Re: Target audiences/Fwd: XML Daily Newslink

Thanks for the pointer Danny. The blog of Bob DuCharme is certainly a
positive one... I have added a pointer to del.icio.us/tag/sweo

I.

Danny Ayers wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
URL: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
PGP Key: http://www.cwi.nl/%7Eivan/AboutMe/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf