News Release: New W3C Standard Defines Way to Organize and Share XML Workflows

New W3C Standard Defines Way to Organize and Share XML Workflows
XProc (XML Pipeline) Replaces Ad-Hoc Approaches

    http://www.w3.org/ — 11 May 2010 — Today W3C announced a powerful
    tool for managing XML-rich processes such as business processes used
    in enterprise environments. The specification "XProc: An XML
    Pipeline Language," provides a standard framework for composing XML
    processes. XProc streamlines the automation, sequencing and
    management of complex computations involving XML by leveraging
    existing technologies widely adopted in the enterprise setting.

XProc Helps Organize Processes using Standard Descriptions

    XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is a mainstay of
    contemporary enterprise computing that is used to store, transform,
    and exchange an enormous range of information, from tax returns to
    fuel tank levels. Many business processes can be modeled as a series
    of operations, each of which involves XML input or output. Companies
    use these models for many purposes, such as ensuring quality
    controls are met or assembling compliance reports.


    W3C published the first XML standard in 1998. Since then W3C has
    standardized a number of core operations on XML including validation
    (Schema languages), query (XQuery), transformation (XSLT), and
    linking (XLink). Business processes combine and build on these core
    operations, but there has been no standard to describe such
    sequences. Instead, ad-hoc solutions have been used, which are not
    easily shared (e.g., with others in a supply chain) and do not
    leverage widely deployed tools or support.

    "XML is tremendously versatile," said Norman Walsh, MarkLogic, and
    one of the co-editors of the specification. "Just off the top of my
    head, I can name standard ways to store, validate, query, transform,
    include, label, and link XML. What we haven't had is any standard
    way to describe how to combine them to accomplish any particular
    task. That's what XProc provides."

    XProc can be used, for example, to sequence the following set of
    operations: (1) given a news ticker feed (2) whenever a company is
    mentioned, use a Web service to contact a stock exchange then (3)
    insert current share prices into the feed and (4) insert background
    information about the company that has been extracted from a
    database. In addition, this enhanced feed could be presented in
    several ways to multiple users including (5) for print or (6) with
    an interactive form so that people can purchase shares online. In
    this scenario, XProc controls a number of processes that might be
    implemented using other standards such as XQuery, XSLT, XSLT-FO,
    XForms, and HTML.

XProc is XML; Benefits from Existing XML Infrastructure

    Because XProc descriptions are in XML, people can use readily
    available XML tools to generate, transform, and validate them.

    "Processing XML as XML is a hugely powerful design pattern, and
    XProc makes this easy and attractive," said Henry Thompson,
    University of Edinburgh and one of the co-editors of the
    specification. "XProc exemplifies what W3C does best: we looked at
    existing practice — people have been using a number of
    similar-but-different XML-based languages — and we produced a
    consensus standard, creating interoperability and critical mass."

    XProc is supported by a test suite that covers all of the
    required and optional steps of the language as well as all the
    static and dynamic errors.

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

Resources:

   Press release in English:
   http://www.w3.org/2010/05/xproc-pr.html.en

   Translations (when available):
   http://www.w3.org/Press/Releases-2010.html#x2010-xproc


Media Contacts

    Contact Americas, Australia, Europe, Africa, Middle East —
           Ian Jacobs, <ij@w3.org>, +1.718.260.9447
           mailto:ij@w3.org


    Contact Asia —
           Naoko Ishikura, <keio-contact@w3.org>, +81.466.49.1170
           mailto:keio-contact@w3.org



About the World Wide Web Consortium

    The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium
    where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work
    together to develop Web standards. W3C primarily pursues its mission
    through the creation of Web standards and guidelines designed to
    ensure long-term growth for the Web. Over 350 organizations are
    Members of the Consortium. W3C is jointly run by the MIT
    Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL)
    in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and
    Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University
    in Japan, and has additional Offices worldwide. For more
    information see http://www.w3.org/


--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Tuesday, 11 May 2010 14:19:29 UTC