- From: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2006 09:51:25 +0100
- To: "W3C SWEO IG" <public-sweo-ig@w3.org>
I think its safe to say that a fair proportion of XML developers/users could have a lot to gain through using semweb tech, and that the semweb would definitely have a lot to gain from increased adoption in that sector (the readership of xml-dev, say). But how to get the message across..? I've not been following xml-dev for the last year or two, but there certainly used to be elevated levels of skepticism when RDF was mentioned. In other XML-oriented places which I do still watch, there does seem to have been a warming towards the tech - especially when material is presented by someone who is well-known in the XML community. Case in point, below is Robin Cover's email newsletter, featuring Bob DuCharme's comments on the questions Lee presented re. XQuery. Although it happened by a convoluted route, it looks to me like good outreach. Cheers, Danny. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Robin Cover <robin@oasis-open.org> Date: 15-Dec-2006 21:29 Subject: XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 15 December 2006 To: XML Daily Newslink <xml-dailynews@lists.xml.org> XML Daily Newslink. Friday, 15 December 2006 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: * RDF Versus XQuery: Different Tools for Different Problems * Mars Project: Developing an XML-based Representation of PDF Documents * Special Report: Java EE 5 Faces the SOA test, Part 2 * Managing Code Modification and Duplication: Configuration-Driven Development * ModelDriven.org Community for Model Driven Methods and Technologies * Open Access Agreement: Oxford Journals and National Library of Medicine * Ease AJAX Development with the Google Web Toolkit * Is Microsoft Thinking of Closing Windows? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RDF Versus XQuery: Different Tools for Different Problems Bob DuCharme, Blog RDF and related technologies fall short in areas where XML and XQuery shine, but XML and XQuery fall short in areas where RDF shines. And they both fall short in areas where relational databases shine, and... etc. RDF is a data model. Certain problem domains map very well to that data model, especially large collections of assignments of values to objects that don't normalize into relational tables or even a single XML schema well. An add-on like OWL makes it easier to define relationships between seemingly unrelated classes of information, making it easier to use the aggregate sources together. RDF can add a lot to a publishing system, but tracking the relationship between in-line elements and their containing block elements (that is, mixed content) is not something it can help much. For example, it can be used to store metadata about document components and associations as document files moves through a workflow... Searching within documents is certainly where XQuery shines, but unless you're using an XQuery engine for pure substring search (for example, "show me which documents have the string 'fireplace' in them"), the insurance policy and rental agreement examples would only work well with XQuery if all of the documents conformed to the same schema. The RDF/OWL strength that makes it popular for semantic web work is its ability to query collections of data in the same domain that aren't necessarily all of identical structure. http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog/2006/12/rdf_versus_xquery.html See also the XML 2006 presentation: http://2006.xmlconference.org/programme/presentations/188.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mars Project: Developing an XML-based Representation of PDF Documents Staff, Adobe Labs Technical Paper Adobe has provided updated information about the Mars (code name) project, defining an XML-friendly implementation of PDF syntax. "PDF today faces increased demand to interoperate with XML based formats and technologies. PDF has historically been difficult for developers to work with because of its complex internal structure.Mars addresses these issues. We hope to enable a larger group of developers to more easily build PDF-based applications. Mars does this by providing a representation of PDF that can be more easily understood and manipulated by XML-savvy developers and tools. Documents and forms can be created and manipulated in Mars format which can be directly opened by Acrobat or Reader or converted to PDFC (PDF Cos-based) format. COS is the name of the object syntax used by PDF. The goals of Mars are to: (1) Provide an XML representation of PDF combined with a ZIP-based package that is a forward-looking, competitive representation of PDF to address customer and competitive demands. (2) Support developers who what to leverage their XML tools and knowledge to create, manipulate, and extract information from PDF. (3) Provide an XML document solution for organizations that have chosen to unify their infrastructure using XML as the base representation. (4) Define and implement a representation of PDF information based on reusable XML components or subassemblies. These subassemblies represent self- contained pieces of document information that might be used in a variety of contexts including contexts not involving PDF documents. Mars should represent page content using a standard XML format: this format is SVG, a W3C Recommendation. It should be possible to round-trip PDF extension data. This means that dictionaries in a PDFC file that are not defined in the PDF spec should be able to be converted to the Mars XML format, and that XML should be able to reproduce the extension dictionaries when the Mars containing them is converted back to a PDFC file. Mars should lower the bar for creation of PDF documents. A variety of XML tools can be applied to help in the task, and dealing with COS syntax and COS object relationships is not required." [From the "Preliminary Mars File Format Specification."] http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/mars/mars_format_specification.pdf See also the Mars web site: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mars/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Special Report: Java EE 5 Faces the SOA test, Part 2 Colleen Frye, SearchWebServices.com During this transitional period from what enterprise Java was to what building an enterprise-grade SOA, the Java ecosystem players are exploring the possibilities and many are putting their eggs in more than one basket. Bruce Snyder, co-founder and developer for the Geronimo project and a senior architect at LogicBlaze Inc., an open source SOA provider, said "enterprise-grade" means different things to different organizations, but that building an SOA should not require a "forklift upgrade." Snyder said enterprise-grade SOA should have flexibility on the back end as well as on the developer side, and by that he means making it easier to do things. "There's a portion of Java EE trying to standardize on that," he said, such as the move toward annotations with the JAX-WS spec. "It's good in terms of standardization, but in terms of flexibility and simplifying things, I'm not sure Java EE 5 does that. I still see people going outside of Java EE to look for solutions." Michael Bechauf, vice president of industry standards at SAP AG, said enterprise-grade SOA "must be secure, reliable and interoperable. However, beyond those technical characteristics, what's key is that a company needs to employ a consistent set of design rules across all its services. The services also need to be designed in a way that they can cover use cases across multiple industries. They need to use a consistent set of data types that interoperate with common industry vocabularies such as RosettaNet. The services need to have the right granularity to allow for both coarse-grained, message type, business-to-business communication, as well as fine-grained access into a business system so that customers can exploit those services for business flexibility and best practices in their lines of business. For fine-grained services, each call needs to transition the business system from one consistent state into another. Sometimes, flexibility needs to be traded-off against system consistency." Organizations have to be asking themselves, just how much work is involved in taking existing enterprise apps and componentizing/service-enabling them? And does Java EE 5 make it easier? http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1234422,00.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Managing Code Modification and Duplication: Configuration-Driven Development Steve McDuff, IBM developerWorks You can compare code duplication to an accident waiting to happen, just waiting for someone to make a modification and forget to carry it over to the duplicated sources. The resulting setback can be significant or minor, but no matter the magnitude, duplication remains a source of trouble. The difference between configuration-driven development and model-driven development is that the former is not restricted to the model of the code such as classes, fields, and relationships. Configuration-driven development (CCD) encompasses anything that can be configured within your application. For example, if your architecture dictates that particular business rules must be applied consistently across your application, you can use configuration files to configure and apply those rules. This article introduces configuration-driven development and explains how it can resolve code duplication and modification problems. The author proposes a simple and efficient way to achieve a functional and successful configuration- driven development process. In configuration-driven development, developers make all modifications primarily in XML files. All other files related to the application read their configuration from those files, either at runtime or by having selected parts generated at build time. In the case of the Rational Portfolio Manager, we stored the following components and information in configuration files... Using the [sample] configuration file, it is possible to generate: (1) A database layout; (2) A Web services interface; (3) Java model classes; (4) User documentation; (5) A simple user interface that uses the labels and embeds documentation for tooltips and help files; (6) Unit test frameworks for each attribute and rule in the configuration... While configuration-driven development is not a radically new idea, getting it to work efficiently in a typically constrained modern work environment can be challenging. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-configdev/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ModelDriven.org Community for Model Driven Methods and Technologies Staff, Data Access Technologies Announcement On December 6, 2006, industry partners announced ModelDriven.org as a community of government, commercial and university members who use, develop, and integrate open source and commercial capabilities to enable agile business solutions based on model driven methods and technologies. The initiative is a division of Data Access Technologies, Inc. ModelDriven.org is standards based, leveraging Model Driven Architecture as defined by the OMG and the Semantic Web as defined by W3C. This community has both a user membership and a provider membership. The user community drives the agenda -- it is their needs that ModelDriven.org and the provider community are there to address. ModelDriven.org serves the open source (and "open model") community by being an active contributor to open source and sponsoring open source projects that help build the Model Driven vision. ModelDriven.org provides open source developers a way to focus efforts on problems that need to be addressed and a way to build quality architectures and software that will really make a difference. ModeDriven.org provides commercial vendors with an outlet for their products and services that support open source and a venue for funded open source projects that are strategically important for both the provider and user communities. The Business Process Definition Meta Model specification has been through a multi-year process within the Object Management Group (OMG) to define a common meta model for the various process notations, methodologies and standards. BPDM also serves as the meta model behind the popular Business Process Modeling (BPMN) notation. BPDM is a robust representation of business process modeling concepts. As a MOF-based metamodel, it is accompanied by an XMI standard format for model exchange. BPDM is consistent with the MDA approach in providing a representation that separates implementation choices to other stages of system design. BPDM process models can be implemented by people exchanging paper documents, or may be automated or a combination of both. It provides a base from which more implementation-specific information make be added, for example, with stereotypes for manual and automated processes. http://portal.modeldriven.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Open Access Agreement: Oxford Journals and National Library of Medicine Staff, Oxford Journals Announcement Oxford Journals has announced a new agreement with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) that will allow all content published as open access under its Oxford Open model to be available from PubMed Central. The agreement makes it easier for authors publishing with Oxford Journals to meet the requirements of their funding bodies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who request all NIH-funded content to be deposited into PubMed Central within 12 months of online publication. Previously, authors who chose to participate in the Oxford Open initiative were entitled to self-archive a post-print of their accepted manuscript and/or the final published version of their article into an institutional or central repository. The new agreement means that all content published under Oxford Open will be immediately deposited into PubMed Central by Oxford Journals directly. Oxford Journals has published almost 2000 open access articles in 2006 through its Oxford Open models, including optional open access for 49 journals, and full open access with Nucleic Acids Research. Martin Richardson, Managing Director, Oxford Journals" "We recognise the importance of ensuring that our authors are able to comply with the policies for those funding their research, and in particular any requirement there is to make the material publicly available as soon as possible after publication. Deposit of open access articles by the Publisher, on behalf of authors, will also benefit readers who will know that they are accessing the version of record." In August 2006, launch of UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) was announced -- a repository based on the PubMed Central in the United States, operated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Like its American counterpart, UKPMC will provide free access to an online digital archive of peer-reviewed research papers in the medical and life sciences. Officials at the Wellcome Trust, strong advocates of open access, said the contract to run UKPMC was awarded to a partnership between the British Library, the University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). http://www.oxfordjournals.org/news/2006/11/28/new_open_access_agreement_for_ox/new_open_access_agreement_for_ox.html See also the Oxford Open Initiative: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ease AJAX Development with the Google Web Toolkit Jeff Hanson, JavaWorld Magazine Google Web Toolkit is a Java development framework for AJAX application development. GWT removes much of the technical details of AJAX-based RPC communication and provides a library of widget components for building rich UIs. GWT allows a developer to implement and debug AJAX- based applications in Java using common Java development tools and then compile and deploy the applications as client-side HTML and JavaScript, and server-side Java. GWT fuses client-side and server-side code together with Java as the common language. This common environment along with features such as enhanced debugging does come with a few drawbacks. For example, GWT is completely dependent on the availability of JavaScript. If JavaScript is not available, the UI will simply not work. Also, where traditional Web-client development technologies deliberately seek to underscore security vulnerabilities, GWT's use of Java for both client and server development can conceal vulnerabilities and lead to a false sense of runtime security. GWT's abstractions form a black-box framework that eliminates many common Web application development challenges, as it steers developers towards an AJAX-styled development model. However, this black-box environment complicates integration of other non-AJAX technologies. Therefore, GWT is most applicable to Web applications designed around a rich GUI, single page model. http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2006/jw-1213-gwt.html See also the GWT web site: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Is Microsoft Thinking of Closing Windows? Staff, Computer Business Review Online Gartner Inc has predicted that the recently released Windows Vista will be the last major release of Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system. While that might seem like an outlandish statement at first glance, the research firm went on to explain that it believes Microsoft will move to a modular, incremental update model for future versions of Windows. Advertisement Microsoft has increased its use of Windows Update as a software delivery mechanism in recent years, using it for the distribution of Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Internet Explorer 7, and the company admits that it is considering its options. Given the level of attention on Microsoft's shipment dates, and its tendency to miss them, you could forgive the company for deciding to move away from the monolithic delivery model. Compare the potential significance of a Windows delay on Microsoft's financial performance in a particular quarter to Red Hat Inc's attitude to a delay for its core operating system. Nick Carr, director of marketing for Enterprise Linux at Red Hat, recently noted that the company is in no hurry to rush the delayed RHEL 5 out the door since the launch of the product is not a "revenue event" for the company. By that, he meant that customers who have active subscriptions for RHEL 3 or RHEL 4 get the new version for free when it becomes available. Red Hat customers are not paying to use a particular version of Enterprise Linux, but to subscribe to support and updates to whichever one is available. That appears to be what Gartner is suggesting Microsoft may consider in the future. http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=BB4C77B9-E987-4650-B1B5-43B0A55B3C9E ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- http://dannyayers.com
Received on Saturday, 16 December 2006 08:51:39 UTC