XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 23 February 2007

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

XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 23 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:

* OWLED 2007: International Workshop on OWL Experiences and Directions
* Open Source Alfresco Shifts to GPL
* WSO2 Hosts WS-MetadataExchange Interoperability Workshop
* State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction
* Microsoft Ponders Ruby Language
* Jonathan Schwartz: My Family Photos and ODF

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OWLED 2007: International Workshop on OWL Experiences and Directions
Christine Golbreich, Conference Announcement

The deadline for submissions to OWLED 2007 is 4-March-2007. The W3C
OWL Web Ontology Language has been a W3C recommendation since 2004.
The OWL: Experiences and Direction (OWLED) workshop series is a forum
for practitioners in industry and academia, tool developers, and others
interested in OWL to describe real and potential applications, to share
experience, and to discuss requirements for language extensions/
modifications. At OWLED 2006 it was agreed to move forward with a
member submission of the OWL 1.1 proposal which extends OWL DL in ways
that have been requested by users, that have effective reasoning
algorithms, and that developers of OWL reasoning systems are willing
to support. The Third "OWL: Experiences and Directions Workshop"
(OWLED 2007) will again bring users, implementors and researchers
together in order to measure the current state of need against the state
of the art and to set an agenda for language evolutions that satisfy
users. OWLED 2007 shall in particular present industrial efforts and
experiences with OWL. It shall further the interaction between industry,
theoreticians and tool builders, help consolidate OWL 1.1, clarify
the relationships between OWL and rules and initiate the specification
of OWL 2.0. Building on the success of the 2005 OWLED and the 2006
OWLED workshops, the 2007 OWLED workshop will again be immediately
after one of the main Semantic Web conferences, namely the ESWC 2007
conference, and is colocated with the First International Conference
on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR2007). [Note: OWL 1.1 was recently
submitted to W3C. "OWL 1.1 extends the W3C OWL Web Ontology Language
with a small but useful set of features that have been requested by
users, for which effective reasoning algorithms are now available,
and that OWL tool developers are willing to support. The new features
include extra syntactic sugar, addition property and qualified
cardinality constructors, extended datatype support, simple
metamodelling, and extended annotations."]

http://xml.coverpages.org/OWLED2007-CFP.html
See also Web Ontology Language (OWL): http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/

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Open Source Alfresco Shifts to GPL
Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com

Alfresco, a start-up that commercializes open-source software for
helping customers keep track of their digital documents, has adopted
the General Public License in an effort to attract outside programmers.
The company's free Community edition previously used the Mozilla
Public License (MPL), but the move to GPL removes some barriers,
said Matt Asay, Alfresco's vice president of marketing. The company's
supported and certified Enterprise edition remains available under a
commercial license. Asay: "We wanted the code to be bigger than the
company; people basically know what (the GPL) means, so there's no
time wasted wondering (about) MPL. In addition, Alfresco will be able
to easily integrate with other GPL projects, such as the Drupal content
management software." Alfresco's license comes at an interesting time,
when the Free Software Foundation is working on version 3 of the GPL.
Some -- notably the core programmers behind the Linux kernel -- are
opposed to changes that appeared in the first two drafts, but Asay
likes the direction. Alfresco is "a modern state-of-the-art ECM built
using Spring, Hibernate, Lucene and jBPM based on standards such
JSR-170, JSR-168, Web Services and REST. This allows Alfresco to be
deployed in any J2SE 5.0 (JRE 5.0) application server such as Apache
Tomcat or JBoss Application Server delivering significantly better
scalability and high-availability properties such as distributed
cache management, automatic failover and clustering."

http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-6161579.html
See also the company web site: http://www.alfresco.com/

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WSO2 Hosts WS-MetadataExchange Interoperability Workshop
Staff, WSO2 Announcement

A posting from Jonathan Marsh (Director of Architecture, Mashup
Technologies) announces an Interoperability Workshop for the Web
Services Metadata Exchange (WS-MetadataExchange) specification.  An
invitation from WSO2 and the authors of the WS-Metadata has been
extended to all companies with a WS-MetadataExchange implementation.
The three-day Interoperability Workshop covering WS-MetadataExchange
will be hosted by WSO2 on April 10-12, 2007 in Auburn, California,
USA.  WS-MetadataExchange is a pre-standardization specification from
Microsoft, IBM, Sun, SAP, BEA Systems, Computer Associates, and
webMethods, defining how metadata can be retrieved or embedded in a
WS-Addressing endpoint references. These standard ways to exchange
WS-Policy, WSDL, XML Schema, and other metadata enable the
bootstrapping of communication with a service. The three-day
interoperability workshop is an ad-hoc, open forum for companies who
have implementations to test their code against other implementations.
Interoperability testing is often the last step in validating a
technology prior to contribution to an open standardization process.
To attend this event, a feedback agreement must be reviewed and
signed by each attendee, either before or at the workshop event; the
purpose of the feedback agreement is to ensure that everyone involved
in influencing the specifications is committed to keeping the
specification royalty free. Also, as this is an Interoperability
Workshop, participants will need to bring an implementation based
on the specifications below. A document "Web Services Metadata
Exchange Scenarios" has been prepared for use by participants in
the Interoperability event.

http://www.wso2.com/about/news/mex-interop-workshop/
See also WS-MetadataExchange: http://xml.coverpages.org/WS-MetadataExchange-V11-200608.pdf

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State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction
Jim Barnett, Michael Bodell (et al.), W3C Technical Report

Members of W3C's Voice Browser Working Group have released an updated
Working Draft for the "State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation
for Control Abstraction" specification. This document is the third
Public Working Draft of SCXML for review by W3C Members and other
interested parties, and has been developed by the Voice Browser Working
Group as part of the W3C Voice Browser Activity. The most significant
changes since the last draft are the addition of an algorithm for
interpreting SCXML and a more detailed specification of the data model.
SCXML is a general-purpose event-based state machine language. SCXML
combines concepts from CCXML and Harel State Tables. CCXML is an event-
based state machine language designed to support call control features
in Voice Applications. The CCXML 1.0 specification defines both a
state machine and event handing syntax and a standardized set of call
control elements. Harel State Tables are a state machine notation that
was developed by the mathematician David Harel and is included in
UML 2.0. They offer a clean and well-thought out semantics for
sophisticated constructs such as a parallel states. They have been
defined as a graphical specification language, however, and hence do
not have an XML representation. The goal of this document is to combine
Harel semantics with an XML syntax that is a logical extension of
CCXML's state and event notation. SCXML may be used in many ways,
including: (1) As a high-level dialog language controlling VoiceXML
3.0's encapsulated speech modules (voice form, voice picklist, etc.);
(2) As a voice application metalanguage, where in addition to VoiceXML
3.0 functionality, it may also control database access and business
logic modules; (3) As a multimodal control language in the MultiModal
Interaction framework, combining VoiceXML 3.0 dialogs with dialogs in
other modalities including keyboard and mouse, ink, vision, haptics,
etc; (4) As the state machine framework for a future version of CCXML;
(5) As an extended call center managment language, combining CCXML
call control functionality with computer-telephony integration; (6)
As a general process control language in other contexts not involving
speech processing.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-scxml-20070221/
See also W3C Voice Browser Activity: http://www.w3.org/Voice/

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Microsoft Ponders Ruby Language
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Microsoft is "very interested" in the Ruby programming language and
also plans to expand its Expression design tools line, according to
Forest Key, Microsoft director of Web and client user experience
marketing for the company's developer division.  Asked if the company
would accommodate the Ruby on Rails Web framework, which is based on
Ruby, in Expression, Key said, "Ruby is currently more of a 'developer'
concept for us." SapphireSteel, meanwhile, has shipped Ruby in Steel
Developer, a Ruby environment for Visual Studio. One area targeted
for expansion in the new Expression line is interaction design,
which pertains to designing the actual interaction or structure of
an experience rather than just designing the onscreen pieces. A goal
is to better tie Visio, the company's diagram drawing software used
by many interaction designers, to Expression and the company's Visual
Studio software development platform. The planned "Orcas" version of
Visual Studio, for example, includes the same design surface for
Cascading Style Sheets rendering as the Expression Web product, Key
said. Orcas also has XAML capabilities, which are featured in the
Expression Blend product. Microsoft believes in collaboration between
designers and developers to build user experience-based applications
and content: "If by Web 2.0 we are talking about great experiences
that combine Web technologies, social computing components, services,
the browser and components of the desktop such as richer graphics
an integration with local data, etc, then you could say Expression
is all about Web 2.0." Microsoft also plans more community-accessible
content for both XAML and the Expression tools.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/23/HNexpressionruby_1.html
See also the Ruby web site: http://www.rubyonrails.org/

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My Family Photos and ODF
Jonathan Schwartz, Weblog

Alongside some of the industry's most important technology companies,
and a bevy of governments and agencies around the world, [we are
helping create] something called the Open Document Format (ODF).
ODF defines an open format for document based information that's
independent of the applications used to create documents stored in ODF.
Which is a fancy way of saying if you write a law or a medical history
or a regulatory filing in a word processor that supports ODF today,
and need to gain access to it at any point in the future, you'll have
the freedom to do so on your terms. Without being held up by an
application provider. ODF is a true open standard, adopted and
implemented by a diversity of vendors (from IBM and Sun, to Google,
Red Hat and now even Microsoft), and embraced by an amazing spectrum
of the planet. And it's royalty free. We're working with Google to
ensure interoperability between Google's office documents and
OpenOffice documents -- leveraging ODF as an exchange mechanism. Any
document created in Google's office can be trivially exported to
(and soon imported from) OpenOffice. Together, the two products allow
businesses and individuals to preserve access, across the globe and
across generations, for laws, legal contracts, patient records,
diaries and strategic plans. Along with spreadsheets and presentations.
now that Microsoft has announced support for the Open Document Format,
users can feel comfortable that OpenOffice can be added to any
environment, home or office, not just across the developing world,
but the developed. In a few weeks, you'll be able to download an ODF
plug-in here, which will enable Microsoft Word, by default, to save
to/read from ODF. From a corporate perspective, this also allows a
very natural migration to occur across large institutions -- front
office staff might stay on Microsoft Word, but the rest of the
organization can move to an interoperable alternative (say, Google's
word processor or OpenOffice, or both). Affordability and
interoperability are a good thing for the internet -- and for the
successive generations we expect to use it.

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/microsoft_vista_microsoft_office_and
See also OpenDocument references: http://xml.coverpages.org/odf.html

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