XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 15 February 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 15 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:

* Google Earth Gets Overlay Search Feature
* Microsoft Is SOA-Ready for Wall Street
* How Much Open Source Progress Flies Under Your Radar?
* XML for Perl Developers: Advanced Manipulating and Writing Techniques
* Enabling Read Access for Web Resources
* IESG Requests Comments on 'The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set'

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Google Earth Gets Overlay Search Feature
Juan Carlos Perez, InfoWorld

Google has created a searchable index of Google Earth data files, a
feature that should make it easier for users to find and adopt third-
party overlays for this popular mapping application. Google Earth's
search engine now returns KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files which
developers have created to add data to the application's maps, the
Mountain View, California, company said Wednesday. "Users can now search
through all of the world's KML files, making the millions of Google
Earth layers on the Web instantly accessible for geobrowsing and
exploration," wrote Chikai Ohazama, a Google Earth product manager in
an official company blog. Google expects to later extend this capability
to its mapping Web site Google Maps, Ohazama wrote. Google Earth is a
free, downloadable PC application that taps a multiterabyte database
of aerial and satellite images to let users "fly" around the globe
using a video-game type user interface. By creating overlays in the KML
file format, users can create markers to pinpoint places and provide
all sorts of information about an area, making Google Earth a repository
of local business listings, homes for sale, photos, architectural
drawings, videos, historical facts and geographical data. KML users
range from casual, individual users to large organizations like Discovery
Networks, the U.S. National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution
and National Geographic. KML can also be used to add data files to Google
Maps, a mapping Web site that is one of the most popular among
developers for creating mashups, which are Web applications that use
data and features from an existing site or online service via
application programming interfaces. Online maps, in combination with
local search engines, have become very popular in recent years, giving
people a way to discover local businesses and attractions, obtain
driving directions and view satellite images of an area, among other
things. [Note: "KML is a file format used to display geographic data
in an Earth browser, such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Maps
for mobile. KML uses a tag-based structure with nested elements and
attributes and is based on the XML standard. You can create KML files
with the Google Earth user interface, or you can use an XML or simple
text editor to enter 'raw' KML from scratch. KML files and their
related images (if any) can be compressed using the ZIP format into
KMZ archives."]

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/14/HNearthoverlay_1.html
See also Keyhole Markup Language (KML): http://earth.google.com/kml/

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Microsoft Is SOA-Ready for Wall Street
Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

Microsoft is ready to take on the Wall Street service-oriented
architecture scene with its latest developer and infrastructure
technologies, said a consultant in building IT systems for financial
services companies. Michael DeSanti, a partner with Eikos Partners,
New York, spoke at the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street conference
said Microsoft's .Net Framework 3.0 meets the needs of financial
services firms trying to build extensible SOAs. DeSanti said the .Net
Framework 3.0 and its components -- the WCF (Windows Communication
Foundation), WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), Windows WF
(Workflow Foundation) and CardSpace -- enable Microsoft to meet real-
world SOA needs: "Microsoft has been integrating SOA technology into
all of its enterprise offerings from its operating system to Microsoft
Office 2007 and various elements of the Microsoft enterprise
application development environment... Meanwhile, some financial
services enterprises are using Microsoft Excel, SharePoint and Web
services to reduce risk in structured product environments. And
financial services firms are using workflow to model credit
derivative processing, to model and manage large corporate loans,
and to manage hedge fund processing... Microsoft was instrumental
in the development of XML and XML Schema, the SOAP (Simple Object
Access Protocol) and the building out of the WS-* Web services stack
and the WSDL (Web Services Description Language)... They're breaking
a lot of new ground, largely because they're consuming most of this
stuff internally..."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2095553,00.asp
See also ebXML.org: http://www.ebxml.org/

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How Much Open Source Progress Flies Under Your Radar?
Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet Blog

Some of what we know about open source plays out in public. But much
else -- perhaps most of the progress -- flies under our radar. This
is not because the people involved don't write about it. It's because
most of us don't have time to read about it. Think about it as the
flip side of the economics of abundance. One example from Ed Dodds in
North Carolina: It's about the very real progress being made by ebXML,
a system of XML codes for electronic business. The note was posted on
the ebXML Forum by Alan Kotok, and details some pretty big achievements.
The Public Health Information Network, run by the Centers for Disease
Control, is now using ebXML to connect public health agencies and first
responders. The Digital Trade and Transport Network in Hong Kong is
now exchanging messages about dangerous cargo using ebXML. The U.S.
Department of Defense is maintaining a metadata registry based on ebXML.
Trygdeetaten, Norway's award-winning public health scheme, has replaced
EDI with ebXML. Energy trading across the European electrical grid is
now taking place using ebXML. T-Mobile uses ebXML messaging for its
provisioning and maintenance in Europe. These are just a few examples
the note highlights. XML has been around for over a decade now. It's
a set of tags, like those used in HTML, whose meaning is agreed to by
folks for some business purpose. It saves businesses and trading
partners billions of dollars per year, allowing them to route business
information over the Internet, in the background, seamlessly. If you
and your trading partners want to create your own flavor of XML you
can do so, using any tags you want. So long as all of you attach the
same meanings to the tags, so long as there is consensus and
transparency, your scheme works for all of you. But the benefits really
start growing when whole industries, or industry as a whole, uses the
same set of tags, as in ebXML.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=942

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XML for Perl Developers: Advanced Manipulating and Writing Techniques
Jim Dixon, IBM developerWorks

Part 1 of this article series began by showing that you can convert
most XML documents in a single step (using XML::Simple) to and from
easily manipulated Perl data structures.  Part 2 introduced more
powerful tools for parsing XML: DOM-style tree parsers and the SAX
event-based parsers.  XML::SAX::Base can be used to build sources,
handlers, and sinks of SAX events. This article, the third in a three-
part series, uses the parsing techniques introduced in Part 2 to build
tree structures that can be transformed, navigated, and written, and
how to manage document transformations using XSLT, SAX, and SQL. You
will then see how to feed transformed parse trees into SAX pipelines,
further transform them, and write them as text or to SQL databases.
Finally you will learn how to reverse this, using database content to
drive SAX pipelines.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xmlperl3.html

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The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set
John A. Kunze (ed), IETF Internet Draft

The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to
consider "The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set" as an Informational
RFC. The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and
solicits final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments
by 2007-03-14. The Dublin Core Metadata Workshop Series began in 1995
with an invitational workshop which brought together librarians, digital
library researchers, content experts, and text-markup experts to promote
better discovery standards for electronic resources. The resulting
metadata element set is perhaps the most widely adopted convention for
structuring resource descriptions designed to bridge networked
information systems and content providers in the publishing, library,
museum, scholarly, archival, and government communities. It defines
fifteen metadata elements for resource description in a cross-
disciplinary information environment. This document, containing the
text of ANSI/NISO Z39.85 plus corrections for consistency and clarity,
obsoletes Internet RFC 2413, which was the first published version of
the Dublin Core. The differences are that the present RFC recommends
lowercase element names (consistent with RDF property types) and remains
silent about the unrestrictedness of element ordering and repeatability
(application profiles being the proper place to discuss such topics).
Sections 2-5 and 10-12 are taken directly from ANSI/NISO Z39.85. The
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is responsible for the
development, standardization and promotion of the Dublin Core metadata
element set.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-kunze-rfc2413bis-05.txt
See also DCMI: http://dublincore.org/about/

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Enabling Read Access for Web Resources
Anne van Kesteren and Brad Porter (eds), W3C Technical Report

W3C's Web Application Formats (WAF) Working Group has released an
updated Working Draft for "Enabling Read Access for Web Resources."
The document provides a mechanism for a web resource to relax typical
browser sandbox restrictions on cross-site access to it. Using either
a HTTP header or XML processing instruction (or both) resources can
indicate they allow read access from specified hosts (optionally using
patterns). When a pattern is used you can also exclude certain hosts.
The world wide web has a rich set of resources that can be combined to
build content and feature-rich web sites. Websites are permitted to
include a reference (either a link or an image inclusion) to web
resources residing on another site. For security reasons, web browsers
typically do not permit a website to read, process, or otherwise
interrogate the contents of any web resource residing on a different
domain. In order to make the experience safe for the end user, web
browsers must tightly control access to web resources. Web pages or XML
documents often contain sensitive information such as account balances
or personal correspondences or corporate financial information.
Consequently, the browser must prevent an example.com application from
making a request from your browser that would allow it to "read" your
sensitive information. Because the web browser can not tell which web
pages or XML documents contain sensitive information and which do not,
the browser sandbox by default restricts all "read" requests. An
application in example.com can not load or inspect the contents of
data from any other document. Some browsers make an exception if the
"read" request is for data from the same host or domain.  Sandbox
restrictions on cross-site access to browsers can be relaxed with the
mechanism described in this TR. An HTTP header or XML processing
instruction or both can indicate read access is allowed.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-access-control-20070215/
See also W3C Rich Web Clients: http://www.w3.org/2006/rwc/

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OSGi Alliance Announces Five New Members
Stafff, OSGi Alliance Announcement

The OSGi Alliance announced today that five new members joined the
alliance following its recent initiatives in the enterprise
applications market. OSGi specifications enhance the service-oriented
architecture (SOA) strategy driving server-side businesses today,
modularizing and componentizing Java applications and allowing
applications to be adapted remotely and in real time. These new members
will help the alliance drive adoption of the OSGi Service Platform in
enterprises and other markets. BEA Systems, IONA Technologies, Jayway
AB, Eclipse and Interface21 -- developer of the Spring Framework --
use the Java platform and OSGi specifications. BEA, IONA and Jayway
are part of the alliance's Enterprise Expert Group (EEG) charged with
enhancing OSGi specifications for enterprise application. OSGi
technology is a component integration platform with a service-oriented
architecture and lifecycle capabilities that enable dynamic delivery
of services. These capabilities greatly increase the value of a wide
range of computers and devices that use the Java platform. The OSGi
specifications provide the platform for universal middleware and are
deployed by Fortune 100 companies in home, automotive, mobile and
enterprise markets. The OSGi Service Platform provides the functions
to change the composition dynamically on the device of a variety of
networks, without requiring restarts. To minimize the coupling, as well
as make these couplings managed, the OSGi technology provides a
service-oriented architecture that enables these components to
dynamically discover each other for collaboration. The OSGi Alliance
has developed many standard component interfaces for common functions
like HTTP servers, configuration, logging, security, user
administration, XML and many more.

http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1268901.html
See also the web site: http://www.osgi.org/

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