XML.com: The XML Cover Page

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The XML Cover Page

Excerpted from the News Section of the XML Cover Pages, edited by Robin Cover.

W3C Member Submission for Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL) - W3C has published the text of a Member Submission from Creative Commons: "ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language." ccREL builds upon the astronomical success of Creative Commons licenses, which are embeddable machine-readable legal instruments allowing authors to express permissions for others to share, remix, and reuse content. ccREL is a new XML/RDF machine-readable language to express copyright licensing terms and related information.

OASIS/ITU-T Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Receives Support from FEMA and WMO - Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announcements highlight adoption of the XML-based Common Alerting Protocol. CAP defines a format for exchanging all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings over multiple networks. FEMA announced a CAP Profile for the Integrated Public Alert and Warnings System. WMO issued a CFP for a December 2008 CAP Implementers Workshop in Geneva, co-sponsored by OASIS and ITU-T.

Balisage 2008 Conference in Montreal Continues Extreme Markup Tradition - "Balisage 2008: The Markup Conference" continues the popular Montreal series (formerly "Extreme Markup Languages") under a new title "Balisage." Organizers have published the complete program for the main conference (August 12-15, 2008) and for the "International Symposium on Versioning XML Vocabularies and Systems" (August 11). Topics: Semantic Web, ontology design, schema mashups, constraint management, topic maps, annotating overlap, digital libraries...

W3C Publishes Approved TAG Finding on Associating Resources with Namespaces - W3C has published "Associating Resources with Namespaces" as an Approved TAG Finding from the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). The document addresses the question of how ancillary information (schemas, stylesheets, documentation) can be associated with an XML namespace. It offers guidance on how a namespace document can be optimally designed for humans and machines such that information at the namespace URI conforms to web architecture good practice.

Information Card Foundation Formed to Support User-Centric Digital Identity - Equifax, Google, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and Paypal have announced the formation of the Information Card Foundation (ICF) as an independent, not-for-profit organization designed to advance the adoption and use of Information Cards across the Internet. ICF's mission is to advance the use of the Information Card metaphor as a key component of an open, interoperable, royalty-free, user-centric identity layer spanning both the enterprise and the Internet.

New OASIS Standard: XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) v1.2 - OASIS has announced the approval of the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) specification v1.2 as an OASIS Standard. It was produced by the OASIS XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) TC. The purpose of the XLIFF vocabulary is to store localizable data and carry it from one step of the localization process to the other, while allowing interoperability between tools. XLIFF is tool-neutral and supports the entire localization process.

OGC Approves Sensor Web Observations and Measurements Encoding Standard - The Open Geospatial Consortium announced the approval of the Observations and Measurements Encoding V1.0 specification as a final OpenGIS Implementation Standard. The standard defines an abstract model and an XML schema encoding for observations and measurements as part of a framework required for use by other OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards and for support of OGC compliant systems dealing in technical measurements in science and engineering.

Public Draft for HTML 5: A Vocabulary and Associated APIs for HTML and XHTML - W3C announced a First Public Working Draft of "HTML 5: A Vocabulary and Associated APIs for HTML and XHTML" as a major revision of the World Wide Web's core language. HTML 5 is intended to replace HTML4, XHTML 1.x, and DOM2 HTML. New features are introduced for Web application authors; new elements are introduced based on prevailing authoring practices; processing models and clear conformance criteria are defined for user agents to improve interoperability.

W3C Publishes SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language Semantic Web Standard - SPARQL (recursive acronym for "SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language") has been released as a standard by W3C. The three-part specification was produced by the RDF Data Access Working Group as part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity. SPARQL defines a standardized query language for RDF enabling 'joining' of decentralized collections of RDF data. SPARQL queries hide the details of data management to lower costs and increase robustness of Web data integration.

OASIS Members Propose Charter for WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People) TC - OASIS member companies have submitted a charter proposal for a WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People) Technical Committee. Companies sponsoring the proposal include Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems. Building upon the June 2007 two-part industry BPEL4People specification, this TC would define extensions to WS-BPEL 2.0 to enable human interactions, along with a model enabling the definition of human tasks.