IDEAlliance/GCA Standards Update
ABSTRACT
Learn the latest about the exciting and important interoperability standards development work taking place in IDEAlliance, GCA's open, vendor-neutral e-business standards incubator, and how to join the IDEAlliance family.
Table of Contents
1. IDEAlliance projects
IDEAlliance, the International Digital Enterprise Alliance, was established in 1999 as a vendor neutral, non- profit research and development center for vertical and cross industry e-Business standards development. Our mission is to foster the development of interoperability applications and systems by providing comprehensive technical, administrative, promotional, and educational support for working groups engaged in developing open system standards.
IDEAlliance is a logical extension of our parent organization, GCA, whose leadership in introducing computing technologies to the printing and publishing industries is well documented. Subsequently GCA, through our GCA Research Institute became the focal point for EDI and e-Business standards development, which led to the creation of IDEAlliance. IDEAlliance works with a wide range of XML and e-Business users, vendors, and standards bodies to build promote, and propagate the use of leading edge technologies.
These are exciting and challenging times at IDEAlliance. While the economy is in a state of flux, causing a number of members to scale back standards development activities, a number of standards initiatives we have supported since our last report are coming to fruition. These are:
1.1. PRISM
The Publishing Standards for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification defines an XML metadata vocabulary for syndicating, aggregating, post-processing, and multi-purposing magazine, news, catalog, book, and mainstream journal content. The PRISM specification enables interchange and preservation of content and metadata, offers a collection of elements to describe that content and provides a set of controlled vocabularies listing the values of those elements.
The PRISM specification will allow publishers to exchange content over the web using standard communications protocols (such as ICE). Using Prism's rights and permissions vocabulary will facilitate publishers' ability to specify the rights and permissions for a given digital asset, including restrictions on geography and industry and the ways in which a resource can be used. PRISM's keyword search capability allows users to use subject codes that speed up search and retrieval capabilities
Release 1 of the PRISM was announced at the April Seybold conference. At that conference two major vendors announced metadata products that support the PRISM specification. At the time of this writing there are other developments regarding PRISM which we hope to incorporate as late breaking news.
1.2. ICE
Information and Content Exchange (ICE), is a standard protocol for the server to server exchange of digital assets between networked partners and affiliates. Applications that use ICE will enable companies to easily construct syndicated published networks, Web superstores and on-line reseller channels by establishing site to site information networks.
The ICE Working Group recently published the ICE Implementation Cook Book, a compendium of 'recipes' designed to help developers implement the standard. The ICE Cook Book provides a practical, step by step guide to ICE implementation, starting with the minimal working protocol subset, then building on that until a minimal ICE compliant implementation has been achieved. We are glad to report that a number of companies have developed working examples or implementations of ICE. This list includes; Vignette's Syndication Server, Kinecta Interact, Microsoft Biz Talk, Xenosys JICE, Macromedia Aria/Like Minde, Intershop Enfinity, Quark avenue.quark, and ArcadiaOne eSyndication.
The ICE Authoring group has also released IceCubes, an Open Source Java Implementation of the (ICE) Protocol Version 1.1. ICECubes(tm) is a set of java class libraries that implement the ICE 1.1 specification. ICECubes takes on the role of syndicator or subscriber as a matter of policy. In addition, standard APIs (interfaces) are provided to setup and manage collections, subscribers, syndicators, catalogs, offers, negotiation and policies. ICECubes provides an ICE implementation framework that can be extended in a large variety of ways to attack many application specific syndication problems. ICECubes is designed to be highly scalable in performance and the number of subscribers, syndicators, subscriptions, catalogs, and collections it can manage.
1.3. CPExchange
CPExchange is a volunteer organization dedicated to developing an open standard to facilitate the exchange of privacy enabled customer information across enterprise applications. In November, the CPExchange working group released Version 1 of the standard. The CPExchange working group is currently working on the development of and Interoperability demonstration that we hope to unveil in June. This demonstration hopes to illustrate CPExchange capabilities for facilitating customer profile information between business partners, and its support for satisfying consumer privacy needs through its adoption of the P3P standard.
The CPExchange protocol was recently featured as one of the emerging technologies designed to increase the sharing of customer information. At a recent meeting of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the CPExchange standard was identified as being one of the key emerging technologies in this arena. During the discussion we were able to emphasize the point that while CPExchange provides the ability for companies to define and deploy a privacy policy, it was not designed as a policy instrument. Rather by using XML standard language, CPExchange offers the flexibility of uniformly capturing customer information across numerous platforms.
1.4. TopicMaps.org
Topic Maps are documents that describe what an information set is about, by formally declaring topics, and by linking the relevant parts of the information set to the appropriate topics.
Topic Maps work without changing an information set. Unlike today's hyperlink paradigm, where the navigation information is actually contained within the content, Topic Maps separates the content from the navigation, making for much greater meaning, granularity, and flexibility in organizing and searching for information.
This initiative is to develop an XML version of the original ISO standard for Topic Maps. This standard is called XTM, or XML Topic Maps. The group behind this effort, called TopicMaps.org, is a free and open consortium of knowledge management leaders.
Since June, the TopicMaps.org Authoring Group has been working very aggressively to complete the spec and is publicly released version 1.0 at GCA's XML 2000 conference in December.
1.5. ICC
The next IDEAlliance member group I want to discuss, is not a standards group, but is just as important to the standards process.
The Independent Consultants Cooperative (ICC) is a consortium of leading experts in XML, SGML, and related e-business technologies. Many of the ICC members are well-known leaders in the e-business community….. such as Dianne Kennedy, the chair of the XML 2000 conference, Debbie LaPeyre and Tommie Usdin, co-chairs of the Extreme Markup conference, and of course Charles Goldfarb, the father of markup languages.
The ICC members are an essential resource for business, technical, and project management expertise, and are important contributors to many of the IDEAlliance working groups.
1.6. papiNet
In addition to the diverse and essential standards work taking place in these working groups, GCA, IDEAlliance's parent has, for over 15 years, been the e-business standards body for the paper, printing, and publishing industry in North America.
Just last year, GCA and the European Paper Consortium for E-Business, a Brussels-based consortium of European paper companies and their customers, joined forces in what is arguably the most significant e-business initiative ever undertaken in this industry, and clearly a model for other industries to follow.
This initiative, named papiNet, focuses on development of a single, open, international, XML-based set of transaction standards in support of the supply chains for fine, packaging, and publishing papers, as well as pulp and recovered paper products. An international team of printers, publishers, and manufacturers was assembled and in March, released the first version of the papiNet standards to the public.
The next phases of the project are to add standards for additional messages and product groups, as well as to bring Asian and Latin American companies into the process.
The remarkable accomplishments of this team are attributable to the strong vision, sense of collaboration, and commitment to overcome all obstacles shared by all team members and their companies. This group had to overcome differences in culture, language, business practices, and terminology to reach a harmonized solution, and succeeded tremendously.
1.7. Conclusion
The critical standards work that is taking place within IDEAlliance and GCA is bringing enormous benefits to our industries. Our focus on open, neutral, user-driven standards ensures that they will meet broad industry needs and objectives. But our work still continues and we encourage more participation. For more information about how to help shape these efforts, contact Leonard Stewart at lstewart@idealliance.org.