XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 26 September 2006

[Robin Cover <robin@oasis-open.org>]

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 26 September 2006
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover

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This issue of XML.org Daily Newslink is sponsored
by Innodata Isogen  http://www.innodata-isogen.com

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HEADLINES:

* XHTML-Print Published as a W3C Recommendation
* Danish OIOUBL eBusiness Standard and UBL Version 2.0
* Feds Getting Comfortable with SOA
* IBM to Put its Patent Filings Online
* Integrate Advanced Search Functionalities Into Your Applications
* IBM alphaWorks Milestone Features Weather Forecast Demo
* FSF Clarifies 'Inaccurate' Information About GPLv3

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XHTML-Print Published as a W3C Recommendation
Melinda Grant and Jim Bigelow (eds), W3C Technical Report

The World Wide Web Consortium has announced the released of the
"XHTML-Print" specification as a W3C Recommendation. Designed for
printing from mobile and low-cost devices, the XHTML-Print page
description format satisfies print and display needs in the absence
of a printer-specific driver and where variability in the formatting
of the output is expected and is acceptable. "XHTML-Print" is based on
XHTML Basic. XHTML-Print is not appropriate when strict layout
consistency and repeatability across printers are needed. The design
objective of XHTML-Print is to provide a relatively simple, broadly
supportable page description format where content preservation and
reproduction are the goal, i.e. "Content is King." Traditional printer
page description formats such as PostScript or PCL are more suitable
when strict layout control is needed. XHTML-Print does not utilize
bi-directional communications with the printer either for capabilities
or status inquiries. The work is based on XHTML-Print written by the
Printer Working Group (PWG), a program of the IEEE-ISTO.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-print/
See also on W3C HyperText Markup Language: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/

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Danish OIOUBL eBusiness Standard and UBL Version 2.0
ITST Denmark, Announcement

An announcement from the Danish of National IT and Telecom Agency
declares that the Agency is submiting a new 'OIOUBL' open standard for
eBusiness documents to public hearing. The standard aims to secure an
easy exchange of eBusiness documents between the public and the private
sector. Ever since the law of electronic invoicing was put in to effect,
the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency has experienced an increase
in the demand for open standards that could be applied for the entire
eBusiness process and not only be limited to the use of electronic
invoicing. As a consequence a new OIOUBL standard is introduced. The
standard, which is both open and free to use, includes standards for
all the essential documents in the entire eBusiness process. According
to Marie Munk, Vice President in the Danish National IT and Telecom
Agency: "By 2012 it is required that all exchange between the public
sector and the private sector could be carried out by means of IT and
the use of open standards. In this regard the OIOBUL marks a significant
step on the way.  As we stress to accommodate the demands and wishes
from the public sector as well as the private sector we hope that the
ongoing public hearing will be seen as an obvious occasion to make
one's voice heard in this process." The current hearing consists of
eBusiness documents that support a basic process of purchase that minor
enterprises and smaller public administrations are ex-pected to support.
The hearing ends the 13th of October 2006. The new standard is expected
to be published by the 13th November 2006. During 2007 new eBusiness
documents that support more advanced processes of purchase will follow.
From the 13th to the 17th November a major international conference on
UBL will take place. The conference includes both a general symposium
and more technical courses in the use of OIOUBL and UBL 2.0 which
OIOUBL is founded upon.

http://xml.coverpages.org/Denmark-OIOUBL.html
See also the web site: http://www.oio.dk/dataudveksling/ehandel/hoeringer/oioubl

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Feds Getting Comfortable with SOA
Joab Jackson, Government Computing News

Federal agency program managers and other IT professionals are becoming
well-acquainted with the concept of service-oriented architecture, even
in cases where they are not using the methodology, according to a report
issued yesterday by a coalition of SOA product and service vendors.
"We're starting to see that decision makers are starting to feel that
choosing SOA is a safe decision, as opposed to feeling they are the
first to foray into the technology," said Mark Zalubas, chief technology
officer for Merlin International Inc. of Englewood, Col. Merlin leads
the Merlin Federal SOA Coalition, which includes AmberPoint Inc. of
Oakland, Calif., BEA Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., and Systinet Corp.
of Burlington, Mass. A study, titled "SOA What? -- Who and What Is
Driving SOA Adoption in the Federal Government?", conducted in July 2006,
was filled out by 196 federal IT specialists and managers last July
[2005]. Fifty-six percent of the respondents agreed that SOA would
benefit their agencies, even though only 22 percent reported successful
SOA implementations in their own agencies. Actually, only 17 percent of
the respondents noted that they were involved in SOA implementations,
and the vast majority of these implementations are taking place in
civilian agencies. The report did note that the Defense Information
Systems Agency plans to release an RFP for an agencywide SOA soon. Of
the possible uses of SOA, more than half of the respondents recognized
it as a way to fuse discrete systems.

http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/42114-1.html

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IBM to Put its Patent Filings Online
Steve Lohr, New York Times and CNet News.com

IBM, the nation's largest patent holder, will publish its patent
filings on the Web for public review as part of a new policy that the
company hopes will be a model for others. If widely adopted, the policy
could help to curb the rising wave of patent disputes and patent
litigation. The policy, being announced today, includes standards like
clearly identifying the corporate ownership of patents, to avoid
filings that cloak authorship under the name of an individual or
dummy company. It also asserts that so-called business methods alone
-- broad descriptions of ideas, without technical specifics -- should
not be patentable. The move by IBM does carry business risks. Patents
typically take three or four years after filing to be approved by the
patent office. Companies often try to keep patent applications private
for as long as possible, to try to hide their technical intentions from
rivals. The more open approach, IBM says, is intended as a step toward
improving the quality of patents issued in general because the process
of public review should weed out me-too claims that are not genuine
innovations.

http://news.com.com/2100-1014_3-6119527.html

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Integrate Advanced Search Functionalities Into Your Applications
John Ferguson Smart

Lucene is a powerful and widely used open source full-text search
engine written in Java. Lucene is well known for its full-text indexing
and searching, but some of its more advanced features, such as multi-
criteria searching and filtering, and sorting, are less well known.
Lucene, an open source project hosted by Apache, aims to produce
high-performance full-text indexing and search software. The Java
Lucene product itself is a high-performance, high capacity, full-text
search tool used by many popular Websites such as the Wikipedia
online encyclopedia and TheServerSide.com, as well as in many, many
Java applications. It is a fast, reliable tool that has proved its
value in countless demanding production environments. Although Lucene
is well known for its full-text indexing, many developers are less
aware that it can also provide powerful complementary searching,
filtering, and sorting functionalities. Indeed, many searches involve
combining full-text searches with filters on different fields or
criteria. For example, you may want to search a database of books or
articles using a full-text search, but with the possibility to limit
the results to certain types of books. Traditionally, this type of
criteria-based searching is in the realm of the relational database.
However, Lucene offers numerous powerful features that let you
efficiently combine full-text searches with criteria-based searches
and sorts. The first step in any Lucene application involves indexing
your data. Lucene needs to create its own set of indexes, using your
data, so it can perform high-performance full-text searching, filtering,
and sorting operations on your data. It is possible to sort search
results in memory once they have been returned; however, this approach
is wasteful and inefficient. In both traditional relational database
applications, and in Lucene, it is by far more efficient to perform
sorting operations at the source. This article shows how to integrate
advanced search functionalities into your application using Lucene.

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-09-2006/jw-0925-lucene.html
See also the Apache Lucene web site: http://lucene.apache.org/

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IBM alphaWorks Milestone Features Weather Forecast Demo
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of its alphaWorks Web site for
experimental technologies, IBM on Monday will begin hosting projects
including a precision weather-forecasting application and two offerings
for developers. Being offered via a new effort called alphaWorks
Services, the projects stray from the previous format in which users
have been able to download prototype technologies. This time around,
IBM is offering what amounts to hosted online applications. One project,
Deep Thunder, provides high-resolution, localized weather forecasts for
businesses, down to the hour and specific square mile. With Deep
Thunder, a business could learn if snow is falling in an area or what
the weather is like at a manufacturing center. Or, a transportation
department could find out which streets need plowing. Although Deep
Thunder sounds suspiciously like an application rather than middleware,
a development tool, or a platform, [Chris] Spencer would not
characterize it as an application. IBM says it isn't in the applications
business. The other hosted projects include ADIEU (Ad Hoc Development
and Integration tool for End Users), which is a collaborative online
environment for developing Web services, and Web Relational Blocks
(WebRB), providing a GUI to construct front-end Web applications from
back-end databases. WebRB features a GUI for nonprogrammers to build
applications. "What's kind of nice is they don't have to understand the
database schema," or the details of the database, said Spencer. The
project uses technology such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
and Cascading Style Sheets in a hosted environment. Components are
dragged and dropped onto a canvas.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/09/25/HNibmthunderalpha_1.html
See also the alphaWorks Anniversary web site: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/anniversary

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FSF Clarifies 'Inaccurate' Information About GPLv3
Peter Galli, eWEEK

The Free Software Foundation has moved to clarify what it says is
inaccurate information being presented about the second discussion
draft of the next version of the GNU General Public License. The
foundation also used the opportunity to put to rest once and for all
concerns that it will try to force people who have software licensed
under the current GPL (Version 2) to relicense that software under
GPL 3. The September 25, 2006 clarification closely follows the release
of a position paper signed by many of the top Linux developers, in
which they announced their objections to the proposed GPLv3. In the
position paper, which was released on September. 22, leading Linux
developers Andrew Morton, James E.J. Bottomley, Greg Kroah-Hartman,
Christoph Hellwig and six others explained in detail why they "reject
the current license proposal."  John Sullivan, a program administrator
for the FSF said that the foundation has no power to force anyone
to switch from the current GPLv2 to GPLv3. Software developers will
continue to have the right to use GPLv2 for their code after GPLv3
is published, "and we will respect their decisions," Sullivan said,
adding that a free software license cannot contain "use restrictions"
that would restrict what can be done with it. "Contrary to what some
have said, the GPLv3 draft has no use restrictions, and the final
version won't either," he said, but pointed out that GPLv3 will
prohibit certain distribution practices that restrict a user's freedom
to modify the code.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2020495,00.asp

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BEA Systems, Inc.         http://www.bea.com
IBM Corporation           http://www.ibm.com
Innodata Isogen           http://www.innodata-isogen.com
SAP AG                    http://www.sap.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc.    http://sun.com

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