XML Working Group
Meeting Notes
March 17, 2004
The meeting was hosted by IBM at its office on K Street in Washington, D.C. Owen Ambur announced that the Department of the Interior has been disconnected from the Internet again by the judge in the Cobell litigation, so he was unable to receive and post some of the presentations in advance of the meeting. On behalf of Brand Niemann, who was participating in the Open Source conference, Owen also noted that the call for presentations for the XML 2004 conference has been issued. http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/2004/call.asp
Rich Thompson of IBM, who chairs the OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets Technical Committee, made a presentation on WSRP via teleconference, assisted by Tadgh Smith, who accessed and displayed the demo site while Rich explained its features. The demo is at http://wsrp.dyndns.org:9081/wps/portal Rich noted that WSRP enables the inclusion of various components in a portal without having to host them all on one platform. Vendors involved in the demo site include IBM, Oracle, BEA, Citrix, and Google. Apache.org is also participating. All of the servers except one are running on J2EE machines. Citrix is running on a .NET computer in the United Kingdom. The servers are widely distributed, with two Apache machines are located in Germany. Citrix is demonstrating a shared application. The Google portlet is hosted on Apache. Owen suggested the WSRP demo is very much in accord with the component-based architecture of the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA).
Joe Chiusano asked about the relationship of WSRP to XML registry services and to JSR-168. http://www.jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr168/ Rich outlined four roles that are relevant in WSRP: 1) end users; 2) consumers, referring to aggregating applications, which might include MS Word, ActiveX, Javascript, etc.; 3) producers, which provide the network interface across which the portlets and portals/applications communicate; and 4) the portlets themselves, rendered in markup language. Responding more specifically to Joe’s question, Rich said WSRP and JSR-168 can be run together. With respect to registry services, he said version 1 of WSRP does not get into discovery, just in the interaction of portlets with portals. In the range of late summer to fall, standard ways of publishing portlets will be announced. Nothing in WSRP precludes Google-type searches but the TC is also aiming to meet the requirements for UDDI and ebXML registry services. Owen suggested it would be interesting to relate WSRP to the citizen-centered content model for FirstGov, and that he could foresee a scenario where GSA might support portlet services to other agencies on a Governmentwide basis through FirstGov.
Scott Hinkelman of IBM’s Austin, Texas, office briefed the group on IBM’s proposed protocol for Business Integration - Information Conformance Statements (BI-ICS). The Austin office focuses primarily on WebSphere testing and architecture and Scott has worked on Web Services client specification. He and the Austin office are concerned with determining which standards IBM may wish to implement and in which of their products to implement them. IBM is involved in a lot of top-down modeling but BI-ICS is an attempt to grow upward from the middleware to the business level.
Scott noted that some specifications for standards run for hundreds of pages, and Owen suggested that perhaps any component that takes more than a certain number of pages to specify may not truly be a “component” but rather a set of components. Common components and industry-specific components lie above BC-ICS in the stack. Scott indicated the TC is cognizant of OMG MDA and UML top-down modeling, but BC-ICS focuses on business interoperability. http://www.omg.org/mda/ & http://www.uml.org/ In short, BC-ICS is an XML vocabulary for statements about the conformance of information with specifications. It is an extensible conformance model. The aim is to free applications from having to dealing with conformance checking. Owen asked if the concept of conformance in BC-ICS includes conformance with security-related concerns, such as those addressed in Security Assurance Markup Language (SAML). Rich suggested that most security concerns are being addressed at the infrastructure level but that BC-ICS is extensible to address any constraints on information conformance.
Rich noted that many XML schemas are being developed as “kitchen sinks” – with a bunch of elements, all of which are optional. BC-ICS allows appropriate constraints to be applied to the elements of such schema. Rich also said IBM’s implementation of BC-ICS is about function, not performance. IBM is publishing the specification and soliciting feedback to see if others believe it has merit and is needed. Owen noted that David Webber has suggested BC-ICS is IBM’s answer to the OASIS Content Assembly Mechanism (CAM), but Rich said BC-ICS is not CAM. He also suggested that CAM is a little heavy weight.
Rich’s presentation is available at http://xml.gov/presentations/ibm/BI-ICS.htm and http://xml.gov/presentations/ibm/BI-ICS.ppt
Craig Tanner of IT Pioneers briefed the group on the Recreation One-Stop data standardization effort. Although an XML schema was initially issued, it did not take into account the needs and desires of State and local agencies. Stepping back to model those requirements brought State and local government collaborators back to the table to agree upon and reissue the schema. The results will be included in the Department of the Interior’s data information model for incorporation in the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) Data and Information Reference Model (DRM). Craig noted that the One-Stop is currently just an inventory of recreational opportunities on public lands and waters but that it will eventually address event notifications as well. Craig’s presentation is available at http://xml.gov/presentations/itpioneers/RecML.htm
and http://xml.gov/presentations/itpioneers/RecML.ppt
Roy Morgan introduced Duane Degler’s presentation on usability issues to be taken into account in designing XML registry services. Owen noted he requested such a presentation because he has not found such services to be particularly usable from his perspective. Duane, who is with IP Gems, emphasized that we need to understand what the user wants to do – and we are not the user. We cannot do so in isolation; users must be engaged in an iterative process to design and implement usable applications and services. User satisfaction does not equal success, because users may like what they see but not understand what they need to do. Likewise, usability is not equivalent to testing; instead user participation in the full life-cycle reduces the need for rework. Usability is closely related to semantics, and one way to approach usability is to consider the life events that are common to many citizens. Scott Hinkelman noted that the insurance industry organization ACORD is working on a life events approach to specifying XML schemas. http://www.acord.org/ Duane displayed the Gov.benefits site as an example of some poor usability features that fail to take the perspective of the user into account. http://www.govbenefits.gov/index.jsp Finally, he noted that some components that are highly usable alone may not be when combined with others. Duane’s presentation is available at http://xml.gov/presentations/ipgems/usability.pdf
Those in physical attendance included:
Owen Ambur, Co-Chair
Lee Ellis, Co-Chair, GSA
Roy Morgan, NIST
Judith Newton, NIST
Joe Chiusano, Booz Allen Hamilton
Duane Degler, IPGems
Jim Disbrow, DOE
Ken Gill, DOJ
Amin Hassam, i411
Renee Lewis, Lockheed Martin/SSA
Bruce Cox, USPTO
Craig Tanner, IT Pioneers
Joab Jackson, Government Computer News
Sol Safran, IRS
Kathleen Morgan, SCS/IRS-Prime
Vicky Niblett, SAIC/NASA
Frank Napoli, LMI
John Weiland, NMIMC/Navy
Tadgh Smith, IBM
Scott Hinkelman, IBM
Participating by teleconference were:
Rich Thompson, IBM
Rex Brooks, OASIS, HumanML & WSRP TCs