces for XACML requests and responses.

W3C GRDDL Recommendation Bridges HTML/Microformats and the Semantic Web. W3C has published "Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL)" and "GRDDL Test Cases" as final Recommendations. GRDDL represents an important link between the Semantic Web and microformats communities. With GRDDL, transformation software can automatically extract information from structured Web pages to make it part of the Semantic Web. Transformations are based upon included markup or indirect reference through profile documents.

Open Virtual Machine Format Specification (OVF) Submitted to DMTF. Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource have submitted the Open Virtual Machine Format Specification (OVF) to DMTF industry standardization. OVF describes an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for packaging and distribution of collections of virtual machines. OVF uses existing packaging tools to combine one or more virtual machines together with a standards-based XML wrapper to correctly install and run virtual machines.

W3C Publishes Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema Recommendation. W3C has published the "Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema" specification as a Recommendation, together with a Usage Guide, Implementation Report, and Test Suite. SAWSDL defines how semantic annotation is accomplished using references within WSDL and XML Schema components to semantic models (ontologies). Association of semantic annotations with a Web service can be used for classifying, discovering, matching, composing, and invoking Web services.

VoiceXML Forum Publishes Session Log Annotation Markup Language (SLAML) Spec. The VoiceXML Forum has published a new specification describing a methodology for collecting, storing, and retrieving runtime data for speech-based services to make data-analysis and service-tuning tools platform-independent. VoiceXML, part of the W3C Speech Interface Framework, supports audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken/DTMF key input, recording spoken input, telephony, and mixed initiative conversations.

OGC Releases Transducer Markup Language (TML) Implementation Specification. OGC announced the publication of the "OpenGIS Transducer Markup Language (TML) Implementation Specification" as a Standard. TML defines the conceptual model and XML Schema for describing transducers and supporting real-time streaming of data to and from sensor systems. OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards support Web-connected devices such as flood gauges, air pollution monitors, bridge stress gauges, mobile heart monitors, Webcams, and imaging devices.

W3C Member Submission: Web Services Policy Attachment for Endpoint Reference. W3C has acknowledged receipt of a Member Submission from Axway, BEA, JBoss, Nokia, Oracle, and Progress Software. The "Web Services Policy Attachment for Endpoint Reference (WS-PAEPR)" specification defines a mechanism to attach policies using the W3C "Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework" specification to an endpoint reference, as defined by WS-Addressing 1.0. It also discusses the semantics of Policies and Policy References within the EPR Metadata element.

Six Technical Committees Proposed for the OASIS Open CSA Member Section. OASIS published six Proposed Charter documents for new TCs to be created within the Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA) Member Section: SCA-Assembly, SCA-Policy, SCA-Bindings, SCA-J, SCA-BPEL, SCA-C. Service Component Architecture (SCA) models business solutions as compositions of groups of service components, wired together in a configuration that satisfies the business goals. OSOA Collaboration specifications will serve as a basis for TC work.

Major Revision of Massachusetts Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM). Massachusetts ITD announced a new major release of the Enterprise Technical Reference Model. ETRM Version 4.0 identifies four specification changes in the "Summary of Technology Specifications" table. Newly added specifications include "WS-I Basic Security Profile v1.0" and "Ecma 376: Office Open XML Formats (Open XML)". Specification updates are listed for OpenDocument v1.1 and XPath v2.0. A new Management Domain document covers Web Services and Systems.

BPEL4People Specifications Integrate Human Interactions Into Business Process. Six technology vendors (Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, SAP AG) have announced the publication of "BPEL4People" specifications which define an approach for integrating human interactions such as concrete tasks and workflow using Web Services Business Process Execution Language 2.0. The 'WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People)' and 'Web Services Human Task (WS-HumanTask)' specifications will be contributed to OASIS for standardization.

OGC Public Review for GeoXACML and OpenGIS Image Geopositioning Service (IGS). The Open Geospatial Consortium announced a call for public comment on two draft OpenGIS Implementation Specifications: GeoXACML and OpenGIS Image Geopositioning Service (IGS). The GeoXACML policy language defines a geo-specific extension to OASIS standard "Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) Version 2.0." The IGS Draft is an OGC Web Service (OWS) that performs triangulation; it uses the new Image Geopositioning Metadata GML Application Schema.

"Fast Incremental Updates of XML Records. Classic UNIX Utilities Offer Help for a Modern Problem." By Uche Ogbuji (Principal, Zepheira). From IBM developerWorks (August 28, 2007). "XML is a very popular format for exchanging collections of records. You can export these records from a relational database, or they can be in formats such as Atom, which is structured around a collection of entry elements. A common architectural pattern is to synchronize data sets by having one system export a set of records to another; this export is often in the form of a large XML file that contains the entire record set. I can certainly say a lot about better ways to approach such an architecture, but in reality this is a pattern seen over and over again, and sometimes you just have to accept it and try to make it as efficient as possible. Such systems have some common efficiency problems: [1] The XML exports can be so large that they use up excessive bandwidth in transmission; [2] For large files, the processing needed to validate and import the XML takes a long time. In this article, I suggest a simple batch of techniques to address these problems — techniques that you can combine into a system for more digestible feeds containing only updated records. It is not a one-stop recipe for solving problems like these in all cases, but if you put together the ideas in this article, you should be able to assemble a solution for your particular needs. You should always be quick to look to several decades of experience when solving such problems. The crux of the techniques presented in this article follows the lines of the age-old diff and patch utilities well known in UNIX diff is a utility that compares two files (or sets of files) and reports the differences in a standard format. patch can read this standard format and apply the represented updates to some other file... I focus on XML with particular characteristics: (1) The root element serves as an envelope whose children are a series of record elements; (2) Each record element has a unique ID attribute or child element; (3) Within each record is a consistent order of elements. The last requirement might seem stringent, but it doesn't necessarily mean that your schema must mandate the order. In practice, incremental updates usually involve comparison of successive export files from the same process, and in such scenarios, matters such as the order of elements within records tend to be consistent. In the worst case, if the schema allows arbitrary order, and you don't want to rely on the order in the actual exports, you can process the XML to impose an order..."
"NIEM: The New Public-Safety Language." By Jennifer McAdams. From Federal Computer Week (August 27, 2007). "Many state and local law enforcement officials eagerly joined an early federal effort to use Extensible Markup Language to streamline data exchanges within the law enforcement community. Several regions shot ahead of the pack and began incorporating a federally designated Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM), only to find the Justice and Homeland Security departments are now pushing a different framework, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). Federal officials released last month the second production version of NIEM, which moves the framework closer to the concept's original purpose, which was to cover a broad range of homeland security-related activities. NIEM goes beyond law enforcement by also applying to emergency response, disaster management, the screening of people and cargo, and international trade. New York was among the first states to adopt NIEM when the state decided to make it the foundation of the New York State Integrated Justice environment. This fall, the state will use NIEM in its eJusticeNY Web portal. Along with New York, Florida has emerged as another NIEM frontrunner. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has established the Florida Law Enforcement Exchange (FLEX) project to map data and establish new regional information sharing systems. NIEM will play an integral role in FLEX... NIEM uses a national standard to create a common vocabulary, and it offers users a structured approach for developing records and reference documents. Those elements are encapsulated in reusable NIEM building blocks called Information Exchange Package Documentation. The IEPDs include a set of schemas for specific XML exchange instances. An IEPD might include examples of style sheets to use when entering new data components or assembling existing data..." See also on NIEM 1.0.
"Document Formats Survey Shows Growing Interest in XML-Based Standards. Interoperability and Choice are Key Factors Driving Strong Open XML Adoption in Europe and the U.S." From Microsoft PressPass (August 27, 2007). "IT managers at large organizations are increasingly interested in employing XML-based standards, including Open XML, among their document standards, according to a study of U.S. and European organizations commissioned by Microsoft Corporation. The results of the survey, which polled 200 government and private-sector organizations to better understand which factors drive adoption of open document standards, are available in an IDC white paper. Survey respondents included key influencers as well as those charged with supporting document standards in 200 organizations (100 in the U.S. and 100 in Europe). Fifty organizations with more than 250 employees were selected from the public sector, another 50 from the commercial sector. Functional approaches to standards adoption were evident in the survey results, with the majority of respondents citing interoperability between productivity tools, long-term archiving, and ease of transition from an existing base of documents to a new standard as the primary criteria used to evaluate organizationwide adoption of a given standard. Other key takeaways from this research include the following: (1) Large organizations with diverse business needs prefer multiple document standards. (2) Although IT managers appear to strongly prefer a single standard to reduce cost and complexity of implementation, line-of-business managers closer to the daily needs of business support the desire for multiple document standards. (3) The standards Portable Document Format (PDF), Open XML and OpenDocument Format (ODF) are all in use today, with PDF viewed as the dominant standard and Open XML demonstrating 'more traction in the market compared to other XML-based standards.' (4) Companies in Europe with an interest in Open XML expect to be piloting or fully deploying the standard a year from today. Those interested in ODF are more likely to be in the 'consideration' phase rather than piloting or fully deploying it within that same time frame..."
For Public Comment: INCITS Biometric Identity Assurance Services (BIAS). Edited by Matt Swayze. INCITS Public Review Text. Members of the OASIS BIAS TC reported that the INCITS 45-day public review of the BIAS standard (INCITS 442, INCITS Project 1823-D, sister standard to the OASIS BIAS Messaging Protocol) opened on 3-August-2007 and closes on 17-September-2007. The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INICTS) document M1/07-0360 [BIAS Revision 6] sets the requirements for the OASIS work. The OASIS Biometric Identity Assurance Services (BIAS) Integration TC complements the efforts of the INCITS to provide the biometrics and security industries with a documented, open framework for deploying and invoking identity assurance capabilities that can be readily accessed as services. The OASIS BIAS Integration TC defines and describes methods and bindings by which the INCITS BIAS framework can be used within XML-based transactional Web services and service-oriented architectures. From the Introduction to Biometric Identity Assurance Services (BIAS): "Biometric technologies are being used today in a wide variety of applications and environments. At the same time, enterprises — both commercial and government — have been moving towards services-based architectures as the framework for their enterprise infrastructures. As biometrics become a larger part of the greater identity assurance capability, the need to access these services remotely across those services-oriented frameworks will become necessary. A current gap exists in standards related to the use of biometric technology in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The Biometric Identity Assurance Services (BIAS) standard is intended to fill that gap by defining a framework for deploying and invoking biometrics-based identity assurance capabilities that can be readily accessed using services (e.g., Web services). Development of this standard necessarily requires expertise in two distinct technology domains — biometrics and service architectures. The two standards organizations that are the leaders in these areas are INCITS and OASIS respectively. The work has been partitioned between the two organizations such that INCITS develops an INCITS standard for biometric services and OASIS develops an OASIS standard for the Web services integration. These two standards will be separate but interrelated. The BIAS standard will help ensure biometric-based solutions are robust and maintainable, while providing a mechanism for accessing an organization's biometric services. BIAS should significantly increase the functional opportunities for implementing identity related functions in a services-oriented framework, allowing for platform and application independence... The BIAS architecture consists of the following components: (1) BIAS services - interface definition; (2) BIAS data - schema definition; (3) BIAS bindings - defined outside this standard. The BIAS services expose a common set of operations to external requesters of these operations. These requesters may be an external system, a Web application, or an intermediary. The BIAS services themselves are platform and language independent. The BIAS services may be implemented with differing technologies on multiple platforms. For example, OASIS is defining Web services bindings for the BIAS services... A goal for this BIAS Standard is to be as language and protocol independent as possible. To that end, the services are specified using a simple XML schema..."
"IPTC Public Review: Experimental Phase 1 Package for NewsML-G2." By Michael Steidl. IPTC Announcement (August 28, 2007). A communication from Michael Steidl (Managing Director, International Press Telecommunications Council) announces that public comment on the IPTC's "Experimental Phase" specification of EventsML-G2 is invited through August 31, 2007. The IPTC, based in Windsor, UK, is "a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards for improved news exchange that are used by virtually every major news organization in the world. The new suite, known as the IPTC G2 Family of Standards, is actually a series of specifications and XML components that can be shared among all IPTC G2-standards for maximum efficiency. For example, NewsML-G2, the family's standard for general news, will inherit some of its functionality from the original NewsML 1.x: It can act as a sophisticated wrapper for any news item of text, photos, graphics, video or other media and it can be used for packaging any combination of these items. But NewsML-G2 will make stronger use of IPTC's robust metadata taxonomy suite, known as NewsCodes, and it will better interact with other IPTC-G2 standards, such as SportsML-G2 or EventsML-G2. It will contain hooks for managing news items, and its flexibility will allow news providers to choose whether to support all of the IPTC G2-standards XML tags or a compact subset. All of this is being developed within IPTC's new modular framework, so that programmers can spend less time learning the nuts and bolts of specialized XML standards and more time writing code for customers. It's the cost-effective way of managing news, whether for a web site, news aggregator, newspaper or television station." See also the ZIP package download.


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