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

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>
Date: Tue, May 11, 2010 at 4:35 PM
Subject: New W3C Standard Defines Way to Organize and Share XML
Workflows [News Release]
To: W3C Members <w3c-ac-forum@w3.org>


Dear Advisory Committee Representative,

W3C just issued a press release with the publication of the XProc
Recommendation:
 http://www.w3.org/2010/05/xproc-pr

The release text is below. Congratulations to the XML Processing Model
Working Group!

Ian Jacobs, Head of W3C Communications

==========

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.

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




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






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Received on Tuesday, 11 May 2010 15:11:16 UTC