XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 20 February 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Tuesday, 20 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
Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://sun.com

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HEADLINES:

* NGA GEOINT Standards Baseline Features OGC Specifications
* Implementing Atom Specifications: Abdera Incubator Version 0.2.2
* Schematron News
* Upgrade XSLT 1.0 to 2.0, Part 4: The Toolkit for XSLT Portability
* The OpenID Era Opens
* U.K. Government Rejects Calls for DRM Ban

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NGA GEOINT Standards Baseline Features OGC Specifications
Staff, OGC Announcement

The U.S. Department of Defense National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
(NGA) has issued a document, "Enabling A Common Vision", which
outlines the overall National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG)
standards baseline. Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Specifications
figure prominently in this U.S. Federal and national baseline. Shortly
after September 11, 2001, the National Center for Geospatial Intelligence
Standards (NCGIS) was formed by the NGA to develop and coordinate
geospatial standards with other Department of Defense (DoD) agencies,
other intelligence agencies, standards organizations, civil agencies,
private industry, and foreign partners. These groups have worked with
NCGIS to develop and mature a set of standards that enable data and
service interoperability in the context of a service-oriented
architecture (SOA). In the NGA report "Enabling A Common Vision," the
NSG has endorsed a set of key specifications known collectively as the
OGC Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) 1.0 baseline. These OGC standards
include the OpenGIS Specifications for Web Feature Service (WFS),
Geography Markup Language (GML), Web Map Service (WMS), Styled Layer
Descriptor (SLD), Catalogue Services (CS-Web), and Filter Encoding
Specification (FE). Other standards included are ISO 19115 Geographic
Information -- Metadata, and ISO 19119 Geographics Information --
Services. The domestic civil community and the international community
are implementing largely the same suite of common geospatial standards.
This architecture is particularly valuable to the Homeland Security
community, allowing it to share investments in geospatial data and
knowledge related to critical infrastructure and natural environments
with U.S. cities, counties and other organizations to support the
prevention and mitigation of national disaster and security situations.

http://xml.coverpages.org/NGA-GEOINT-Standards200702.html
See also the NGA report: http://xml.coverpages.org/NGA-GEOINT-Standards.pdf

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Implementing Atom Specifications: Abdera Incubator Version 0.2.2
Staff, Apache Abdera Project

Developers in the Apache Abdera Project have announced the release of
Abdera version 0.2.2, available in binary and source distributions.
Builds are available for Java 1.5 and Java 1.4.2. The goal of the
Apache Abdera project is to build a functionally-complete, high-
performance implementation of the IETF Atom Syndication Format
(RFC 4287) and Atom Publishing Protocol (in-progress) specifications.
Abdera is an effort undergoing incubation at the Apache Software
Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Apache Incubator PMC. Incubation is
required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates
that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process
have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF
projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of
the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the
project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. The Abdera parser
is capable of handling Atom Feed and Entry documents, Atom Publishing
Protocol Introspection Documents, and any other arbitrary, well-formed
XML document. Users can either use the default
org.apache.abdera.parser.Parser instance by calling Parser.INSTANCE,
or they may create an new Parser instance. The Feed Object Model (FOM)
is a set of interfaces designed around the Atom Syndication Format
data model. The object model provides the API by which Atom documents
are read and created.  The Feed Object Model is designed to fully and
dynamically support extensions to the Atom Feed format.  As an
alternative to navigating the Feed Object Model manually, developer's
may use XPath to query a parsed Document. Atom Feed and Entry documents
may be digitally signed and/or encrypted by using the optional Abdera
Security module. The security module currently depends on the Apache
Xerces, Apache XML Security Projects and the Bouncy Castle Java
cryptography implementation. Release 0.2.2 fixes an XHTML/XML entry
content bug, fixes StAX API conformance bugs, updates to Apache Axiom
1.2.1, and provides various API Cleanups. Contributions in the form of
coding, testing, improving the documentation, and reporting bugs are
welcome.

http://incubator.apache.org/abdera
See also Atom references: http://xml.coverpages.org/atom.html

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Schematron News
Rick Jelliffe, O'Reilly News

Some of the recent news on ISO Schematron: (1) My XSLT 'skeleton
implementation (the latest version of the most commonly used version
of Schematron) is available in beta from Schematron.com, as open source,
non-viral. This version fully supports ISO Schematron (except for
abstract patterns, for which a preprocessor has been contributed) and
has a lot of input from members of the schematron-love-in maillist.
Notable contrabutions are from Ken Holman, Dave Pawson and Florent
Georges. A variety of different output formats are available as
backends, including an ISO SVRL (Schematron Validation Report Language)
XML format and a terminate-on-first-error backend. (2) Topologi's Ant
Task for Schematron is available now in beta from Schematron.com. The
code will be available as open source, non-viral. Thanks for Allette
System's Christophe Lauret and Willi Ekasalim for doing the programming
on this. It can output text to standard error or collate all the
SVRLs into a single XML file.  (3) Dave Pawson is writing a little
online book ISO Schematron tutorial concentrating on using Schematron
with XSLT2. I haven't reviewed it thoroughly yet, but Dave has a good
track record.  (4) Mitre's Roger Costello has written up two pages 'Usage
and Features of Schematron' and 'Best way to phrase the Schematron
assertion text' that seem pretty sensible to me. Roger followed his
usual method of asking people on the XML-DEV maillist and compiling the
results.  (5) Murata Makoto has been preparing the Japanese translation
of ISO Schematron, to be used as the text for the Japanese Industrial
Standard. He has also been translating other parts of ISO DSDL. The
great thing about diligent translators such as Dr Murata and Dr Komachi
is that they uncover many practical issues; in Schematron's case there
are a couple of paragraphs in the ISO standard that seem completely
reasonable when you know what they are supposed to mean, but actually
are pretty cryptic. Murata-san also has pointed out an improvement to
the formal specification of Schematron in predicate logic.

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/02/schematron_news.html
See also Schematron references: http://xml.coverpages.org/schematron.html

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Upgrade XSLT 1.0 to 2.0, Part 4: The Toolkit for XSLT Portability
David Marston and Joanne Tong, IBM developerWorks

XSLT 2.0, the latest specification released by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), is a language for transforming XML documents. It
includes numerous new features, with some specifically designed to
address shortcomings in XSLT 1.0. In this collection of articles, you'll
get a high level overview and an in-depth look at XSLT 2.0 from the
point of view of an XSLT 1.0 user who wants to fix old problems, learn
new techniques, and discover what to look out for. Examples derived
from common applications and practical suggestions are provided if you
wish to upgrade. To help you begin to use XSLT 2.0, migration
techniques will be provided. If you are concerned with the adoption of
XSLT 2.0 and what will happen to your legacy stylesheet code, this
article will help: it focuses on those features of 2.0 that address
cross-version compatibility with 1.0. It explains how 1.0 and 2.0
processors recognize XSLT instructions and the vendor's implementation-
specific instructions (if any), distinguishing them from elements that
should not be directives to the processor. The article includes a
survey of all portability tools such as fallback, function availability
tests, and the new use-when attribute. It describes all the functions,
instructions, and attributes that are used for compatibility across XSLT
versions. This toolkit is slightly larger than the toolkit for
portability across different implementations of the same XSLT version
from different vendors. If you want to use 2.0 features and haven't
started to look at your existing stylesheets and how they must change,
this article provides some ideas about new code replacing old at
different granularities. You might replace an XPath expression, an
instruction, a template, or an imported stylesheet module, among other
constructs, and the replacement might be a different granularity. For
example, a new 2.0 function might allow a template with several
expressions and instructions to collapse down to a single XPath 2.0
expression.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xslt20pt4.html

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The OpenID Era Opens
Larry Seltzer, eWEEK

The industry is getting excited about the new OpenID identity standard,
but it's evolving at a rapid rate before our eyes. If you haven't used
OpenID yet you probably will soon. This new open standard for identity
exchange on the Internet is picking up support from all over the place,
and appears unstoppable in the blogosphere. AOL is the latest large
company to announce support for OpenID, and it's a smart move for them,
making your AOL login useful wherever you go. Before that we had
Microsoft and Symantec announcing support. Microsoft's support looks
serious, especially in as much as its implementation is a good example
of how to address security deficiencies in OpenID. And the deficiencies
in the early versions of OpenID are serious. OpenID is an identification
system that allows anyone with a Web server to be an identity provider.
The identities are URLs, like "johndoe.openid.net." When logging a user
in a site, the RP (Relying Party) redirects the user and their openid
URL to the site that provided it (openid.net in the example). That site,
the IP or Identity Provider (also known some places as an OP, although
I'm not sure why), authenticates the user and returns an authentication
token to the RP. If the two have never communicated before, there are
some additional communications at this point. The official announcement
from Microsoft was joined by JanRain (a software company providing
OpenID solutions, including popular libraries), Sxip (who has made
contributions to the OpenID 2.0 specification to improve extensibility)
and VeriSign, an early pioneer in OpenID and an identity provider
themselves. The companies announced their intention to collaborate on
integrating OpenID into Windows CardSpace. CardSpace, like OpenID,
is an identity metasystem based on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol,
an XML-based standard for procedure calls), XML and Web service
standards including WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-MetadataExchange, and
WS-SecurityPolicy. CardSpace also includes a GUI to allow users to
choose among multiple identities, known as Information Cards.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2096829,00.asp
See also the OpenID web site: http://openid.net/

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U.K. Government Rejects Calls for DRM Ban
Graeme Wearden, CNET News.com

The U.K. government has rejected a call for digital rights management
to be banned in the U.K., but has acknowledged that the technology
could undermine consumer rights. A total of 1,414 people signed an
online petition calling for digital rights management (DRM) -- which
places restrictions on how people can use media such as software or
music -- to be outlawed. The petition, hosted on the U.K. government's
e-petitions Web site, warned that DRM removes the freedom of choice
between competing products offered for digital download or on CDs.
The DRM debate in the U.K. coincides with arguments against use of
the technology from another sector -- Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs,
who earlier this month advocated licensing music without DRM. Jobs
contends that eliminating DRM will encourage interoperability between
music services and boost sales of downloadable recordings. Sony's use
of rootkit-like technology on its music CDs caused a storm of protest.
The DRM technology was secretly installed and hid itself from the
operating systems on people's PCs when they played Sony CDs on their
computers. Users complained that this violated their rights to full
disclosure about the products they bought from Sony, whose problems
escalated after virus writers used the technology to hide malicious
software. In the U.K., the Open Rights Group campaigns against
technologies such as DRM, which it believes can undermine the rights
of users. Becky Hogge, executive director at the Open Rights Group,
[said] that some DRM technologies put restrictions on users that run
counter to their rights under U.K. copyright law. For example, a
blanket ban on copying prevents an individual from taking a sample
for review or illustrative purposes, as they are allowed to under the
"fair use" provisions within copyright law.

http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6160760.html

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