Category: Collective Web

XMLifying my site, Take 3. I am pleased to announce the next breed of XML-feeds from the Slashdemocracy universe: A new XML-feed from Slashdemocracy Forum is now available.

I came up with a mod to GT Forum, and submitted it to the developers forum, where someone had asked for such a mod. It turns out that he had found a solution himself, and suggests some more advanced code than I can provide, so I may try that out sometime. But for now, I will say “mission accomplished” in regard to xmlifying the forum.

It must have been a busy week at The World Wide Web Consortium, and I have set my feed reader to be especially attentive to their news feed, because there is a continuous stream of important news there.

I’ll run through those news I consider the most important:

IPR: Royalty-Free Patent Policy Last Call Published. The Patent Policy Working Group has released the Royalty-Free Patent Policy as a Last Call Working Draft. The draft governs the handling of patents in the process of producing and implementing W3C Recommendations (press release; patent policy home page). Thanks guys. This is good news, I think (coverage: Wired, The Register.) Over at Slashdot, David Wheeler yesterday wrote:
“Yes – please, tell the W3C you support their new royalty-free policy for W3C standards. Send email with your “attaboy” message to: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org It’s not done, this is still a draft.” By all means, follow David’s advice! Securing one of the meanings of “Free” (beer) is important, and the W3C policy is an important (first) step here for the web standards. But Free as in freedom is the hard one, and the policy is not really helping us a lot here.

Architecture: The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) has released an updated Working Draft, Architecture of the World Wide Web. The Web Services Architecture Working Group also released the first public Working Draft of Web Services Architecture, WSA, as well as an.updated Web Services Architecture Requirements and Web Services Glossary. WSA is a “blessing” of SOAP and WSDL, but has a generic definition: A Web service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by internet protocols.. TAG writes:

“Our definition of the term “Web services” does not presuppose the use of SOAP as a packaging format or a processing model. Nor does it presuppose the use of WSDL as a service description language. There are, and will be in the future, plenty of Web services that use raw HTTP as a data transfer protocol and some mutually agreed-upon XML format as the message content. The Web Services *reference architecture* does, however, assume that the higher levels of the Web services protocol stack are built on the foundation of SOAP and WSDL.
This “blessing” of SOAP and WSDL is not logically necessary, since some other mechanism could be defined to gather XML message components into a single package, and other description mechanisms such as DAML-S could be used instead of WSDL. Perhaps in the long run, other technologies will supplant SOAP and WSDL, and it is not the intent of the WSA to discourage research and experimentation in these areas. On the other hand, the WSA WG believes that a common foundation is a *practical* necessity for the industry to move forward with additional Web services functionality, including security, choreography, etc. The WSA reference architecture builds on SOAP and WSDL as the basis for messaging and description. Specifications that conform to the WSA reference architecture MUST use SOAP and WSDL when appropriate.”

What are they saying here? I am yet to dig deeper into the documents, but from what I can see, it looks quite sensible. I slowly getting used to SOAP, and agree with the TAG that we do need to move forward. If SOAP and WSDL are made fully compliant to the IPR-policy, and if the industry can deliver better and cheaper systems using them, well, then let’s make a move forward with these two standards then. I’m not sure I like the MUST above …

Metdata: RDF/XML Syntax Specification Update. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a general-purpose language for representing information in the Web (a metadata language).The RDF Core Working Group has released a Working Draft of RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised). The document updates the RDF Model and Syntax Specification in terms of XML, XML Namespaces, the XML Information Set with new support for XML Base. The Working Group has also released updated Working Drafts of the RDF Primer, RDF Test Cases, RDF Semantics, and RDF Concepts and Abstract Syntax. The primer is a good starting point, and will become an important document once it has been consolidated a bit more. RDF is famous for being very complicated, even for the new breed of “XML coders”, and the syntax update is long overdue. There’s lots of politics involved here, of course. Follow the debates on BurningBird.

Forms: XForms Becomes a W3C Candidate Recommendation.W3C announced advancement of XForms 1.0 to Candidate Recommendation. More flexible than previous HTML and XHTML form technologies, the new generation of Web forms separates purpose, presentation, and data (press release; testimonials; and XForms home page.) Coverage: The Register, XMLHack , CNet.This is important news to government, who loves forms. Is it bad news to anyone? Yes, to Microsoft, who has developed their own XDocs, and whom does not support XForms. Yet?

Graphics: W3C also announced the Proposed Recommendation of SVG 1.1 and SVG Mobile Profiles. SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics, is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML. By also releasing the first working draft of SVG 1.2, W3C  has taken on the battle about graphics on the web, and now with the Mobile Profiles, also the various mobile devices. (CNet).
Flash XML is doomed, it seems.

XMLifying my site, Take 2. Another day, another feed 🙂 XFML is a new xml format for shared, faceted taxonomy of metadata. XFML = eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language.

OK, having all that metadata for my blog is mainly useful as a demonstration. Facetmap, a system for managing faceted hierarchies, offers a useful service for demonstration purooses, see My FacetMap.

Yesterday, and also earlier, I have posted about SOAP and the intellectual property issues around it. This issue is still open: Patent claims a problem for next web services standard. It turns out that Microsofts SOAP-patent is not the issue. There are appearently two other patents out there, belonging to WebMethods and Epicentric (Vignette) related to Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) version 1.2. CNet reports (Firm changes mind on SOAP patent) that Epicentric is now amending their statement via W3C to be royalty free.

Even with this, and even if WebMethods does the same, where do we stand? Someone told me that Tim Berners-Lee recently listed some 30 standards with IPR-issues on W3C’s table.

I wouldn’t be surprised if IBM have some patents in this area too – they are by far the leader in terms of getting patents.
I just found patent 6,471,068, belonging to IBM, that may, or may not, be related to the security issue. But today, in the Register, we can read that IBM will disarm royalties over technologies it owns that are used in Web services standards, but only if other vendors with similar claims on technologies follow suit.

Yesterday, we saw a new OASIS Open Standard coming out: SAML, Security Assertion Markup Language, an XML-based security standard for exchanging authentication and authorization information. There are IPR-issues involved with this too, BTW.

IPR-issues are everywhere. A patent is part of the reason why I cannot have www.gøtze.dk as my domain name. Walid, Inc. owns a patent (awarded January 2001, US Patent No. 6.182.148) on multilingual Internet domain names, which apprearently is causing problems for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), who would have been able to allow a more truly multilingual web to emerge. Now, thanks to Dr Walid’s patent, it may take another 18 years, before I can register gøtze.dk.

Jon Udell talks about The RESTful SOAP meme, and refers to a great article by Mark O’Neill.

Meanwhile, W3C is close to ratifying SOAP 1.2, but is still fighting with intellectual property rights.

How interesting. Phil Windley and I’ve been reading the same book: “Emergence: The Connected Loves of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software” by Steven Johnson. As Phil says, it’s about “how acting on a local scale, on local information produces useful, global patterns”. 

According to Johnson, emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of of relatively simple elements self-organises to form more interlligent, more adaptive higher-level behaviour. Ant hills are one example: no one directs the actions of the ants, they have simple rules for responding to local stimuli and yet, produce highly complex and efficient behavior (such as creating graveyards for dead ants or finding and harvesting food sources in a rather systematic manner), yet, “there are no Five-Year Plans in the any kingdom”.

Johnson’s book is a fascinating tour de force – drawing on a variety of domains, from evolutionary theory, urban studies, neuroscience, cybernetics, to comptuer games and literature. Johnson’s book is almost as good a read as Richard Sennett’s The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities from 1990 (my favorite all-time book, which my PhD was heavily influenced by).

Phil chose this quote from Johnson’s book:

There are manifest purposes to a city—reasons for being that its citizens are usually aware of: they come for the protection of the walled city, or the open trade of the marketplace.  But cities have a latent purpose as well: to function as information storage and retrieval devices.  Cities were creating user-friendly interfaces thousands of years before anyone ever dreamed of digital computers.  Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots.  Cobblers gather near other cobblers, and button makers near other button makers.  Ideas and goods flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don’t die out in rural isolation.  The power unleashed by this data storage is evident in the earliest large-scale human settlements located on the Sumerian coast and in the Indus Valley, which date back to 3500 B.C.  By some accounts, grain cultivation, the plow, the potter’s wheel, the sailboat, the draw loom, copper metallurgy, abstract mathematics, exact astronomical observations, the calendar—all of these inventions appeared within centuries of the original urban populations.  Its possible, even likely, that more isolated groups or individuals had stumbled upon some of those technologies at an earlier date, but they didn’t become part of the collective intelligence of civilization until there were cities to store and transmit them.

There are many other good thoughts in the book, so go order it!

In the deliberations about our national IT architecture (see yesterday‘s post), I have set up “eGovernment as urban planning” as one theme for discussion. One of the proposals we make in our green paper about eGov architecture is that we ought to see government at large as a city, i.e., what Johnson and others would call a superorganism, that is in need of some “architecting” and “urban planning”.

What are the essential patterns of an architecture fit for eGovernment? Thoughts? Please join our deliberations about architecture!

United States Patent 6,457,066 was issued on September 24, 2002. It says that Microsoft Corporation now owns the Simple object access protocol (SOAP).

Dave Winer, in his Scripting News, sounds somewhat surprised about this, and says that that is not the SOAP we use today. “[H]ad Microsoft wanted to patent XML-based SOAP they would have needed to get me on board, and I never gave permission to do that.”

I’m no expert on patents, and I am not sure what conclusions to draw from this patent, but as I see it, a patent is a patent. SOAP is owned by Microsoft. End of story. Base you policy making on this. If you want to promote open standards, don’t promote SOAP, because that is not an open standard.

I’m providing yet another open feed here. It’s a list of all the news feeds I use in my new desktop aggregator, AmphetaDesk. The format is an XML dialect, namely OPML.

You will also now find a new icon:
in the menu, indicating that Amphetadesk users can import my OPML-file directly into their Amphetadesk.

Registering and Discovering RSS Feeds in Microsoft Windows .NET Server UDDI Services by Karsten Januszewski from Microsoft seems interesting. Perhaps .Net can be used for something useful after all …

My new TrackBack Display (example) and the TrackBack form does not make much sense, perhaps, but this is the beginning to something big 🙂

I have installed the new standalone Trackback tool from movabletype.org.

The standalone TrackBack tool serves two purposes: 1) it allows non-Movable Type users to use TrackBack with the tool of their choice, provided they meet the installation requirements; 2) it serves as a reference point to aid developers in implementing TrackBack in their own systems. This tool is a single CGI script that accepts TrackBack pings through HTTP requests, stores the pings locally in the filesystem, and can return a list of pings either in RSS or in a browser-viewable format. It can also be used to send pings to other sites.

It is released under the Artistic License.

TrackBack uses a REST model for its pings in order to ensure that each TrackBack item has a unique URL. Although Trackback is developed for blogs, I think it can be used much more widely. But not least, it can bring blogs and other systems closer together. I wonder which non-blog kind of application first picks up on backtracking?