The UN/CEFACT Techniques and Methodologies Group (TMG) has announced the release of the "UN/CEFACT Core Components Technical Specification (UN/CEFACT CCTS)" Version 3 for a Second Public Review. CCTS describes and specifies a semantic-based approach to information interoperability within and between e-business applications and databases. It focuses on a dynamic, flexible, and interoperable way of standardizing e-business library semantics for data exchange.
OASIS acknowledged receipt of a draft TC charter proposal to create a Web Services Federation (WSFED) Technical Committee. The TC would accept as input the "WS-Federation" specification (Version 1.1) published by BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA, IBM, Layer 7 Technologies, Microsoft, Novell, and VeriSign. The revised "WS-Federation" v1.2 would extend basic federation capabilities enabled by WS-Security, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Trust, and WS-SecurityPolicy.
The OSOA Collaboration represented by eighteen leading technology vendors announced that key Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) Final Specifications have completed incubation and will be submitted to OASIS and the Java Community Process (JCP) for standardization. SCA provides an executable model for composition of individual service components into a service network. SDO supports format-independent handling of business data.
The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced the release of "Basic Security Profile V1.0" as Final Material. The Profile consists of a set of non-proprietary Web services specifications, along with clarifications to and amplifications of those specifications which promote interoperability. Publication of BSP 1.0 has been praised by Web Services security experts as a key technology enabler to enhance interoperability and improve security.
W3C has announced the publication of a First Public Working Draft the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML 3.0). The Working Group was re-chartered to enhance MathML to better support internationalization of mathematics, accessibility, semantic encoding of mathematics, Unicode alignment, and precise control of rendering for print publishing. MathML is an XML application for encoding both mathematical notation and semantic structure of mathematical content.
The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced a new DASH Initiative (Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware) designed to produce a suite of specifications leveraging Web Services for Management (WS-Management). One of several DMTF Management Initiatives, DASH provides a comprehensive framework for syntax and semantics necessary to manage desktop and mobile client systems, independent of machine state, operating platform, or vendor.
W3C has released "Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0" as a Recommendation, supporting internationalized XML content. ITS identifies concepts such as directionality important for I18N and L10N; it also defines implementations of these concepts as sets of elements and attributes to enable internationalization of existing XML documents without modifying them. Implementations are given for three schema languages: XML DTD, XML Schema, and RELAX NG.
W3C has acknowledged receipt of a Member Submission for the Service Modeling Language (SML) specification. SML, with its SML Interchange Format (SML-IF), enables modeling of complex IT services and systems, including structure, constraints, policies, and best practices. Rules and constraints are expressed using W3C XML Schema, Schematron grammars, and XPath 1.0. SML's authors include BEA, CA, Cisco, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) announced the release of an International e-Invoice designed for use by the Steel, Automotive, or Electronic industries, as well as in the retail sector or Customs and other Government Authorities. The Cross Industry Invoice (CII) is an important accounting document having potential legal implications for sender and receiver. It supports EU VAT declaration and reclamation, and statistics declaration.
Continuing our mini-series on XSLT 2.0, Erik Wilde describes XIPr, an XInclude Processor implemented as a single XSLT 2.0 stylesheet, for using in document inclusion processing tasks.
Andrew Newman describes SPARQL as a kind of relational query language over the Web itself; or, at least, over RDF and any data that can be mapped into RDF. He suggests that SPARQL is an excellent candidate Web 2.0 technology.
SOA is just a bunch of silly three-letter acronyms, right? Well, maybe not: Apache has more than enough real-tech credibility to make the SOA doubters take another look when they learn that Apache and SOA go together very nicely. In this article Kyle Gabhart explains how to do SOA with Apache.
Michael Day asks an interesting question: which XML technologies are beautiful and why? He answers with some candidates. Which XML technologies do you think are most beautiful?
In this second part of a two-part series, Bob DuCharme concludes his introduction of RDFa--a new, XHTML-friendly standard syntax for RDF metadata that allows you to embed RDF metadata into the Web in a novel way.
Cedric Savarese offers an interesting guide to using XUL to enhance web apps on Mozilla-compatible browsers. He very helpfully includes performance numbers, including comparisons to equivalent JavaScript widgets.
In the golden days, XML parser performance was a perpetually hot topic. And today it's still worth knowing which modern parsers offer the best performance. In this first of a two-part series, event-based parsers are compared; in the next part, object parsers are compared.