XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 15 March 2007

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

To: XML Daily Newslink <xml-dailynews@lists.xml.org>
Subject: XML Daily Newslink. Wednesday, 14 March 2007

XML Daily Newslink. Thursday, 15 March 2007
A Cover Pages Publication http://xml.coverpages.org/
Provided by OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org
Edited by Robin Cover

====================================================

This issue of XML Daily Newslink is sponsored by
SAP AG  http://www.sap.com

====================================================

HEADLINES:

* A Relational View of the Semantic Web
* Implementation of Business Rules and Business Processes in SOA
* The Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format (IDMEF)
* National BIM Standard Version 1.0 Part 1: Out for Industry Review
* XML Pipelining with Chunks for the Information Registry Information
* IBM Puts Its SOA Where Its Virtualization Is
* Tutorial: Specializing DITA Conditional Attributes
* Update: Google to Make Search Logs Anonymous

----------------------------------------------------------------------

A Relational View of the Semantic Web
Andrew Newman, XML.com

As people are increasingly coming to believe, Web 2.0 and the Semantic
Web have a lot in common: both are concerned with allowing communities
to share and reuse data. In this way, the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 can
both be seen as attempts at providing data integration and presenting
a web of data or information space. As Tim Berners-Lee wrote in 'Weaving
the Web': "If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like
on huge book, RDF, schema and inference languages will make all the
data in the world look like one huge database..." RDF is at the core of
W3C's Semantic Web architectural layers. It is the standard specifically
designed to provide a way to produce and consume data on the Web.  It
sits on top of standards such as XML, URIs, and Unicode and is used as
a basis for schemas and ontologies. It consists of a set of statements
that are composed of a subject, predicate, and object that form
propositions of fact. How are queries performed on this "one huge
database"? Up until recently, manipulating or retrieving RDF data has
been done through vendor specific query languages or imperatively
through APIs in languages such as Java, PHP, and Ruby. The W3C's
proposed standard, SPARQL, is set to provide a declarative language to
query and manipulate Semantic Web data. The current suite of existing
technologies, such as SQL and the relational model, were devised without
the specific requirements of disparate, uncontrolled, large-scale
integration. It is unclear whether they are flexible enough to adapt
to these new set of requirements in order to enable this idea of a
global database. One of the goals of the Semantic Web is to be able to
achieve querying of disparate data sources across the web. The
proposed standard for querying the Semantic Web, SPARQL, can be seen
as an extension of an existing formalization, the relational model.
The use of the relational model provides a way to use previous work
in query distribution, optimization, and formulation. The standard
relational model is not sufficient, however, and must be extended to
support untyped relations and operations in order to integrate these
data sources.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/03/14/a-relational-view-of-the-semantic-web.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Implementation of Business Rules and Business Processes in SOA
Boris Lublinsky and Didier Le Tien, InfoQ

In this article we outline commonalities and differences between
business rules and business processes and present some guidelines on
positioning business rules in SOA implementation and appropriate
usage of each technology. Business rules can be viewed as a
collection of business practices, defining the actual implementations --
business logic. Implementation of such logic can often be simplified
through the usage of specialized tooling -- business rules languages
and business rules engines. A rules language is a domain specific
language, containing constructs for defining of the business rules.
These constructs can vary greatly depending on the business
requirements. The scope of possibility ranges from a textual
description (using a rule specific language or plain English) to the
use of decision tables or decision trees. Service orchestration
typically deals with long-running and asynchronous invocation of
external activities/services. Today's business rules engines do not
support these capabilities. Business process language/engine, designed
specifically to define and execute long-running coordinations with
asynchronous invocations is the most appropriate paradigm for the
service orchestration. A prevalent pattern in SOA implementation is
employment of rules engine as part of service implementation and the
use of business process engines for service orchestration. In cases
when rules control activities whose coordination is complex enough, or
change much faster the process itself, so that they require usage of
the rules engines, these rules are usually externalized as a special
rules service, invoked by business process engine. Because this service
invocation can be potentially expensive (network calls) some of the
business process engines, for example Biztalk 2004 from Microsoft,
WebSphere Process Server from IBM, Smart BPM Suite from PegaSystems
and others incorporate both business process and rules engine in a
single application. Business process and business rules should not be
treated as competing but rather as complementary technologies. Business
processes define a set of activities that need to be performed in
order to perform a business functions. Business rules provide a value
add approach to implement those activities by offering a superior
level of flexibility and configurability to adapt to rapidly changing
business environments.

http://www.infoq.com/articles/business-rules-processes

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format (IDMEF)
Herve Debar (et al., eds), Experimental RFC

The IETF announced that a new Request for Comments is now available
online in the RFC libraries. The memo defines an Experimental Protocol
for the Internet community. The purpose of the Intrusion Detection
Message Exchange Format (IDMEF) is to define data formats and exchange
procedures for sharing information of interest to intrusion detection
and response systems and to the management systems that may need to
interact with them. This document describes a data model to represent
information exported by intrusion detection systems and explains the
rationale for using this model. An implementation of the data model in
the Extensible Markup Language (XML) is presented, an XML Document
Type Definition is developed, and examples are provided. The most
obvious place to implement the IDMEF is in the data channel between an
intrusion detection analyzer (or "sensor") and the manager (or "console")
to which it sends alarms. The diversity of uses for the IDMEF needs to
be considered when selecting its method of implementation. The IDMEF
data model is an object-oriented representation of the alert data sent
to intrusion detection managers by intrusion detection analyzers. The
data model defines extensions to the basic Document Type Definition
(DTD) that allow carrying both simple and complex alerts. Extensions
are accomplished through subclassing or association of new classes.

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4765.txt

----------------------------------------------------------------------

National BIM Standard Version 1.0 Part 1: Out for Industry Review
Staff, National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS)

The first version of the National Building Information Modeling Standard
(NBIMS) was released for a two month industry review period today. The
document titled "National Building Information Modeling Standard
Version 1.0 -- Part 1: Overview, Principles, and Methodologies", issued
through the buildingSMART Alliance, provides the capital facilities
industry with its first comprehensive look at the full scope of
requirements for Building Information Modeling (BIM). The review period
will span from March 12, 2007, until May 21, 2007; comments may be
submitted through a comment forum that has been set up by the Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to receive your comments and initiate
discussion. . The NBIMS will provide the diverse capital facilities
ption through design and construction, even past demolition for improved
operations, maintenance, facility management, and long-term
sustainability. The document was assembled by over thirty subject matter
experts from across the capital facilities industry. The NBIMS has six
goals: (1) Seek industry wide agreement, (2) Develop an open and shared
standard, (3) Facilitate discovery and requirements for sharing
information throughout the facility lifecycle, (4) Develop and
distribute knowledge that helps share information that is machine
readable, (5) Define a minimum BIM, and (6) Provide for information
assurance for BIM throughout the facility lifecycle... One of the
critical functions of a BIM is to consistently maintain the semantic
meaning of all encoded information throughout the facilities lifecycle.
NBIMS is using the IFC [International Alliance for Interoperability,
Industry Foundation Classes, IFC2x Edition 3 -- ifcXML and EXPRESS-G]
data model of buildings as the data model for encoding information
exchange and sharing because it constitutes an interoperability enabling
technology that is open, freely available, non-proprietary and
extensible, and is also applicable throughout the life of a facility.
The IFC data model consists of definitions, rules and protocols that
uniquely define data sets which describe capital facilities throughout
their lifecycle. These definitions allow industry software developers
to write IFC interfaces to their software that enable exchange and
sharing of the same data in the same format with other software
applications, regardless of individual software application's internal
data structure. The first version of the IFC data model was released
in 1997; the latest release is IFC2x3. XML-based implementations of the
IFC data model are available as ifcXML; the latest published version is
ifcXML2, the implementation of IFC2x2... IFC provides the only
available data definitions, rules and protocols for populating any
open standards based BIM. Thus, by definition, an open standards based
BIM is an IFC-based BIM.

http://www.facilityinformationcouncil.org/bim/story_031307.php
See also IFC/ifcXML Specifications: http://www.iai-international.org/Model/IFC(ifcXML)Specs.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

XML Pipelining with Chunks for the Information Registry Information
Andrew L. Newton (ed), IETF Internet Draft

The IESG announced the approval of an Internet Draft as an IETF
Proposed Standard: "XML Pipelining with Chunks for the Information
Registry Information." The specification was produced by members of
the IETF Cross Registry Information Service Protocol (CRISP) Working
Group. Using S-NAPTR [Domain-Based Application Service Location Using
SRV RRs and the Dynamic Delegation Discovery Service (DDDS)], IRIS has
the ability to define the use of multiple application transports (or
transfer protocols) for different types of registry services, all at
the descretion of the server operator. The TCP transfer protocol
defined in this document is completely modular and may be used by any
registry types. This transfer protocol defines simple framing for
sending XML in chunks so that XML fragments may be acted upon (or
pipelined) before the reception of the entire XML instance. This
document calls this XML pipelining with chunks (XPC) and its use
with IRIS as IRIS-XPC. A second CRISP Working Group document, "A
Common Schema for Internet Registry Information Service Transfer
Protocols," has also been approved. It defines an XML Schema for use
by Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS) application transfer
protocols that share common characteristics. It describes common
information about the transfer protocol, such as version, supported
extensions, and supported security mechanisms. As an example, upon
initiation of a connection, a server may send version information
informing the client the data models supported by the server and the
security mechanims supported by the server. The client may then
respond appropriately. For example, the client may not recognize any
of the data models supported by the server, and thefore close the
connection. On the other hand, the client may recognize the data
models and the security mechanisms and begin the procedure to
initialize a security mechanism with the server before proceeding to
query data according to a recognized data model. Both LWZ and XPC
provide examples of the usage of the XML Schema defined in this
document.

http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-ietf-crisp-iris-xpc-06.txt
See also Common Schema: http://xml.coverpages.org/draft-ietf-crisp-iris-common-transport-05.txt

----------------------------------------------------------------------

IBM Puts Its SOA Where Its Virtualization Is
Clint Boulton, InternetNews.com

IT analysts have been saying for the last few years that companies can
leverage greater computing efficiencies by plugging virtualization
technologies into a service-oriented architecture (SOA). IBM is
ushering virtualization to the SOA altar this week by splicing
virtualization capabilities from its System p servers with SOA
middleware to help customers boost hardware and software performance
and ease maintenance pain. Virtualization enables IT administrators
to run multiple pieces of software on a single machine. IBM employs
virtualization in its System p servers, which allows a single machine
to be split into multiple partitions, which can each run different
operating systems and multiple applications. This helps customers
shift processing resources during periods of peak activity. SOA is
a distributed computing paradigm that allows multiple services and
software to be reused, making computing more efficient. Plugging
virtualization into an SOA, then, makes sense. But that doesn't mean
it's easy. IBM will start offering System p Configurations for SOA
Entry Points to allow processing resources to be shifted from one
partition to another on the fly to meet peak demand needs. IBM's
System p machines run IBM's AIX and Linux operating systems on the
same box. Acording to IBM: "SOA is an architectural approach that
structures IT assets as a series of reusable, loosely-coupled
services that perform business functions using a standard
specification. SOA creates the flexibility that successful businesses
require. IBM has defined the SOA Foundation, an integrated, open set
of software and best practices that provide what is need to get
started with SOA. The software that makes up the SOA Foundation has
been carefully selected from the broader IBM software portfolio to
support each stage of the SOA lifecycle. To build flexible business
on SOA, the SOA Foundation requires a rock solid (i.e., high
performance, stable, high availability, with excellent security and
reliability features) IT Infrastructure like System p."

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3665666
See also the announcement: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21237.wss

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Tutorial: Specializing DITA Conditional Attributes
W. Eliot Kimber, Blog

A new feature in Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) 1.1
is the ability to specialize from the base= and props= attributes.
For conditional processing, this lets you add your own attributes
rather than using otherprops=, which can be clearer to authors and
implementors. Note that at the time of writing the DITA Open
Toolkit does not implement support for specializations of props=,
but it should be added soon. This form of specialization is fairly
easy to implement. This tutorial shows you how to do it using DTDs;
the mechanism using Schemas is essentially the same and if you've
stepped up to using the DITA 1.1 schemas I'm going presume you can
figure this out on your own.  The specialization requires two things:
(1) Modification of any shell DTDs that need to reflect the
specialized attribute (e.g., topic.dtd, reference.dtd, or your own
specialized topic types' shell DTDs). You integrate the
specialization attribute domain through the shell DTDs. (2) For
each specialization of props=, a '.ent' declaration set that defines
the attribute and a corresponding domain declaration. This is the
"attribute domain specialization module".  Note that as a rule,
any production use of DITA will likely require local versions of
the DITA-provided shell DTDs, if only to do configuration of the
domains you need, so unless you are using DITA very informally, you
should already have local copies of all the DITA-provided shell
DTDs... For this tutorial assume we're putting everything in the
directory dtd/myspecs within the normal DITA Open Toolkit distribution
structure. It can go anywhere as long as you configure the entity
resolution catalogs appropriately, but for initial development and
testing I find it convenient to use relative paths to the various
declaration components as that eliminates a variable from the
configuration (resolution via catalogs) that can lead to confusing
errors. Once you've established that the declarations are correct
you should replace all relative paths with absolute URLs or (if you
must) PUBLIC IDs that are resolved via catalogs. For my development
work I use the OxygenXML editor, which makes it easy to set up
catalog configurations for testing resolution via catalogs, and
generally testing the correctness of all the parts...

http://drmacros-xml-rants.blogspot.com/2007/03/tutorial-specializing-dita-conditional.html
See also DITA resources: http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Update: Google to Make Search Logs Anonymous
Stephen Lawson, InfoWorld

Google will start making its records about users' searches anonymous
after 18 to 24 months under a policy announced recently. Until now,
the dominant search company has indefinitely retained a log of every
search, with identifiers that can associate it with a particular
computer. The new policy, to be implemented within the next year, is
intended to better protect users' privacy, two executives wrote in
a Google Blog entry posted Wednesday. Privacy advocates have raised
alarms over search providers and other Internet companies retaining
information about users' activities because that data could be
subpoenaed by law enforcement, be lost by the provider, or fall into
the hands of hackers. Under the new policy, unless Google is legally
required to retain them longer, server logs will still be retained
but will be "anonymized" after 18 to 24 months so that they can't be
identified with individual users, according to the blog entry. It
was written by Peter Fleischer, Google's privacy counsel for Europe,
and Nicole Wong, the company's deputy general counsel. Engineers are
working out the technical details now... Two high-tech civil rights
groups have called the move a good first step but said more work
needs to be done. "This is a big step in the right direction," said
Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and
Technology.  "Keeping the data around forever significantly
compromises (Google's) users' privacy" according to Kevin Bankston,
a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in San
Francisco. The U.S. government probably has subpoenaed search log
data on individuals in criminal investigations, a move it wouldn't
necessarily have to reveal; another danger is that an angry spouse
or business partner could obtain the information in the course of
a lawsuit.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/15/HNgooglesearchlogs_1.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------

XML Daily Newslink and Cover Pages are sponsored by:

BEA Systems, Inc.         http://www.bea.com
IBM Corporation           http://www.ibm.com
Innodata Isogen           http://www.innodata-isogen.com
SAP AG                    http://www.sap.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc.    http://sun.com

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Newsletter subscribe: xml-dailynews-subscribe@lists.xml.org
Newsletter unsubscribe: xml-dailynews-unsubscribe@lists.xml.org
Newsletter help: xml-dailynews-help@lists.xml.org
Cover Pages: http://xml.coverpages.org/

----------------------------------------------------------------------