The next meeting of the XML Users Group will be held on Wednesday,
April 21, 2004 at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at 2000
Florida Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20009-1277. The meeting starts
at 7:00 p.m. and usually last approximately 2 hours. If attending
the meeting by Metro, get off the Dupont Circle stop and walk
north to Florida Avenue...turn right.
There is no cost associated with attending but if you are planning on
attending this meeting, please let us know so that we can give a list to
AGU management. You can register at:
http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/meeting-register.html
April 2004
Ken Sall, Silosmashers
Scalable Vector Graphics
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is W3C's non-proprietary alternative i
to Flash and bitmapped graphics. SVG enables 2-D resolution- and
media-independent graphics in a text-based format — an XML
vocabulary. This permits integration with XHTML, XSLT, XLink,
SMIL, DOM and other W3 specifications.
This introduction to SVG will focus on the basics (i.e., fonts,
graphic shapes, animation, and interactivity) by means of small
demos. The talk will also touch upon recent SVG developments.
Burke Cox, JNetDirect
XML - Enabling Data Evolution
Data Evolution recognizes that software and technology development
is a lot like parenting - there is no goal line to cross - you never
really get to spike the ball and say you're done. Once you think
you've reached the end of a project, a new standard, application,
or business need will come along and cause you to change course.
Web services are doing just that. IT departments have invested a
lot of time in building relational data and now the demand for
web services is forcing technologists to take a second look at
their relational infrastructure. On the surface this looks like a
zero sum game - a full conversion to XML must be necessary to meet
the end-user demands - but this is not the case. There are tools
available that allow the translation from relational data to XML
and vice versa. Large enterprises, including the government, will
not do a full conversion to XML, but in using tools that work
between the relational and XML world, there can be an introduction
of XML into large environments. This session will discuss the
technology and business case behind these translation tools.
May 2004
Debbie Lapeyre, Mulberry Technologies
Jeff Beck, National Institute of Health
NLM's Public Domain DTDs: An Update
In March 2003, National Library of Medicine released into public
domain a DTD suite for journals, books, and textual material, a
journal archival DTD, a journal publishing DTD, and full documentation.
This session will discuss the impact on the publishing community.
June 2004
Tony Byrne, CMS Watch i
A Critical Review of "Enterprise Content Management (ECM)"
"Enterprise" Content Management has emerged as a favorite
buzz-phrase for analysts and software vendors alike. In theory
it holds the alluring promise of connecting, consolidating, and
aligning the disparate information management efforts across a
major enterprise into a simpler and more effective whole.
In practice, ECM means many different things to different
organizations, and early returns from the ECM front suggest
that attempts to implement content management on a truly enterprise
scale have been fraught with great difficulty. In some cases
effective business processes are being sacrificed at the altar of
technical consolidation. In other cases, large enterprise-level
projects are collapsing under their own weight. And in still other
cases, rationalization of vendors and suppliers is forcing
substandard technical solutions on individual business units.
CMSWatch founder Tony Byrne will argue that "ECM" does indeed
hold some promise, and that all industry players can have a critical
role in making ECM a truly useful practice. The two keys to successful
ECM are:
1) successful Enterprise Information Architecture, without
which cross-divisional content sharing and consolidation
are nearly impossible, and
2) successful recognition and application or emerging ECM
design and implementation patterns. Byrne will share
some preliminary thinking on some initial ECM patterns
and invite the XML community to critique and extend
those patterns based on concrete project experiences of
their own.
Ralph Hodgson, TopQuadrant, Inc.
There is a growing Interest in semantic technology. 2004 could
well be a year where this emerging technology moves from the realm
of small pilot projects to serious enterprise adoption. What
justifies this view? Consider first the growing need to reconcile
different vocabularies between new and legacy applications. With
few exceptions enterprises have the challenge of integrating databases,
raising the need for mapping and mediation between different schemas
with different terminologies. Businesses face the challenge of
integrating with new partners and suppliers in an ever increasing
dynamic environment. Mergers, acquisitions, and organizational
restructuring also drive the need for more agility in IT
infrastructure. The future will see enterprises adopting service-
oriented architecture based on web services. When these architectures
extend across distributed systems, efficient dynamic discovery and
correct composition of web services become key capabilities. XML
was not intended to solve these problems.
However, new standards for expressing and interchanging meaning on
the web have now become international standards. In February 2004,
W3C announced that RDFS and OWL (Web Ontology Language) have reached
recommendation status. These XML-based languages allow semantic
differences between database schemas to be resolved through mappings
and inference rules. Several vendors are now offering standard
compliant semantic integration solutions. Early adopters are already
working on projects that will create the semantic interoperability
infrastructure for their companies.
July 2004
Xaware
Currently we need speakers for both the technical and vendor presentation
portion of future meetings. If you would like to give a presentation at
a future meeting, please send e-mail or call Betty Harvey (410) 787-9200.
Share your knowledge and experience with others.
Hope to see you there.
Washington Area XML Users Group Web Site:
http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug
Electronic copies of papers supplied from speakers are
available on-line.
To subscribe to the Washington Area XML Users Group mailing
list, go to http://ecc05.eccnet.com/mailman/listinfo/xmlusers.
DIRECTIONS:
From Connecticut Avenue north of AGU, make a left onto
T Street (1 block before Florida Avenue). Drive one block,
the entrance to Atlantic Garage North should be on your
right.
From Connecticut Avenue of AGU, make your first right after Florida Avenue onto T Street. Drive one block. the
entrance to Atlantic Garage North should be on your right.
From I-66
- Continue east on I-66 to Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge. This
places you on Constitution Avenue.
- Take a left on 18th Street, NW and head north. Continue north to
Connecticut Avenue.
- Turn left (North) on Connecticut Avenue to Florida Avenue.
- Right on Florida Avenue. AGU is 1/2 block on the right at the
corner of 20th & Florida Avenue.
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Betty Harvey | Phone: 410-787-9200 FAX: 9830
Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. |
ha****@eccnet.com | Washington,DC SGML/XML Users Grp
URL: http://www.eccnet.com | http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/
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