XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 09 February 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 09 February 2007
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 Daily Newslink is sponsored by
IBM Corporation  http://www.ibm.com

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HEADLINES:

* Distributed Event-Based Systems: An Emerging Community
* Call For Participation: Extreme Markup Languages 2007
* Widgets 1.0 Requirements: Updated W3C Working Draft
* XML 2.0?
* Sun CTO Of Software Bob Brewin Hates 'Web 2.0'
* Few 'Substantive' Criticisms of Microsoft's Office Open XML Format
* Improving Communication in E-democracy Using Natural Language Processing
* Random XML Encounter: UPS OnLine Tools
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Distributed Event-Based Systems: An Emerging Community
P. Pietzuch, G. Muehl, L. Fiege; IEEE Distributed Systems Online

Over the past couple of years, event-based systems have appeared in
many application domains, such as enterprise management systems,
large-scale data dissemination, Internet applications, and autonomic
computing. Event-based techniques have established themselves as an
efficient way to structure such systems and handle challenging
interaction patterns between components. Events and messaging have
been in use in industry for years. With the advent of service-oriented
and event-driven architectures, however, the eventing paradigm becomes
a central building block of business IT. Traditionally, events have
been used, for example, in enterprise application integration to
mediate business events such as orders and invoices that are documents
and artifacts of business processes. At the same time, dedicated
information-dissemination applications, such as stock quotes and
network monitoring, have operated at a distinct, lower level of
granularity. However, for some time, we've been witnessing a shift
from specific applications to eventing as a general architecture
paradigm. The zero-latency enterprise was propagated a while ago only
to be superseded more recently by service-oriented and event-driven
architectures (EDAs). Service-oriented architectures don't prosper
just because we communicate over HTTP. The components must be designed
to serve by making them autonomous, composable, and responsive to
input, exceptions, and changes. Event-driven design offers the
flexibility to address these issues and reflects the real world's
event-driven nature. With the advent of Web services, standardization
efforts have begun to establish Web services in conjunction with
related standards (such as XML) as a meta-middleware connecting
applications running on various platforms. In many aspects, these
efforts resemble past efforts to standardize middleware platforms
such as CORBA. One crucial difference is that now all major players,
such as Microsoft, IBM, TIBCO, and Google, are cooperating. Recently,
these standardization efforts have also targeted event-based
communication, leading to open specifications such as WS-Eventing
and WS-Notification. This development is also pushed by the hype
surrounding EDA and helps bring event-based programming to a broader
public. The Inaugural International Conference on Distributed
Event-Based Systems (DEBS) will be held June 20-22, 2007 in Toronto,
Canada. [Note: BEA Systems, Computer Associates, IBM, Microsoft,
and Tibco Software contributed WS-Eventing to W3C in March 2006.]

http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/pages/dsonline/2007/02/o2002.xml
See also Web Services Eventing (WS-Eventing): http://www.w3.org/Submission/WS-Eventing/

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Call For Participation: Extreme Markup Languages 2007
Staff, Mulberry Technologies Announcement

The Extreme Markup Languages Conference 2007, to be held August 7-10,
2007 in Montreal, Canada is "a friendly, technically challenging,
intensive, thought-provoking, argumentative, welcoming, obstreperous
conference on markup, managing information, and information structures."
Conference organizers welcome participation by peer reviewer, as
described in the Call for Participation.  Extreme Markup is the leading
international conference on markup theory and practice. If you have
interesting markup applications, difficult markup problems, or
intriguing solutions to problems related to the design and use of
markup, markup languages, or markup tools; if you want to know what
the leading theorists of markup are thinking; if you are the house
markup expert and want to spend time with your kind, then you should
plan on attending Extreme Markup Languages 2007.  Extreme is an open
marketplace of theories about markup and all the things that they
support or that support them: the difficult cases in publishing,
linguistics, transformation, searching, indexing, and storage and
retrieval. At Extreme, markup enthusiasts gather each year to trade
in ideas, not to convince management to buy new stuff. Extreme pushes
the edges of markup theory and practice.  Paper submissions are
requested on a range of topics, including, for example: (1) XQuery,
XSL-FO, XSLT, Pipelining, Topic Maps, SVG, RDF, TMQL, DSDL, OWL, SGML,
XML, XSD, RELAX NG; (2) markup for document production; (3) markup
for preservation and reuse of cultural artifacts; (4) issues in the
design and deployment of markup vocabularies; (5) engineering tradeoffs
in the design of markup-driven systems; (6) overlapping structures
and how to represent them; (7) bias, objectivity, neutrality and
ontological commitment in markup, markup design and software tools;
(8) trees, tuples, sequences, directed graphs, and other data
structures for the representation of information; (9) better markup
as a tool for making the Web more useful; (10) the future of multi-
purpose content; (11) the future of structured documents; (12)
designing, creating, using, manipulating, and interpreting marked-up
content; (13) new markup-related tools; (14) markup semantics.

http://xml.coverpages.org/Extreme2007-CFP.html

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Widgets 1.0 Requirements: Updated W3C Working Draft
Marcos Caceres (ed), W3C Technical Report

Members of W3C's Web Application Formats Working Group have released
an updated Working Draft for "Widgets 1.0 Requirements". The document
specifies the design goals and requirements for a specification that
would standardize the way client-side web applications (widgets) are
to be scripted, digitally signed, secured, packaged and deployed in a
way that is device independent. The type of web applications that are
addressed by this document are usually small client-side applications
for displaying and updating remote data, packaged in a way to allow a
single download and installation on a client machine. The application
may execute outside of the typical web browser interface. Examples
include clocks, stock tickers, currency converters, news readers,
games and weather forecasters. Some existing industry solutions go by
the names "widgets", "gadgets" or "modules". The W3C Web Application
Formats Working Group was chartered to develop languages for client-side
Web Application development. One deliverable is a specification of a
declarative format for applications and user interfaces. It will be
based on an existing application/UI format, such as Mozilla's XUL,
Microsoft's XAML, Macromedia's MXML or Laszlo Systems' LZX, provided
the owners of the format are willing to contribute. The format should
allow embedded program code. This format, combined with existing
technologies including XHTML, CSS, XForms, SVG and SMIL, should
provide a strong basis for rich client application development. The
WG's XBL2 deliverable is an extension to the sXBL specification
developed jointly by the SVG and CSS Working Groups. XBL is a
declarative language that provides a binding between custom markup and
existing technologies. This enables an extensible framework for custom
controls and the MVC (model, view, controller) methodology.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-widgets-reqs-20070209/
See also W3C Rich Web Clients: http://www.w3.org/2006/rwc/

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XML 2.0?
Tim Bray, Ongoing Blog

Anne van Kesteren suggests an XML 2.0 mostly defined by less-Draconian
error handling, provoking further discussion over chez Sam Ruby. I was
recently asked about this by Xavier Borderie in an interview currently
appearing at Journal du Net... [excerpt:] "Is HTML on the Web a special
case?" -- the answer is obviously "yes". Note that the HTML language
being developed by the WhatWG is not XML at all, and I'm not brave
enough to predict whether that is a good idea. There have always been
a few tools that processed XML data but also accepted broken (non-XML)
data; for example, every Web browser. It seems unlikely to me that
there will ever be an official new release called "XML 2.0" that has
different error-handling rules. But I'm sure that the arguments about
when to apply real XML error handling and when software should accept
non-XML data will go on forever; among other things they are quite
entertaining. There's a spectrum of situations: at one end, if an
electronic-trading system receives an XML message for a transaction
valued at 2,000,000 euros, and there's a problem with a missing end tag,
you do not want the system guessing what the message meant, you want
to report an error. At the other end, if someone sends a blog post from
their cellphone with a picture of a cute kitten, you don't want to
reject it because there's an "&" in the wrong spot. The world is
complicated...

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/01/30/XML-2
See also Results of mobile tests: http://simon.html5.org/articles/mobile-results

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Sun CTO Of Software Bob Brewin Hates 'Web 2.0'
Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek

Sun's CTO for software Bob Brewin has been instrumental in Sun's
strategy on developer technologies including the NetBeans IDE and
Java Studio Creator. Lately he's been thinking about how to improving
the developer experience, and alignment and integration of Sun's
platforms, technologies and tools. Asked about the most pressing
problem that Web 2.0 faces: "The name? That's one of the big ones.
(Laughs) I'm going to use the term -- hate it -- but have nothing
else to replace it with. One of the problems we have with Web 2.0 in
general is that a lot of it is defined as all or nothing for a solution.
If you take a look at REST-type [Representational State Transfer]
services, these in many ways abandoned the tried and true technologies
we build up in enterprise infrastructure, which I think are quite useful.
So there's going to be challenges, for instance, in how we take
enterprises, which are now moving into providing services for consumers
or Web 2.0 portals that look into their business, [how do we take
enterprises into this world ] when most of that they're doing is build
around WS-STAR standards -- WS reliable messaging, security and so on.
And most of what everybody else is looking for is not SOAP, they're
looking for REST, right? So how do we bridge that gap and also handle
things like security and identity in the new model? There're going to
be areas like reliability -- these applications tend to be built fairly
quickly. What happens when you have to scale out to a million users
because your site suddenly becomes popular? What do you do about
languages? What do you do about performance? There's a whole slew of
different things that as we get into the space, and by "us" I mean the
industry in general, there are a lot of problems that people just don't
know they have yet.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197004655

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Few 'Substantive' Criticisms of Microsoft's Office Open XML Format
Peter Galli, eWEEK

According to an eWEEK "Source": More information is leaking out about
the content of the comments, complaints and formal contradictions that
19 countries submitted to the International Standards Organization
under the fast-track approval process for Microsoft's Office Open XML
format. Office Open XML was approved as a standard by Ecma International
in December 2006, and in early January that standards body began the
fast-track process for adoption of the format as an ISO international
standard. During the 30-day comment period that followed, the national
standards body of 19 ISO member countries commented, complained or
issued formal contradictions. A source close to Microsoft told eWEEK
that Romania specifically stated that it is in support of the fast-track
process, while other countries, including Hungary and Sweden, also
raised no contradictions in their submissions. Many others, including
the United States, felt that there were no grounds for contradiction
and so chose not to make a submission during the comment period. Fewer
than 10 of the submissions contain substantive comments that Ecma,
Microsoft and others will work to address, the source said... The
issues that have been raised include the question of how dates will
be handled, given that there is an official ISO date format. The ISO
Secretariat now has up to 90 days to seek resolution of the issues
raised by the member submissions, although this can be extended if
the issues cannot be resolved in the given time period. After that
comes a five-month technical review period, followed by a vote.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2093075,00.asp
See also ComputerWorld: http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9010662

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Improving Communication in E-democracy Using Natural Language Processing
Michele Carenini, et al., IEEE Intelligent Systems

"The E-democracy European Network project has applied natural language
processing to improve communication between public administrations and
their citizens. E-democracy -- the design and development of new
techniques for improving communication between public administrations
(PAs) and citizens -- is a major application field for natural language
processing and language engineering. Helping citizens access information
in a friendly, intuitive way (that is, using their own language) is
the primary objective of a global e-democracy framework. If we take
NLP and language engineering out of laboratory research and into a real
communication context, e-democracy can represent the ultimate testbed
for different tools and techniques. The E-democracy European Network
project (EDEN) aimed at discovering whether a particular NLP approach
could further e-democracy by increasing citizens' participation in the
decision-making process. Our goal was twofold: to test whether we could
meet e-democracy requirements using advanced linguistic technologies and
to test whether Augmented Phrase Structure Grammars (APSGs) were robust
and well-assessed enough to use in a real-world (and highly sensitive)
environment... The fact that we used the same output format without
major problems in developing the Dutch, English, Italian, and German
parsers was the project's first interesting result. Rule-based analyzer
development is usually a resource-consuming activity in linguistic
engineering. The EDEN project demonstrated that combining the right
approach with enhanced tools lets you quickly develop full-functioning
parsing applications. Another interesting outcome concerns the output
format. Linguistic analyzers embedded in EDEN NLP tools represent
sentences by means of flat lists of triples. The output format clearly
borrows from the EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering
Standards) initiative's proposed modeling for linguistic resources
standards and was first tested in the SPARKLE  (Shallow Parsing and
Knowledge Extraction for Language Engineering) project; nonetheless,
it's surprisingly effective and up-to-date. Its simplicity and
flexibility make it independent of domain and language and easily
customizable; at the same time, it can appropriately encode all
information necessary for W3C RDF specifications, which are the
leading Web sites and standards to the next generation.

http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/pages/dsonline/2007/02/x1car.html
See also SPARQL Query Language for RDF: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

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Random XML Encounter: UPS OnLine Tools
Staff, United Parcel Service Technical Documentation

Founded in 1907 as a messenger company in the United States, UPS has
grown into a $42.6 billion corporation by clearly focusing on the
goal of enabling commerce around the globe. Today UPS is a global
company with one of the most recognized and admired brands in the world.
UPS technology solutions offer a way to integrate tracking features
into a customer intranet or Web site. The UPS Tracking Tool provides
up-to-the-minute package status to a customer and its clients using HTML
and XML. A UPS Signature Tracking Tool provides a signature (XML format)
image along with tracking results; it obtains proof of delivery
information, including an electronic signature and delivery address.
The UPS File Download for Quantum View Tool automates retrieval of
Quantum View files for integration into your back-end system, using
XML-formatted data. The UPS Rates and Service Selection Tool provides
quotes in XML-format for UPS service, allowing  customers and employees
to compare prices and select the UPS shipping service that best suits
their needs. A UPS Time in Transit Tool enables employees and customers
to compare different UPS shipping services where UPS delivers around
the world. A UPS Address Validation Tool ensures that customer-entered
shipping addresses are correct at the time of order processing. The UPS
Shipping Tool uses XML-format daya to integrate UPS Web-based shipping
with enterprise applications. UPS TradeAbility helps international
shippers generate cost estimates for duties, taxes, and transportation,
locate compliance and licensing information, and identify restricted
trading parties using XML-based technologies. The XML documents have
tags naming each data element allowing optional elements to be omitted
and unexpected or uninteresting elements to be ignored. XML documents
are also hierarchically structured so that a particular value, such
as "City", can be used in a variety of contexts (e.g., OriginAddress,
DestinationAddress, ShipperAddress) without confusion. Because
unexpected data, identified by the tags, can easily be ignored, XML
documents can be extended (i.e., added to) without impact to existing
applications.

http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/bussol/offering/technology/automated_shipping/online_tools.html

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