Column Two

Robin Cover reports on the release of a revised RDF and OWL recommendations. To quote: The World Wide Web Consortium has announced "final approval of two key Semantic Web technologies, the revised Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). RDF and OWL are Semantic Web standards that ...

Michael Smith has forwarded the announcement that RELAX NG is now a full ISO standard (this is an alternative to the W3C schema specification, for those who are into XML). To quote: RELAX NG was developed under the guidance of Clark and MURATA Makoto (creator of the original RELAX schema ...

Robin Cover writes about the Atom specification, slated as a replacement to RSS. To quote: The Atom Project, to the extent that anyone can declare authoritatively what it is, or is quintessentially meant to support, is "an initiative to develop a common syntax for syndication, archiving, and publishing." Sam Ruby ...

Robin Cover reports on the release of Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) Version 1.0. To quote: The BPMI Notation Working Group has announced the release of a public draft for the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN Version 1.0). The BPMN specification "provides a graphical notation for expressing business processes in ...

John Krasnay has just released a new Java-based visual XML editor. While I haven't downloaded it yet, there is a tremendous need for better tools in this area, so I wish him the best of luck. To quote: VEX is a Java Swing application that provides a word processor-like ...

The Association of Information and Image Management (AIIM) has released a draft XML specification for the interchange of document images. To quote: The standard is designed for use when an image is transferred between users, either within an organization or between organizations; the standardization of metadata permits the interchange to ...

Oliver Becker, Paul Brown, Petr Cimprich introduce the world to a new XML transformation language: Streaming Transformations for XML (STX). To quote: This article introduces Streaming Transformations for XML (STX), a template-based XML transformation language that operates on streams of SAX events. STX resembles XSLT

Apparently it's the fifth birthday of XML, sometime around now. This would explain today's flood of XML-related articles, most of which I haven't passed on...

Robin Cover reports on new XForms activity within W3C. To quote: A new XForms Activity has been created as part of the W3C Interaction Domain. The XForms Activity currently "hosts a single Working Group, and focuses on the development of W3C specifications for the next generation of Web forms. More ...

On January 23, a working draft was released for a RDF Primer. (RDF standing for "Resource Description Framework".) To quote: This Primer is designed to provide the reader with the basic knowledge required to effectively use RDF. It introduces the basic concepts of RDF and describes its XML syntax. It ...

PerfectXML has released a list of the top 100 XML acronyms, with everything from CML (Chemical Markup Language) to X-KRSS (XML Key Registration Service Specification). This is a very cleanly laid-out page, with a brief description and URL provided for each acronym. It's actually scary how useful this list is. ...

zapthink has released a free report on the pros and cons of XML. This takes a pragmatic look at the world of XML, and identifies the following key findings: There are 18 key arguments favoring XML There are 9 key arguments challenging XML Does XML represent a revolutionary technology change or is ...

Robin Cover summarises the news that OASIS has created an e-Gov Technical Committee, "providing an international forum for governments to voice their needs and requirements with respect to XML-based standards". Its mandate is as follows: Bringing together government representatives from around the world, the OASIS e-Gov Technical Committee will ...

Frederick Hirsch writes a mammoth (12 page) article on all aspects of XML security. He provides a high-level view of the issues and requirements, and then walks through each XML security standard in turn. To quote: The XML Security standards include XML Digital Signature for integrity and signing solutions, XML ...

The Register reports on the recent establishment of the OASIS Open Office XML Format Technical Committee. The aim is to further develop a common set of XML standards for interoperability between Office packages (notable is the lack of Microsoft involvement). OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) has ...

Kendall Grant Clark writes about the very mottled history of RDF, and where it might be going in the future. This draws on recent discussions on the XML-dev mailing list, sparked an earlier RDF article. I finished reading this article with my current views reinforced: perhaps it could be useful, ...

Robin Cover has written a news article on the release of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) Guide, which "is intended to provide a language that can be used to describe the classes and relations between them that are inherent in Web documents and applications". To quote from the Working ...

Robin Cover has summarised the release of NewsML 1.1. From the functional specification: NewsML provides a framework for the interchange and management of news: NewsML is primarily intended as a format for the interchange of news. However, it may also be used as a format for news storage and as ...

A report on ZDNet discusses the news that World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released XML 1.1 as a candidate recommendation. This focuses on revising the support for Unicode, and this has generated a lot of ire in the past. To quote: The revision of XML comes with a trio ...

There is a report today, which discusses the growth of the XML market. To quote: Over the past year alone the market for XML servers has delivered an incredible performance. Between 2001 and 2002 XML servers have grown by 168% which, IDC firmly believes, will in turn create a market ...

Micah Dubinko writes an introduction to XForms. This is a potentially very interesting technology, as we all use a lot of online forms in a given year. Of course, it is very early days yet. There is no browser support, and the spec leaves it up to the implementers to ...

NUBlog has written a piece on the potential benfits of the Dublin Core metadata scheme. They would like to see all web creators add metadata to their pages, with the grand aim: Now, if everybody used Dublin Core, the Open Directory Project (or its monopoly instantiation, Google Directory) ...

As a response to an earlier article, Norman Walsh provides his view on XML: One Input---Many Outputs. His conclusions: XML certainly can be used to achieve

Robin Cover has written a useful summary of the news that XForms 1.0 has been released as a Preview Candidate Recommendation. This is a good specification, in principle. There is a strong need for a consistent way of creating and managing forms, across platforms and software. I will have to ...

Kendall Grant Clark has written an article summarising the changes incorporated in the new XHTML 2.0 draft. He identifies the major new features as: Navigation lists: a standardised way of generating lists of links (perhaps in an expandable/collapsable form). Everything is a link: the "href" attribute is added to every element, ...

Addison-Wesley Professional has just released a new book titled XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web which they describe as a "complete introduction and application guide to the world of topic maps". I haven't seen (or read) this book yet, so I can't provide a review. You ...

For those of us who are still struggling to get a firm grasp on topic maps (and I'm definitely in that category), there is a simple topic map tutorial called MyFirstTopicmap. (This is a introduction provided as part of the excellent easytopicmaps.com site.)

Walter Perry has written a very interesting article which questions whether defining standard languages for communicating between business is such a great idea after all. He argues that by providing a dumbed-down medium for communication (one that has it's own rules and loopholes) it opens the way for "the problem ...

A new standard has been released that describes consistent metadata for still images. This has been produced in draft form by NISO (US National Information Standards Organization) and AIIM International. The data dictionary "defines a standard set of metadata elements for digital images. Standardizing the information allows users to develop, exchange, ...