XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 14 February 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 14 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
SAP AG  http://www.sap.com

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HEADLINES:

* Introducing RDFa
* Vendors Form Open-Source Business Alliance
* Interoperability, Choice and Open XML
* End-user and Vendor Organizations Create SOA Consortium
* Members Approve OpenDocument Version 1.1 as OASIS Standard
* All Your Resolvers Are Belong To Us

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Introducing RDFa
Bob DuCharme, XML.com

For a long time now, RDF has shown great promise as a flexible format
for storing, aggregating, and using metadata. Maybe for too long -- as
its most well-known syntax, RDF/XML, is messy enough to have scared
many people away from RDF. The W3C is developing a new, simpler syntax
called RDFa (originally called "RDF/a") that is easy enough to create
and to use in applications that it may win back a lot of the people who
were first scared off by the verbosity, striping, container
complications, and other complexity issues that made RDF/XML look so
ugly. RDF/XML doesn't have to be ugly, but even simple RDF/XML doesn't
fit well into XHTML, because browsers and other applications designed
around HTML choke on it. So, while the general plan for RDFa is to make
it something that can be embedded into any XML dialect, the main effort
has gone into making it easy to embed it into XHTML. This gives it an
important potential role in the grand plan for the Semantic Web, in
which web page data is readable not only by human eyes but by automated
processes that can aggregate data and associated metadata and then
perform tasks that are much more sophisticated than those that typical
screen scraping applications can do now. In fact, the relationship
between RDFa metadata and existing content in web pages has been an
important driver in most use cases driving RDFa's progress.  RDF often
uses a subject, predicate, object combination called a triple to specify
an attribute name/value pair about a particular resource. RDFa uses the
existing XHTML 1 attributes href, content, rel, rev, and datatype, and
it uses the new about, role and property attributes from XHTML 2's
Metainformation Attributes module. RDFa lets you add triples of useful
metadata to your XHTML with simple, straightforward markup. It also
offers features that let you do even more interesting things with it.
In Part 2 of this article, we'll look at how to assign data types to
your RDFa values, reification (how to add metadata about your metadata),
specifying RDFa metadata about elements with an id attribute, compact
URIs, and platforms that make it easier to automate the creation of RDFa
metadata.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/02/14/introducing-rdfa.html
See also the W3C RDFa Primer: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/

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Vendors Form Open-Source Business Alliance
China Martens, InfoWorld

Ten leading open-source software vendors have created a nonprofit
consortium, dubbed the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), to push the
adoption of more open-source technology in the business world. The
group made the announcement Wednesday at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions
Summit in New York. The founding companies are Adaptive Planning,
Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, Openbravo,
SourceForge.net, SpikeSource, and Talend. They offer a wide range of
open-source business software including business intelligence, business
performance management, database, CRM (customer relationship management),
ERP (enterprise resource planning) and systems management applications.
[Note, from the OSA white paper: "The OSA plans to address the major
interoperability issues faced by small and midsize businesses. We will
develop a series of guidelines and best practices that detail how open
source applications should support interoperability. The initial
interoperability topics include compatible infrastructures, shared
services, common standards, support models, the user experience and
business models... The Open Solutions Alliance does not intend to draft
new standards but supports the use of existing standards, both formal
and ad hoc, where it makes sense. One common type of application
integration is 'presentation integration', where the applications are
actually separate but combine their presentation layer in a single web
page via a portal. The OSA will host a community discussion of the
various portlet standards such as JSR-168 from the Java Community
Process and OASIS's Web Services for Remote Portlets. We will use the
community's input to recommend all OSA member companies support a
specific standard. A community member may nominate any standard, with
the exception of standards only supported by one vendor where that
implementation is not available under an open source license. De facto
or ad hoc standards (such as Hibernate for Java object relational
mapping) are eligible.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/14/HNopensourcealliance_1.html
See also the web site: http://www.opensolutionsalliance.org

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Interoperability, Choice and Open XML
Tom Robertson and Jean Paoli, Microsoft Interoperablity Report

"Over the past year, Microsoft has stepped up efforts to identify and
meet the interoperability needs of our customers. Among other things,
we have launched the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, made
up of senior CIOs from the public and private sectors around the world,
who are working closely with us to help us understand their most
critical needs...  In document formats, customers have said loud and
clear that they want interoperability, choice and innovation. On these
criteria, Microsoft has long believed in the power of XML-based file
formats to unlock data in documents and to help integrate front and
back office processes -- while providing significant opportunities for
independent software vendors to create high-value applications.
Microsoft has increasingly implemented XML-based formats in successive
releases of Office. With Office 2007, the default file formats for
Word, Excel and PowerPoint are now based on Open XML, which is also
supported in Office 2003, Office XP and Office 2000 through a free
update. In fact, Office has long supported multiple formats. We believe
that Open XML represents an exciting advance toward achieving the
original vision of XML, where broad interoperability allows documents
to be archived, restructured, aggregated and re-used in new and dynamic
ways. We believe that Open XML can help spark an explosion of innovation
and investment, which will bring great benefits for customers in the
years to come... Some discussion of the ratification of Open XML has
focused on comparisons between it and ODF. It is important to recognize
that ODF and Open XML were created with very different design goals
and that they are only two of many document format standards in use
today, each of which has characteristics that are attractive to
different users in different scenarios."

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/letters/choice.mspx
See also InfoWorld: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/14/HNmsvsibm_1.html

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End-user and Vendor Organizations Create SOA Consortium
Staff, SOA Consortium Announcement

The SOA Consortium is a new SOA advocacy group comprised of end
users, service providers, and technology vendors, committed to helping
the Global 1000 successfully adopt SOA by 2010. SOA Consortium Founding
Sponsors include BEA Systems Inc., Cisco, IBM Corporation, and SAP AG.
SOA Consortium Participants include Avis Budget Car Rental, Bank of
America, CellExchange, Inc., HP, Integration Consortium, Object
Management Group, and WebEx Communications. The SOA Consortium mission,
strategies, and tactics center on the following premises: (1) Service-
oriented architecture adoption is a key enabler for the 21st century
enterprise; (2) Achieving the benefits of service-oriented architecture
requires significant changes for both IT and business executives; (3)
Service-oriented architecture is perceived by business executives as an
IT integration and productivity story, rather than a business agility
story; (4) Enterprise SOA practitioners would greatly benefit from a
vibrant practitioner community to drive local, business-driven, SOA
success, and to spur broader enterprise, and industry-wide, SOA adoption.

http://www.soa-consortium.org/press-releases/02-12-2007.htm

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Members Approve OpenDocument Version 1.1 as OASIS Standard
Staff, OASIS Announcement

OASIS announced that its members have approved version 1.1 of the Open
Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as an OASIS
Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification.
The result of a unique collaboration between advocacy groups for the
disabled and open source and commercial software vendors, this new
version of the standard provides key accessibility enhancements to
ensure that the OpenDocument format (ODF) addresses the needs of people
with disabilities. "The changes made in version 1.1. mean that
OpenDocument now meets and even exceeds the accessibility support
provided in other office file formats, as well as that specified by
the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines," said Dave Pawson of the
U.K.'s Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB). "OpenDocument 1.1
is a practical XML format that is readily transformable to the DAISY
digital talking book standard for people with print impairments. The
clear specification of OpenDocument v1.1 will remain usable long after
commercial and proprietary formats have been condemned to the dustbin."
OpenDocument 1.1 supports users who have low or no vision or who suffer
from cognitive impairments. The standard not only provides short
alternative descriptive text for document elements such as hyperlinks,
drawing objects and image map hot spots, it also offers lengthy
descriptions for the same objects should additional help be needed.
In addition to text documents and spreadsheets, OpenDocument defines
presentation format. Other OpenDocument accessibility features include
the preservation of structural semantics imported from other file
formats, such as headings in tables, and associations between drawings
and their captions. The new version of OpenDocument reflects the work
of the OASIS OpenDocument Accessibility Subcommittee, which is made up
of accessibility experts from IBM, the Institute for Community Inclusion
(ICI), RNIB, Sun Microsystems, and others. The Subcommittee's
recommendations were incorporated into the OpenDocument specification
by members of the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee, which
includes representatives from Adobe Systems, IBM, Intel, Novell, Sun
Microsystems, and others.

http://xml.coverpages.org/OpenDocumentV11-Announce200702.html
See also the OASIS TC web site: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/

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All Your Resolvers Are Belong To Us
Norm Walsh, Blog

Making resolvers easier for users... The plan is this: using the
standard JAXP factory finder mechanisms, inject a special set of parser
classes into the application. These classes behave exactly like the
standard JAXP 1.4 parsers except that they always use a resolver. It
turns out that this works quite well... The catch is that I constructed
these specialty factories by stealing code from the JAXP 1.4
implementation. But I didn't want to steal all the code, so the result
depends on JAXP 1.4. In practice, this means that you'll need to be
running at least Java 6 or using the standalone JAXP 1.4 code... I
haven't setup a special factory for the Transformer yet, so you'll
still have to tell your application which URI Resolver to use if you're
using XSLT. [Note from the xmlresolver Project Home: The goal is to
design and build an "enhanced XML resolver with XML Catalog support,
tation of the SAX EntityResolver, the Transformer URIResolver, and a
new NamespaceResolver. The implementation uses the OASIS XML Catalogs
V1.1 Standard to provide a mapping from public identifiers to local
resources. In addition to enhanced support for RDDL-based namespace
resolution, the implementation supports automatic local caching of
resources. This provides the advantages of the catalog specification
without requiring users to manage the mapping by hand. Applications
can use the resolver directly or they can instantiate one of a set of
convenience classes to access parsers that automatically implement
these resolvers. The goal of the project is to produce a clean,
reasonably simple API and a robust, thread-safe implementation. At
this time, the code is probably neither completely baked nor entirely
robust. Please consider it "beta' for the time being."]

http://norman.walsh.name/2007/02/14/resolvers
See also the xmlresolver Project Home: https://xmlresolver.dev.java.net/

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