http://tc.eserver.org/dir/XML A listing of the most recently indexed works about XML in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/XML http://tc.eserver.org/35713.html http://tc.eserver.org/35713.html I did an experiment on Friday that taught me an important lesson: When it comes to handling XML structures, I know pretty much jack. This may be a fatal admission for a technical communicator, but it’s an honest one. http://tc.eserver.org/35618.html http://tc.eserver.org/35618.html By reading this short tutorial, you'll get acquainted with the DITA 1.1 markup and after that, you'll be able to author your first DITA document right away. This short tutorial will not discuss the DITA ``philosophy'' or the advantages of the DITA vocabulary over other XML vocabularies (e.g. DocBook). http://tc.eserver.org/35606.html http://tc.eserver.org/35606.html XAML stands for eXtensible Application Markup Language and was created by Microsoft. It is currently the primary mechanism for declaratively creating the user interface in a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application. WPF is part of the .NET 3.0 framework. Why discuss these very technical things in a design blog post? The answer is simple: because XAML is designed for designers. It has other uses of course, but one of its main tenets is that XAML enables the separation of UI and logic (code). That is a very powerful concept! In this and future posts, I will explain how a few of us at Autodesk are using XAML in our design process as a way to enable design refinement during the Development phase. http://tc.eserver.org/35431.html http://tc.eserver.org/35431.html This presentation is for beginning to intermediate users of DITA. It's based on my experience with projects on which I'm project manager, information architect, and writer. http://tc.eserver.org/35432.html http://tc.eserver.org/35432.html Before DITA, we told readers how things worked. After DITA, we tell users how to use things. Before, we wrote information linearly. After, we write individual units as needed. http://tc.eserver.org/35310.html http://tc.eserver.org/35310.html Intelligent content is content which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s content that is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. It’s content that helps you and your customers get the job done, often automatically. http://tc.eserver.org/35289.html http://tc.eserver.org/35289.html A blog about XML theory and XML applications. http://tc.eserver.org/35225.html http://tc.eserver.org/35225.html Perhaps the true measure of a good idea is its persistence, even though folks are slow to pick up on it. SGML is a good example. It seemed like a great idea, but for a long time, had trouble getting traction in the general tool space. Then it started showing up at technical communication conferences wearing a name badge that said, “Hi, my name is DITA,” and suddenly, it’s a hit! http://tc.eserver.org/35165.html http://tc.eserver.org/35165.html In his article in this issue, Peter-Paul Koch proposes adding custom attributes to form elements to allow triggers for specialized behaviors. The W3C validator won’t validate a document with these attributes, as they aren’t part of the XHTML specification. This article will show you how to create a custom DTD that will add those custom attributes, and will show you how to validate documents that use those new attributes. http://tc.eserver.org/35166.html http://tc.eserver.org/35166.html The reason that we use XML instead of a specific application is that XML is not just a pretty face, living in isolation from the rest of the computing world. XML is more than a rulebook for generating custom markup languages. It is part of a family of technologies, which, working together, make your XML-based documents very useful indeed. To demonstrate what I mean, I decided to create a new XML-based markup language from scratch, and show what you can do with a document written in that language, using off-the-shelf tools. http://tc.eserver.org/35174.html http://tc.eserver.org/35174.html It’s time we came to grips with the fact that not every “document” can be a “web page.” Some forms of writing just cannot be expressed in HTML—or they need to be bent and distorted to do so. But for once, XML might actually help. http://tc.eserver.org/35175.html http://tc.eserver.org/35175.html RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets.” http://tc.eserver.org/35122.html http://tc.eserver.org/35122.html Although managing costs is important anytime, it is especially important in today's economic reality where budgets are shrinking drastically. Getting your money's worth as well as what you need to support your data should be a core factor of any data project. The two biggest cost factors are the type of conversion work you need done and how much of it you'll need. This article focuses on how your goals for your project relate to the output format you choose, and how that format impacts costs. While some outputs, like XML, provide higher capabilities, they also cost more to create. http://tc.eserver.org/35123.html http://tc.eserver.org/35123.html While I'm a big fan of XML for many purposes, it's a misconception that it's the single best solution in every scenario, and it's worthwhile to consider the alternatives in situations where the benefits of XML are not necessary. In this article, I discuss alternatives to XML, SGML, and HTML that might be suitable when budgets are more limited. While XML is perfect for highly coded information, other options can work well for many kinds of information. Markup languages are at the high end of the cost spectrum, so if you don't need the benefits they provide, you certainly should consider the alternatives discussed below. http://tc.eserver.org/35056.html http://tc.eserver.org/35056.html XSL stands for EXtensible Stylesheet Language, and is a style sheet language for XML documents. XSLT stands for XSL Transformations. In this tutorial you will learn how to use XSLT to transform XML documents into other formats, like XHTML. http://tc.eserver.org/35057.html http://tc.eserver.org/35057.html XML considers four characters to be whitespace: the carriage return, the linefeed, the tab, and the spacebar space. Microsoft operating systems put both a carriage return and a linefeed at the end of each line of a text file, and people usually refer to the combination as the "carriage return". XSLT stylesheet developers often get frustrated over the whitespace that shows up in their result documents -- sometimes there's more than they wanted, sometimes there's less, and sometimes it's in the wrong place. Over the next few columns, we'll discuss how XML and XSLT treat whitespace to gain a better understanding of what can happen, and we'll look at some techniques for controlling how an XSLT processor adds whitespace to the result document. http://tc.eserver.org/35058.html http://tc.eserver.org/35058.html Since the early days of XSLT, many have asked whether it was possible to automate the creation of XSLT stylesheets. The general idea of filling out a form or dragging some icons around, then clicking a button and seeing a productive stylesheet generated from your input has always appealed to people. However, the problem of generating working XSLT syntax from the result of someone clicking on pull-down menus and radio buttons has not attracted many takers. http://tc.eserver.org/35060.html http://tc.eserver.org/35060.html In a recent weblog post, XML.com's "Python and XML" columnist Uche Ogbuji provided a nice collection of links to discussions about the push vs. pull styles of XSLT stylesheet development. What do we mean by "push" and "pull"? As a short example of each, let's look at two approaches to converting the following DocBook document to XHTML. http://tc.eserver.org/35061.html http://tc.eserver.org/35061.html XPath 1.0 (and hence your XSLT style sheets) considers two elements to be equal if their string values are the same. The string value is essentially all of the PCDATA between the element's start and end tags, even if the element has descendant elements. For example, an XSLT processor considers the w and z elements in the following to be equal, because they both have a string value of "abcdefghi". http://tc.eserver.org/35062.html http://tc.eserver.org/35062.html Covers XPath's new ability to do some things that every real programming language can do: conditional statements and iteration, or, as they're more colloquially known, "if" statements and "for" loops. We'll also look at a useful related technique for checking whether certain conditions do or don't exist in a set of nodes. http://tc.eserver.org/35063.html http://tc.eserver.org/35063.html Learn about the concept of XML whitespace, and gets tips for avoiding problems associated with it. http://tc.eserver.org/35064.html http://tc.eserver.org/35064.html With XSLT support fast becoming a commonly available component in the browser, web developers can now leverage transformations to manipulate large amounts of data in the browser at speeds acceptable for more advanced user interfaces. Once Safari gets its act together, I see more and more UI-specific data processing being moved off of the server into the browser. This article outlines the process involved in transforming the del.icio.us user API XML document into an HTML fragment. http://tc.eserver.org/35065.html http://tc.eserver.org/35065.html RSS is a hot topic these days, as it provides an easy way to stream data online. This article, the first of a four-part series on developing VoiceXML applications, shows you how to develop a voice-enabled RSS reader. The input to the application is RSS data, and the output is VoiceXML that can be read and spoken by your favorite compatible voice application. http://tc.eserver.org/35066.html http://tc.eserver.org/35066.html The value of XQuery is not in its role as an alternative syntax to XSLT 2.0 for manipulating XML; it's in the implementations, which let you quickly retrieve, sort, and manipulate specific subsets of XML from collections that can measure in the terabytes. The ability to store large, indexed collections of data that don't fit neatly into normalized relational tables will create possibilities for all kinds of new applications, both inside and outside of the publishing world. http://tc.eserver.org/35067.html http://tc.eserver.org/35067.html Gets you to the point where you could start exploring those features with a reasonably large collection of your own data. Without spending any money, you can check them all out and discover the advantages to having large amounts of your XML stored in a database where you (or an application!) can use a W3C standard language to quickly retrieve what you want from that database. http://tc.eserver.org/35068.html http://tc.eserver.org/35068.html XQuery is to XML what SQL is to database tables. XQuery was designed to query XML data. http://tc.eserver.org/35075.html http://tc.eserver.org/35075.html Because most of CMS integration efforts will be concentrated on the boundaries, it further supports the engineering conclusion that minimizing the amount of effort spent on the core functionality is good because it maximizes the amount of the total implementation budget that can be spent on implementing the boundary functionality. http://tc.eserver.org/35076.html http://tc.eserver.org/35076.html I feel that the term "XML CMS" is unnecessarily specialized. In my world, content management is a much more general problem and 90% of what you need to manage XML well applies to everything else too. That's another reason I chafe at over-specialized XML repositories--they really can't manage anything else. http://tc.eserver.org/35077.html http://tc.eserver.org/35077.html XM (XSLT Make) is a simple and affordable web-publishing content-management solution that takes advantage of XML and XSLT. http://tc.eserver.org/35042.html http://tc.eserver.org/35042.html Structured writing requires an analysis of content and a reorganization into the smallest possible coherent topics. http://tc.eserver.org/35043.html http://tc.eserver.org/35043.html This top ten list is based on interviews conducted by TheContentWrangler.com with technical writers at more than 20 software companies—tech writers that are actually using DITA to create documentation today. http://tc.eserver.org/35044.html http://tc.eserver.org/35044.html Think DITA is just for procedural technical documents? Think again. A new OASIS DITA sub-committee has been announced whose purpose it is to explore using the popular technical documentation standard known as the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) outside technical documentation projects. http://tc.eserver.org/35045.html http://tc.eserver.org/35045.html The DITA Open Platform is a free, open-source project which goal is to provide an enterprise platform for the edition, management and processing of DITA documents. http://tc.eserver.org/35046.html http://tc.eserver.org/35046.html The DITA Open Toolkit can transform your DITA files into a wide variety of output types. When you first install it, it's easy to get the impression that you need to know Ant well to use it, but you can pack most of its available options into a single Java™ command line. http://tc.eserver.org/35047.html http://tc.eserver.org/35047.html The topic of technical publishing is relatively new to the world of Eclipse. One can make the argument that technical publishing is just another collaborative development process involving several people with different backgrounds and skills. This article will show that the Eclipse platform is a viable platform for technical publishing by discussing how to write documents such as an article or a book within Eclipse. In fact, this article was written using Eclipse. http://tc.eserver.org/35016.html http://tc.eserver.org/35016.html The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides maps for assembling topics into deliverables. By specializing the map elements, you can define a formal information architecture for your deliverables. This architecture provides guidance to authors on how to organize topics and lets processes recognize your organizing principles, resulting in a consistent, clear experience for your users. http://tc.eserver.org/35019.html http://tc.eserver.org/35019.html XML is an optimal format for writing documentation that you can use with many different documentation software packages and production environments. In this third article in the series, discover how to create single-source documents that can produce output in a variety of different output formats. http://tc.eserver.org/35020.html http://tc.eserver.org/35020.html In this article we will introduce the concept of WS-Management and Common Information Model (CIM). By exploring the SOAP message with multiple examples, we will learn how to transfer CIM operations through WS-Management SOAP messages. http://tc.eserver.org/34979.html http://tc.eserver.org/34979.html Marketing materials are always important, and in these difficult times, they are critical to the success of the organization, and there are huge pressures to do more with less and for less money. Enter XML. XML is often perceived as complex, rigid and horrible to work with (geeky, technical) — anathema to the average marketing communications author. But this is no longer true. XML and the tools that support them have matured to the point where the XML is hidden, much in the same way RTF is hidden from the average Microsoft® Word author. Using XML for marketing materials provides considerable benefits, including consistent messaging, reduced time to create content, reduced costs to maintain content, reduced translation costs, and powerful multichannel conversion capabilities. XML is creating a profound shift in the way we create, manage, deliver and control marketing materials. It is a shift that is resulting in significant ROI and increased levels of success. http://tc.eserver.org/34784.html http://tc.eserver.org/34784.html DocBook is a set of tools for implementing XML (Extended Markup Language)-based structured documentation. It is developed back in 1991 and is widely used today by those technical writers who generate single-sourced documentation. It is especially well suited for software, hardware and networking documentation. http://tc.eserver.org/34718.html http://tc.eserver.org/34718.html Inline links and citations can be disruptive to the flow of information. Try to delete them because a topic is a discrete unit of information that is meaningful when it is displayed alone. http://tc.eserver.org/34719.html http://tc.eserver.org/34719.html Overview of best practices for using ditamaps and relationship tables to manage linking. http://tc.eserver.org/34720.html http://tc.eserver.org/34720.html While topic relationships can be stored in the topics themselves, as products evolve and user interfaces change, a topic that was required for release 1.0 of a product may no longer be needed in release 2.3. If related topics are maintained at the topic level, removing a topic that is no longer part of the system may involve modifying the related topics of a dozen different DITA files. http://tc.eserver.org/34721.html http://tc.eserver.org/34721.html Because keyref is so important and because it also has inherent, unavoidable complexity, I will be posting short examples of how keyref can be used to solve specific business problems. This is the first in an occasional series of such examples. This example shows one particular application of the keyref feature to a real-world problem faced by one of Really Strategies' clients. http://tc.eserver.org/34722.html http://tc.eserver.org/34722.html DITA maps provide a mechanism for ordering topics and creating a topic hierarchy. Because DITA maps consist of lists of references to topics, you can reorganize the content in a deliverable simply by changing the order of the topic references. You can create different maps referencing the same source topics to create two deliverables to meet different users' needs. http://tc.eserver.org/34580.html http://tc.eserver.org/34580.html Why XML documents aren’t a good fit for relational databases, how university professors are creating custom text books for students, and find links to several innovative projects that are demonstrating the power of XML and its cousin XQuery. http://tc.eserver.org/34491.html http://tc.eserver.org/34491.html This paper outlines a course given by Adena Frazier of Suite Solutions--a course which is highly recommended for anyone who wants to get the most of the OT. This paper outlines the most important processes, but it leaves out many of the details, tips, and debugging notes that were included in the course. Note, too, that errors easily could have crept in, and some details are bound to change for later versions of the toolkit. (We used version 1.4.1) So it makes a lot of sense to take the course, even if you find the outline useful. http://tc.eserver.org/34472.html http://tc.eserver.org/34472.html The site is about Structured Authoring. That is a broad subject, but will focus on SGML and XML and the implementation. Tools used to author, manage, communicate and deploy data usually in the maintenance from some small widget to a large weapon system. Covering Mil-Stds and S1000D. http://tc.eserver.org/34421.html http://tc.eserver.org/34421.html DITA enters a new phase this year with version 1.2. We'll learn about the big new features, such as keyref, and see them used in the latest DITA Open Toolkit. Attendees will know how to make use of new DITA 1.2 features using the DITA Open Toolkit. Attendees will understand key aspects of the new DITA 1.2 standard. http://tc.eserver.org/34422.html http://tc.eserver.org/34422.html How do you mitigate the risk of a major technology change such as DITA? This presentation shares lessons learned in the first DITA pilot project at IBM Internet Security Systems. How to pick the right opportunity for a user assistance pilot project. How to specify appropriate proof-of-concept requirements. How to use a wiki and collaborative walkthroughs to transfer knowledge and set standards. http://tc.eserver.org/34358.html http://tc.eserver.org/34358.html You can open and edit XML files stored on the WebDAV server using FrameMaker 9. When FrameMaker 9 is installed on your computer, the Edit with FrameMaker plug-in is added to the browser's toolbar and is listed as an option in the edit menu for XML files. http://tc.eserver.org/34359.html http://tc.eserver.org/34359.html The Structure View allows for real-time validation of the structured element content while editing. It discourages the author from violating the constraint rules set by the EDD or XML schema which was earlier possible only while saving or exporting the document. The Structure View is now capable of pointing the constraint error for integer and float data constraints. The content will turn Red indicating that the content does not satisfy the data type constraint. http://tc.eserver.org/34361.html http://tc.eserver.org/34361.html This tutorial uses the DITA Open Toolkit 1.4.2.1 and the corresponding PDF plugin release, and Wrycan's demo text. This assumes you have a working DITA environment and can run the default formatting with PDF plugin. http://tc.eserver.org/34362.html http://tc.eserver.org/34362.html The DITA-OT plugin transforms a map into a single file, suitable for publication, and automatically call the xmlrpc API of the blog to publish it. The DITA Wordpress plugin adds a css (a slightly modified version of the DITA-OT commonltr.css) to your Wordpress theme to properly render the standard domains. http://tc.eserver.org/34364.html http://tc.eserver.org/34364.html Our goal is to bring people together — think social network organized around XML, DITA, content management and related topics. This blog serves as a hub for white papers and URL resources, contains a calendar of XML-related events and conferences, tracks industry trends, and keeps members up-to-date as to “what’s new” on the site. http://tc.eserver.org/34330.html http://tc.eserver.org/34330.html I decided to simplify the DITA publishing process for myself by building a Windows interface to Ant. Ant was developed to allow programmers to write a simple build file in an XML format, and then process that XML file with the Ant build software. http://tc.eserver.org/34273.html http://tc.eserver.org/34273.html This article discusses main challenges that documentation team faces when it decides to use DITA as a source format for Eclipse Help documentation. It also explains how DITAworks documentation tool plans to address these challenges. http://tc.eserver.org/34264.html http://tc.eserver.org/34264.html If you're new to XML, this article introduces the basic construction of XML documents as well as the rules that you must follow to create well-formed XML, including naming conventions, proper tag nesting, attribute guidelines, declarations, and entities. You'll also gain an understanding of validation in terms of both DTD and schema usage. http://tc.eserver.org/34261.html http://tc.eserver.org/34261.html Using Adobe FrameMaker 9, one can save a DITA Map in various formats depending on one’s requirements. It could be intermediary output, like – FrameMaker Book/Document; or it can be final output, like – Print/PDF. http://tc.eserver.org/34240.html http://tc.eserver.org/34240.html Design principles for XML schemas that eliminate redundancies and avoid update anomalies have been studied recently. Several normal forms, generalizing those for relational databases, have been proposed. All of them, however, are based on the assumption of a native XML storage, while in practice most of XML data is stored in relational databases. In this paper we study XML design and normalization for relational storage of XML documents. To be able to relate and compare XML and relational designs, we use an information-theoretic framework that measures information content in relations and documents, with higher values corresponding to lower levels of redundancy. We show that most common relational storage schemes preserve the notion of being well-designed (i.e., anomalies- and redundancy-free). Thus, existing XML normal forms guarantee well-designed relational storages as well. We further show that if this perfect option is not achievable, then a slight restriction on XML constraints guarantees a “second-best” relational design, according to possible values of the information-theoretic measure. We finally consider an edge-based relational representation of XML documents, and show that while it has similar information-theoretic properties with other relational representations, it can behave significantly worse in terms of enforcing integrity constraints. http://tc.eserver.org/34241.html http://tc.eserver.org/34241.html XML Schema’s abstract data model consists of components, which are the structures that eventually define a schema as a whole. XML Schema’s XML syntax, on the other hand, is not a direct representation of the schema components, and it proves to be surprisingly hard to derive a schema’s components from the XML syntax. The Schema Component XML Syntax (SCX) is a representation which attempts to map schema components as faithfully as possible to XML structures. SCX serves as the starting point for applications which need access to schema components and want to do so using standardized and widely available XML technologies. http://tc.eserver.org/34242.html http://tc.eserver.org/34242.html Since conventional historical records have been written assuming human readers, they are not well-suited for computers to collect and process automatically. If computers could understand descriptions in historical records and process them automatically, it would be easy to analyze them from different perspectives. In this paper, we review a number of existing frameworks used to describe historical events, and make a comparative assessment of these frameworks interms of usability, based on 'deep cases' of Fillmore ’score grammar. Based on this assessment, we propose a new description framework, and have created a microformat vocabulary set suitable for that framework. http://tc.eserver.org/34243.html http://tc.eserver.org/34243.html In this paper, we consider a way to represent contact center applications as a set of multiple XML documents written in different markups including VoiceXML and CCXML. Applications can comprise a dialog with IVR, call routing and agent scripting functionalities. We also consider ways how such applications can be executed in run-time contact center environment. http://tc.eserver.org/34244.html http://tc.eserver.org/34244.html XML Schema documents are defined using an XML syntax, which means that the idea of generating schema documentation through standard XML technologies is intriguing. We present X2Doc, a framework for generating schema-documentation solely through XSLT. The framework uses SCX, an XML syntax for XML Schema components, as intermediate format and produces XML-based output formats. Using a modular set of XSLT stylesheets, X2Doc is highly configurable and carefully crafted towards extensibility. This proves especially useful for composite schemas, where additional schema information like Schematron rules are embedded into XML Schemas. http://tc.eserver.org/34173.html http://tc.eserver.org/34173.html A brief and basic tutorial about the XML-based scripting language. http://tc.eserver.org/34150.html http://tc.eserver.org/34150.html Since adaptation and reuse are core ideas of DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), perhaps we'll be forgiven if we adapt and reuse old Beatles standards to explain the newest XML standards (hey, maybe it's the only way to make XML sound catchy). DITA is an IBM gift to the technical documentation community that was approved as a standard this spring by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the hosts for many XML interchange standards such as ebXML. Ever since, tech writers have been buzzing about an easier way to get into structured topic-based writing with DITA XML and asking XML Editor vendors to add support for DITA. http://tc.eserver.org/34143.html http://tc.eserver.org/34143.html XML feeds, though useful, are boring to look at in a browser because they are simple XML files. It's possible though to make them easier on the eye, and in this article we'll look at two ways of doing that. First, we'll use simple CSS properties to format each XML node, and then we'll use a little more complex but much more powerful XSL transformation. http://tc.eserver.org/34070.html http://tc.eserver.org/34070.html While the concepts of structured authoring are more than just slightly useful for technical writing, they can be beneficial for just about any writing task within an organization. But how do you bring XML-based structured authoring to the masses? Perhaps by taking a cue from a word processor called Yeah Write. http://tc.eserver.org/34036.html http://tc.eserver.org/34036.html XML, that is, Extended Markup Language, is the future of technical writing. There are TWO important reasons why that is so: XML is at the heart of “single sourcing” movement; and XML is a documentation manager’s dream since writing once and publishing many times drops unit production costs tremendously. http://tc.eserver.org/34005.html http://tc.eserver.org/34005.html Some browsers have difficulty upon encountering the XML Prolog. In some cases, the browser will render all the markup as text. In other cases, when a browser has some XML support, it might attempt to render the document as an XML tree. To avoid these problems, many practicing web professionals prefer to leave the prolog off. This table will help you make that decision by showing you which browsers have known problems with the XML prolog. http://tc.eserver.org/33974.html http://tc.eserver.org/33974.html The transition in a markup-based publishing environment from SGML- to XML-based tools and procedures can sometimes be complex. This session details Cessna Aircraft Company's implementation as it moves from an SGML environment to an XML enviroment. http://tc.eserver.org/33975.html http://tc.eserver.org/33975.html The Mozilla platform offers a rich support of XML techniques, from low level ones (XPath, RDF, DOM, e4x) to rendering dialects like XHTML, SVG, XUL and XForms, thus making this platform a natural choice for the XML inclined. It is becoming a platform of choice when developing rich connected applications. When building dynamic applications, the developer is often facing a common set of programming patterns : gathering data from various remote and local sources, storing data with an optional transformation phase, and updating parts of the GUI to reflect the modifications in the data store. With today's ubiquitous use of XML as a data exchange syntax, a major part of these tasks can be achieved with XML based solutions. In this article we will present an XML centric solution that aims at minimizing the impedance mismatch between different data models that plagues classical architectures involving for instance XML/object/relationnal translation. It combines some of Mozilla's existing capabilities with REX (Remote Events for XML) and a native XML database with XQuery support. REX provides means to update the XUL based GUI and the database, while the XML database is used as a versatile storage engine. http://tc.eserver.org/33976.html http://tc.eserver.org/33976.html XQuery is a language that operates on XML in its native data model, using the type system of XML Schema. By the time of the XML 2006 conference, XQuery Version 1.0 will probably be adopted as a W3C Recommendation. Like SQL, XQuery is declarative and functional, which makes it well-suited for automatic optimization. XQuery Version 1.0 is designed for querying and transforming XML data, and W3C has published a working draft of an XQuery extension for updating XML data. With an additional small extension, XQuery could be turned into a native application development language for XML, eliminating the impedance mismatch problem. An earlier paper briefly outlined such an extension, called XQueryP. This paper expands on the XQueryP proposal, adding more details, additional features such as error handling, and some use cases that illustrate the use of the extended language in various different environments. http://tc.eserver.org/33977.html http://tc.eserver.org/33977.html There is an obvious need to understand the current adoption and the current usage of XML Schema by the IT industry. That is, XML standardization bodies, XML tool providers, and IT decision makers need to know about the current position of XML Schema on the 'adoption curve'; they would like to know who is using XML Schema, what it is used for, and how users reflect on their usage. All sorts of more detailed questions arise: Is XML Schema usage observably increasing? Who is authoring schemas? (Developers? DBA's? Analysts? Who else?) Who is consuming schemas? What tools are used to author and consume schemas? What other meta-data languages are used in the same corporation? The study at hand covered these and some more questions. The goal was to gather broad information on XML Schema adoption and usage, leaving room for studies that dive into more detailed subtopics. There were 2,000 solicited participants of the study with 59 completed responses. The presentation (paper) does not just present the results of the study, but also motivates the study, describes its design, and draws some conclusions. This study has been carried out in collaboration with the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. http://tc.eserver.org/33978.html http://tc.eserver.org/33978.html Three panellists talk about the challenges of managing an XML publishing and documentation project. After brief introductory remarks from each speaker, there will be a general discussion with the audience about the challenges of XML project management in the publishing world. http://tc.eserver.org/33980.html http://tc.eserver.org/33980.html The rules for finding schema components when validating a document using W3C's XML Schema 1.0 are widely misunderstood. This presentation will the rules for constructing a schema and describe the reasoning behind the design. http://tc.eserver.org/33981.html http://tc.eserver.org/33981.html The OpenDocument Format ("ODF") shows promise for bringing the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to the common desktop PC of the future as the native file format for office documents in the next-generation office suites including OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice, Workplace, Writely and others. An ODF Plugin for MS Office -- currently under development by the OpenDocument Foundation -- can deliver this promise to the 450 million legacy Windows desktop PCs already in place. Sam Hiser, an officer of the OpenDocument Foundation, will discuss the origins and design objectives of the Foundation's ODF Plugin. He will also discuss the strategic goals of the Foundation's ODF Plugin while showing how the Plugin effort is already influencing the development of the ODF standard itself at OASIS. An audience of general business people and software developers will leave Hiser's presentation with a clear understanding of the ODF Plugin, its context of relevance and development, and how it can alter the landscape for XML. http://tc.eserver.org/33982.html http://tc.eserver.org/33982.html In this session, the author discusses best practices, common patterns and pitfalls in using XSLT as a host language for generating web-based user interfaces expressed in XForms. http://tc.eserver.org/33983.html http://tc.eserver.org/33983.html We will demonstrate how enhancements to the XJ language (http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xj) facilitate the development of Web Service applications. http://tc.eserver.org/33984.html http://tc.eserver.org/33984.html In this session, three panellists and audience members will discuss creating XML documents using two familiar word processors: Microsoft Word and OpenOffice. Paul Bernard will introduce some real-world examples of how publishers are using Microsoft Word in XML workflows, and how Office 2007 and OpenXML will affect those processes. Jon Parsons will discuss XML, Office 2007, and content management for document integration in the middle tier. Lisa Richards will discuss XML authoring in OpenOffice. http://tc.eserver.org/33985.html http://tc.eserver.org/33985.html This session provides an overview of several real-world case studies describing publishers who have implemented an XML-based process with Adobe InDesign, InCopy, and editorial and production management systems, such as K4 and Woodwing. The session also provides best practices for incorporating these products in a production workflow covering activities such as: How to import XML into the Adobe products; How to export XML out of the Adobe products; How to structure templates (styles to tag and tags to styles mapping). http://tc.eserver.org/33986.html http://tc.eserver.org/33986.html Industry standards consortia have defined thousands of exchange formats for business related messages in XML Increasingly, data conforming to industry exchange formats are being stored in files and database systems as XML (as well being mapped to relational data). This talk describes what happens when the exchange formats and the storage formats become one. Business applications can be built in new ways that can reduce development costs and more readily accommodate evolving business requirements. The use of generic tools rather than bespoke software becomes more attractive. The criteria for managing XML schemas and for XML schema evolution change. The talk will outline trends arising from the unification of storage formats and exchange formats. It will incorporate a case study to illustrate the main points. http://tc.eserver.org/33987.html http://tc.eserver.org/33987.html Pipeline processing is a powerful programming technique that can lead to programs that are easier to maintain and enhance and monolithic imperative programs. Developers familiar with the power of pipeline operations central to the UNIX operating system know how simple, modular tools can be chained together to accomplish a wide variety of complex tasks. XSLT pipelines offer the same advantage for XML transformation. Where UNIX pipelines are based around standard input and output of lines of text, XSLT pipelines rely on the structure of well-formed XML between stages. The panel members will demonstrate the value of a pipeline processing approach and discuss implementation specifics. http://tc.eserver.org/33988.html http://tc.eserver.org/33988.html Three panellists talk about how they've applied agile development techniques to XML, followed by audience discussion and Q&A: Tony Coates will discuss XML and schema quality assurance using unit test frameworks. David Carver will discuss agile XML schema development. Claudia Lucia Jimenez-Guarin will discuss software construction for evolving systems with incomplete data definition. http://tc.eserver.org/33989.html http://tc.eserver.org/33989.html The "Unleashing the power of XML" presentation provides insight, from 20 years personal experience in the publishing industry, on the value of good markup and the challenges of migrating from SGML to XML based systems. We will review the results of an informal survey of the publishing industry that focuses on how XML is (and is not) being leveraged and the rationale behind these decisions. Finally, we will discuss a 'new' technology that has the potential to revolutionize the publishing industry as well as highlight some real world applications already leveraging this technology. http://tc.eserver.org/33991.html http://tc.eserver.org/33991.html Panellists talk about two vendor-neutral programming interfaces for content-management systems. Joel Amoussou discusses JSR 170, a vendor-neutral Java API designed to work across many different content management systems. Michael Wechner discusses Neutron, an Open Content Management User Interface based on XML. http://tc.eserver.org/33992.html http://tc.eserver.org/33992.html Many governments are moving to using XML for drafting and publishing legislation. SAIC has worked with a number of jurisdictions to facilitate the automation of legislative drafting and publication processes using XML. http://tc.eserver.org/33993.html http://tc.eserver.org/33993.html From initial data modeling, to technical XML Schema design and critical programmatic realization, we have an actionable, real-world set of comprehensive recommendations that can help you formulate a successful XML implementation. http://tc.eserver.org/33995.html http://tc.eserver.org/33995.html LexisNexis, global provider of legal, news, and business information, has migrated the content of its non-US business units to a single product delivery platform. This paper provides an overview of how this was enabled using XML. http://tc.eserver.org/33895.html http://tc.eserver.org/33895.html One of the tenets of modern software design is that early and frequent testing is a key contributor to successful application development. Unit testing frameworks, tools designed to ease the development and execution of unit tests, exist for many programming languages. This paper discusses how unit testing can be applied to the development of stylesheets and describes a testing framework for XSLT 2.0 unit tests. http://tc.eserver.org/33896.html http://tc.eserver.org/33896.html Wide deployment of XML technology in enterprise applications demands high performance XML processing framework. This results in extensive investigation on building an XML processing infrastructure leveraging a compact, pre-parsed XML format, which could save in the memory and CPU consumption as well as the network bandwidth. In this paper, we will discuss the project building a compact schema-aware binary XML processing framework and compare it with the existing binary XML technologies. The discussion will cover the design of the compact binary XML format, the implementation for the compact binary XML processors, which encode and decode the XML documents, and how the compact binary XML support is integrated with the existing XML processing stack. At the end, we will provide the result testing applications leveraging the compact binary XML processing framework. http://tc.eserver.org/33897.html http://tc.eserver.org/33897.html This paper proposes a general synchronization grammar which can describe synchronization rule sets. For example, when handling three input files, we show that changes to elements can be described in terms of just seven possible permutations. Similarly, PCDATA and attribute changes can be described in terms of a fixed set of permutations. Using these permutations a grammar is proposed, allowing precise description of synchronization algorithms and rule sets and providing a testable framework for their implementation. The paper applies the resulting grammar to existing synchronization tools and technologies and shows how the grammar can be applied to provide solutions for specific application areas, including document workflow and translation. http://tc.eserver.org/33898.html http://tc.eserver.org/33898.html It is unclear how adoption of Web services contracting systems based on XML standards will affect the frequency of litigated contract disputes among businesses. During the more than 20 years that business-to-business EDI contracting systems have been in use, there have been no reported cases of litigated contract disputes involving EDI contracts. By contrast, there have been many litigated disputes involving business-to-consumer contracts formed through the use of clickwrap and browsewrap Internet interfaces that have been in use for only a decade. B2B EDI contracts are usually formed between businesses that are already in a long-term trading partner relationship, and the high initial investment required to use EDI may provide additional incentives to resolve disputes informally. Businesses without long-term relationships should be able to use B2B XML contract technologies, and the absence of a relationship of trust may make it more difficult to resolve disputes informally when they arise. B2B XML contracts should still have a lower rate of litigation than B2C Internet contracts, however, because most businesses prefer arbitration to litigation. http://tc.eserver.org/33899.html http://tc.eserver.org/33899.html The pharmaceutical industry has been slow to adopt XML until recently. Initiatives in the US and EU, as well as other jurisdictions, have begun that use XML to define important documentation formats as part of the drug product life cycle. In the US the FDA is mandating that drug product descriptions called "labels" be submitted in an XML format called the Standard Product Label (SPL) language by the end of 2005 and similar mandates are being made in the EU and other regions. Since most pharmaceutical companies are international, companies are scrambling to figure out the best method for managing their data in order to meet all of meeting these specific requirements. Also, drug label information will become an important component in the broader set of medical records and prescription standards that are being developed concurrently. This session will describe the roles and status of these standards, initiatives for adoption in the US and the EU, and provide some ideas on strategies for managing data within this complex set of requirements. http://tc.eserver.org/33900.html http://tc.eserver.org/33900.html Existing XML processing models are pipelines, controlled by pipeline descriptions which resemble shell scripts. Functional XML allows XML documents to specify their own processing explicitly, without losing the generality of the pipeline script approach. http://tc.eserver.org/33901.html http://tc.eserver.org/33901.html Management is an essential for any organization planning to make production use of SOA. Even at the outset of a Web services project, success hinges on defining, tracking and controlling appropriate service levels. When implementing Web services, organizations need to review and analyze quality-of-service (QoS) metrics in order to plan for growth, minimize risk and justify additional investments. Once in production, loosely coupled systems require heightened security measures and a means for handling unexpected business conditions. In this session, the author will review how two leading financial services organizations built and deployed production-ready SOA systems, and, as a result, significantly reduced development cycles and total cost of ownership. Ed will also discuss the benefits these companies have achieved from implementing their SOA systems, the challenges they overcame and how they plan to extend their SOA systems to realize greater business benefit in the future. http://tc.eserver.org/33902.html http://tc.eserver.org/33902.html XML schema analysis aims to extract quantitative and qualitative information from actual XML schemas. To this end, XML schemas are measured through systematic algorithms, on the basis of the intrinsic feature model of the XSD language. XML schema analysis is a derivative of software analysis (program analysis) and of software code metrics, in particular. The present article introduces essential concepts of XML schema analysis and applies them to the important problem of understanding XML schema usage in practice. Analyses for feature counts, idiosyncrasy counts, size metrics, complexity metrics, and XML schema styles are executed on a large corpus of real-world XML schemas. http://tc.eserver.org/33903.html http://tc.eserver.org/33903.html Discusses how XML is changing the definition of 'Information Management' and the challenges associated with this change. XML provides endless opportunities when it comes to solving complex data issues companies face today from data integration to implementation of Service Oriented Architectures(SOA). Companies that choose to exploit the advantages of XML will undoubtly gain an edge over their competitors but will also be required to solve the challenges around how to best manage and service XML data without compromising data security and integrity. http://tc.eserver.org/33904.html http://tc.eserver.org/33904.html This paper describes the session concept as it relates to middleware systems in general and Web services in particular. Common applications of the session concept are found in distributed object systems, the Web, and messaging middleware systems. The purpose of a session is to allow multiple individual Web Services to enter a relationship by sharing certain common attributes as an externally modeled entity. For example, multiple Web Services executing within the scope of a single authorized/secure session. In the context of Web services, explicit building blocks for session-oriented protocols and services have been proposed in two specifications, WS-Addressing and WS-Context. The distinguishing characteristic of these two proposals is the degree of coupling they introduce between session participants. In this paper we shall compare and contrast the underlying models these specifications present, as they relate to the session concept in Web services. The aim is to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and summarize best-practices and techniques for supporting a scalable Web services architecture. Note, although this paper is not purely research oriented, it does make an important contribution in the area of software practices and experiences for current and future researchers. The authors believe that it is important to ensure that the Web services architecture scales as well as the World Wide Web and as we shall see, the session concept and how it is provided play an integral role in that arena. http://tc.eserver.org/33905.html http://tc.eserver.org/33905.html Advances in word processing technology now enable people to author simple documents in an interface they are familiar with. They no longer need to know a lot about markup, the schema in use, or be distracted by other concerns than writing what they want to write. This simpler interface, built upon a Microsoft "Smart Doc" solution provides support for authors who are focused on the content they are writing rather than the markup that describes it. At the same time, the author is producing valid XML that can be routed for review and approval, used for multi-channel delivery, or reused by other authors in the enterprise. Several scenarios of how such an authoring/management system could be used to solve business challenges are described. http://tc.eserver.org/33906.html http://tc.eserver.org/33906.html Serving XML is a markup language for expressing XML pipelines, and an extendible Java framework for defining the elements of the language. It provides a markup language for expressing flat-XML, XML-flat, flat-flat, and XML-XML transformations in pipelines. This article provides a brief introduction to the vocabulary of this language, and some examples of its flat-XML capabilities. http://tc.eserver.org/33907.html http://tc.eserver.org/33907.html This presentation explores how recent advances in user interfaces have blurred the once clear distinction between structured and unstructured data. It examines how these tools can be used to empower a new class of user to participate in an XML workflow and a managed content environment. http://tc.eserver.org/33908.html http://tc.eserver.org/33908.html This session will provide a technical description of the new Microsoft Office Open XML formats that will become the default XML based formats of the coming version of Microsoft Office (Office 12). The Microsoft Office XML formats provides a great Open and standard-based XML format for Office Documents that enables new XML document scenarios that were not possible before. http://tc.eserver.org/33877.html http://tc.eserver.org/33877.html While looking over the slides for the Tools of Change presentation, I came across this fun presentation(PDF) by Bill Kasdorf to explain different versions of XML for publishing. The graphics are under the fold. http://tc.eserver.org/33843.html http://tc.eserver.org/33843.html The first phase of RosettaNet innovation and deployment was fuelled by the early challenges of achieving standards-based interoperability and making B2B integration work over the Internet. In the second phase, RosettaNet is working to reduce the cost of multi-enterprise collaboration to increase the depth of collaboration and to encourage small- and medium-sized enterprises to participate and thereby increase the breadth of multi-enterprise collaboration. This paper focuses on the XML-based technologies and methodologies that RosettaNet is using to address the principal challenges of the second phase, and shares some insights that may be useful for those facing the challenge of creating standards for information exchange within an enterprise or between enterprises. http://tc.eserver.org/33844.html http://tc.eserver.org/33844.html Yahoo Search Marketing makes extensive use of XML internally, for data exchange and APIs between back-end systems, and externally, as the primary interaction mechanism with third parties via REST and SOAP APIs. http://tc.eserver.org/33847.html http://tc.eserver.org/33847.html Enterprise metadata appears in many languages and formats. XML provides a standard and consistent language for metadata, simplifying both interchange and parsing. But simply storing metadata as an XML file (be it XSD, BPEL, WSDL, J2EE EJB descriptors files, or any of dozens of proprietary formats) does not automatically and formally capture the full richness of the given metadata language. Even if XSDs are used to constrain syntax, they cannot define all possible structures and relationships, nor can they express the meaning of metadata in its business context. http://tc.eserver.org/33822.html http://tc.eserver.org/33822.html Recent trends in XML content authoring demonstrate increasing shift towards advanced reuse patterns and multi-source compound document architectures. This imposes completely new requirements for the XML authoring tools, most of which were originally developed for narrative document authoring and architectures like Docbook or TEI. The key requirement is the ability to provide a single, transparent, directly editable view for such complex documents. http://tc.eserver.org/33823.html http://tc.eserver.org/33823.html As companies and consumers rely more on Web services, it becomes increasingly important for Web services developers to know how to properly design, develop, deploy, and ultimately manage a Web services system. However, because of the inherent complexities that can arise with a Web service implementation, it can be difficult to grasp practical fundamentals and devise a step-by-step plan for Web services development. http://tc.eserver.org/33824.html http://tc.eserver.org/33824.html This paper will explain how XSL-FO, XSLT, XForms and UBL can be used together (and how the implementation in Scriptura XBOS is done). Each technology contributes its own strengts to the total solution. XSL-FO for page oriented layout with a visual fidelity, XForms for advanced and flexible forms, and UBL to represent the business data. Together they allow to create UBL documents such as invoices in a very powerful and flexible way, all with open standards. http://tc.eserver.org/33825.html http://tc.eserver.org/33825.html By taking advantage of open source products, and by stretching the definition of location, we were able to program xml and SVG tools to perform many of the functions of a standard geographic information system (GIS). Additionally, we were able to develop prototypes of document management, content management and knowledge visualization tools that are not easily available through standard GIS tools. http://tc.eserver.org/33826.html http://tc.eserver.org/33826.html The XSL stylesheets used at PubMed Central for data conversion present a particular challenge because documentation is needed not only for the reference of developers, but also for digital archivists to ensure that the conversion process conforms to accepted archiving standards. The choices that developers make in writing conversion filters need to be transparent and reviewable. To meet this need, we defined a format for inserting documentation into XSL stylesheets. The documentation had to be easy to maintain and needed to be capable of generating documentation for developers, archivists, and other stakeholders. http://tc.eserver.org/33827.html http://tc.eserver.org/33827.html The discussion will share advancements in the areas of digital capture, storage, management, access and output. It will review the significant benefits and cultural implications with the digitization of information, focusing on software and storage solutions creating easy access and search capability for scanned information. A demonstration and review of the automatic bookscanning process relating to the use of XML will share how modifications can be made to a pre-existing XML file. http://tc.eserver.org/33828.html http://tc.eserver.org/33828.html Based on a broad survey of native XML database companies, this presentation describes how native XML databases are being used in the real world, including descriptions of why native XML databases succeeded and relational and other technologies failed. http://tc.eserver.org/33829.html http://tc.eserver.org/33829.html This paper describes a platform for the XML definition of secure, intelligent web-based applications. XForms provides a powerful model-view-controller (MVC) pattern that may best be described as a cause-and-effect XML processing model originated by XFDL. This paper describes a new version of XFDL that consumes, or skins, XForms. Hence, this paper presents the first integration of the standardized XML markup for expressing the core processing of a web-based form applications (XForms) with a host language (XFDL) that offers security, precision presentation, a document-centric capability, and other features that contribute to a more rich user experience. http://tc.eserver.org/33830.html http://tc.eserver.org/33830.html Since 2005 the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) is established as a DOI registration agency for scientific content. Data providers transmit XML-files containing the DC-based metadata descriptions of the scientific data to a webservice infrastructure at the TIB, which was created by the Research center L3S during a project founded by the registration agency for scientific content. Data providers transmit XML-files containing the DC-based metadata descriptions of the scientific data to a webservice infrastructure at the TIB, which was created by the Research center L3S during a project founded by the German research association (DFG). This webservice infrastructure is based on the web application framework COCOON. We have however extended COCOON with full webservice functionalities. Using XSLT the webservice is furthermore able to transform XML-metadata files into well-formed PICA-files to insert the metadata information into the library catalogue of the TIB. http://tc.eserver.org/33831.html http://tc.eserver.org/33831.html During the past twenty years, a huge number of custom languages - at least hundreds, perhaps a couple of thousand - have been attempted. Almost all have been miserable failures. That is to say, the vast majority have failed to achieve wide adoption, and those that were adopted have often failed to achieve their goals, whether of reducing costs, enriching applications, or both. http://tc.eserver.org/33832.html http://tc.eserver.org/33832.html This paper is based from a number of real-world XML validation projects, and compares and contrasts the experience 'in the trenches' with the current state of the art in XML validation standards. Validation is a topic of some controversy in the XML community. While there has been movement from the basic validation offered by XML 1.0 DTD's, there is little consensus on whether that movement has been in the right direction. http://tc.eserver.org/33833.html http://tc.eserver.org/33833.html Since February 1st 2005, millions of invoices have been exchanged between the private sector and the public sector in Denmark. This paper focuses on real life problems, experiences and solutions with syntactical and semantical validation of millions of electronic invoices. Localization and documentation for regional and national use is a massive and important assignment. I.e. decisions on the use of identifiers have to be specified and local payment methods must be mapped to the international standard. The result is a message with many internal integrity constraints that cannot be validated with the UBL schemas alone. In order to provide even stronger validation, non-normative supplementary schemas have been developed. These schemas perform stronger validation based on decisions about the use of national identifiers for companies and persons. In addition to the use of XML schema – Schematron is used for the validation of internal referential integrity constraints. Experiences and theoretical considerations on the localization of international vocabularies are discussed. http://tc.eserver.org/33834.html http://tc.eserver.org/33834.html One would think that with the magnitude of XML-based tools into the marketplace it would be easier to justify authoring and storing documents directly in XML. By now most managers have been exposed to the benefits of creating XML content management systems according to some agreed upon set of documentation rules. However, understanding the benefits of this technical approach and being able to justify the expense of implementing it are two different things. Many XML developers are not able to articulate the long-term advantages of converting corporate data repositories to XML in order to build a suitable business case to get such a project off the ground. This session will help business managers articulate the long-term advantages of converting corporate data repositories to XML in order to build a suitable business case to get such projects off the ground by outlining the many cost savings and revenue generation opportunities created by managing enterprise data directly in XML.This session will help business managers articulate the long-term advantages of converting corporate data repositories to XML in order to build a suitable business case to get such projects off the ground by outlining the many cost savings and revenue generation opportunities created by managing enterprise data directly in XML. http://tc.eserver.org/33835.html http://tc.eserver.org/33835.html As world events and business opportunities collide, the requirements for interoperable document formats become increasingly evident. Mandating XML for systems is a first step, but real information can't be shared effectively without a common understanding on the semantics and usage of the markup. One solution is to use agreed-on custom schemas. Another is to cite well-standardized formats such as XHTML, or deploy more specific XML formats such as Microsoft Office XML or the OpenDocument Format. None of these latter formats were written with a particular semantic usage in mind. They are of more general applicability than custom-built schemas, can be used for human-readable documents, and can be built into specific tools. http://tc.eserver.org/33836.html http://tc.eserver.org/33836.html The emerging XML based web increasingly relies upon ways of presenting content in a just in time manner. Presentation technologies such as SVG and XHTML can do so, yet the power to properly harness them will likely lie in the emergent binding languages such as XBL, sXBL, and XTF. In this presentation, bindings and binding languages will be explored, illustrating how such environments as the Mozilla Firefox 1.5 browser are using XBL as a means for performing component binding into XHTML, SVG and XForms interfaces, looks at sXBL and the W3C's XBL directions, and details why such binding languages likely represent the future of XML presentation and interaction. http://tc.eserver.org/33837.html http://tc.eserver.org/33837.html In 1998 the industry got behind a common vision of interoperability for systems and data using XML. The web (HTTP/HTML) connected millions of users to each other as well by presenting information they needed - both at work and from home. The next logical step is to connect systems together and break down the stove pipes of information and business logic that exist to unleash an entirely new wave of productivity gains. In this talk I will trace the march of computing that has led to incredible productivity gains over several decades; draw parallels to the invention of electrical generation facilities and the subsequent building of the electric grid that provided power for all to harness and call out the challenges that still lie ahead of us. http://tc.eserver.org/33838.html http://tc.eserver.org/33838.html There has been much debate over two quite different approaches to implementing XML services. The "web services" approach leverages a rather large and not yet stabilized stack of formats and protocols built on top of SOAP that promise secure, reliable operations; the "REST" or "Plain old XML over HTTP" approach keeps the basic formats and operations quite simple, but puts the burden for any security or end-to-end reliability on the application developer rather than the computing infrastructure. This presentation considers a third approach which complements many of the ideas in both WS and REST but uses an XML-capable DBMS as the messaging hub or service broker. This makes it feasible to support asynchronous, loosely coupled communications between service requesters and providers. http://tc.eserver.org/33839.html http://tc.eserver.org/33839.html Data are the essence of business processes and technical applications, and managing data effectively is critical for success in any industry. To that end, XML has emerged as the dominant syntax for data management. The fundamental organizing principle of XML is hierarchy. Parent-child relationships among data are maintained to infinite depth through markup. Hierarchies also serve as a critical component of XML’s validation capability. An XML Schema document defines the rules for structuring data within an XML instance by describing a finite set of hierarchy sequences and an explicit set of sequences of elements within them. Hierarchy, therefore, is the underlying principle of data management in XML. http://tc.eserver.org/33841.html http://tc.eserver.org/33841.html A recent survey of XML implementations found that many United States Air Force (USAF) communities are incorporating XML as a foundational step in their migration to a net-centric vision. Although the survey was limited to publicly available resources –and thus only a partial view of total USAF efforts – thoughtful analysis of the survey results nonetheless reveals both strengths and weaknesses in the approaches inspected. In this paper we summarize the survey results and what they imply for how the USAF is progressing towards net-centricity. We note potential positive impacts XML technologies could have on USAF business practices, and some potential shortfalls. http://tc.eserver.org/33815.html http://tc.eserver.org/33815.html Designers of XML formats have to face the problem of how to design their formats to be extensible and yet be resilient to changes due revisions of the format. This presentation covers various techniques and considerations for versioning XML formats. http://tc.eserver.org/33816.html http://tc.eserver.org/33816.html XML is becoming the de facto business document interchange language for the Internet. Technologies such as SOAP and EBXML have been developed within the XML framework. Digital security standards and techniques are now being applied to XML, and to 'business webs' built using XML and Web Services. This presentation discusses these initiatives and the issues being encountered when applying security principles of confidentiality and non-repudiation to XML. Drawing on practical experience in Vordel projects, this presentation looks at how Web Services can be applied in the Financial Services industry to provide for improved secure partner and customer integration for the delivery of products and services.