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"The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full."

"The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management."

"Web Services confuse me. I've been trying to wrap my head around the concept for a little while now and, as hard as I've tried, I still don't get it. It's not the technology mind you. I've built a couple of SOAP services that are in production. I like the idea that you and I can speak to each other without getting into long and arduous discussions about endianess, implementation languages and the like.

What I'm having a hard time groking is all the stuff being piled atop what was a very simple and useful concept. Doing so seems to creating the perception that you can build whole systems like this."

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"XSS has been around for a long time, but the current appetite for weblogs opens up new opportunities for attackers.

The idea is simple: a web site allows users to enter content. Somehow, the third party content gets embedded in an HTML page at the server before it is sent out to other users. Lots of sites rely on this principle: Amazon, eBay, Yahoo Groups and, of course, web logs.

What happens if the posted content contains a script? Well, you may have seen what happens: the script gets executed on your machine."

You are Under Attack

"WS-I announces the first Working Group Draft of its Basic Security Profile Security Scenarios. This draft documents Web services security challenges, threats, and countermeasures, and has been released for public review and feedback."

• Retail group KarstadtQuelle is using SeeBeyond's ICAN integration suite
• Core operational systems run as separate applications
• SeeBeyond gateways link them into a J2EE-based messaging infrastructure
• Messaging enforces loose coupling between the core applications
• Smaller, self-contained applications are offered as services

Going halfway to SOA

"In a bid to extend its "adaptive enterprise" services strategy into the mobile arena, Hewlett-Packard is releasing a Web services tool and is hooking up with Ericsson on a mobile telecom platform."

"Instant messaging is alive and well in the workplace. We tested four enterprise IM products, looking at the business-critical elements you should consider"

InfoWorld: Enterprise instant messengers make the grade: February 20, 2004: By Curtis Franklin Jr.,Brian CheeandMike Heck: Applications

Why do I need a Personal E-mail Certificate?
It can be used to:

• digitally sign your e-mail communications so that people know the mail came from you.
• to encrypt your e-mail communications to prevent unauthorized people from reading them.
• Authentication to Web servers - most modern Web browsers allow you to use a Personal Email Certificate to authenticate yourself to a Web server. Certificate-based authentication is much stronger and more secure than password-based authentication.

The Object Management Group (OMG)'s Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) has gained significant mindshare within the IT industry this past year. To recap, the basic theory is that developers will use complex modeling tools to capture platform-independent models (PIMs) that describe the domain requirements and processes. These PIMs will be transformed, via a tool, into platform-specific models (PSMs) that reflect the realities of your environment. These PSMs will in turn be evolved by the modelers and eventually translated, once again with a tool, into your working system. All models are created using the OMG's Unified Modeling Language (UML).

But does this approach really work?

(derived from a text by Scott Ambler in the Software Development Magazine newsletter)

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"Microsoft has shelved plans to bundle its server applications two weeks before the launch of a major overhaul to its BizTalk Server 2004 integration server software.

The software giant is backing away from its strategy to sell its server applications as a suite, called Jupiter, which would have included its BizTalk Server, Content Management Server and Commerce Server products. The company's Jupiter initiative was seen as a direct assault on Java server software companies, which have each created their own server software suites. "

"Google, the most widely used search engine in the U.S. and among English speakers worldwide, has reached a milestone of sorts now that its index of Internet items has surpassed the 6 billion mark, the company announced Tuesday. Google's index had about 4.5 billion items in August 2003, a spokesman said."

Many people believe Microsoft's software is so dangerously pervasive that a virus capable of exploiting even a single flaw in its operating systems could wreak havoc.

TheStar.com - `Monoculture' debate hits Microsoft

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Document Library Migration Tools

"Things change. If we store information about the world this may not be a problem. After all when something changes one of the great values of a computerized record system is that it allows us to easily update a record without resorting to liquid paper or retyping pages of information.

Things get interesting, however, when we need to record the history of the changes. Not just do we want to know the state of the world, we want to know the state of the world six months ago. Even worse we may want to know what two months ago we thought the state of the world six months ago was. These questions lead us into a fascinating ground of temporal patterns, which are all to do with organizing objects that allow us to find answers to these questions easily, without completely tangling up our domain model. Of all the challenges of object modeling, this is both one of the most common and most complicated."

Beating a path from identity to services: but does it justify the purchase? Oblix has observed that customers who buy web services management software already have identity management in place.

Any enterprise that's sophisticated enough in its use of IT to be thinking about managing its web services has probably long since taken steps to get on top of identity management. Having done so, will it then want to use the same vendor for web services management? This is where the flaw lies in Oblix's thinking. If a company is of the type that prefers to get all its software from a single source, then it won't have become a customer of Oblix in the first place. It will have gone to IBM, or Computer Associates, or whichever other vendor already supplies the bulk of its infrastructure management software.

Identity comes first

"In the late 1990s, electronics company Siemens decided it wanted to give its employees one place to shop for indirect goods. That destination, www.Click2Procure.com, went live in 2000, and is supported by Siemens BuySide Marketplace, USA (Siemens BSM). At a high level, Click2Procure is doing fine thanks to supplier acceptance (45 major Siemens suppliers are aboard), plenty of content (1.5 million SKUs), and internal traction (in the form of about 13,000 registered users). Still, every system generates customer services issues, and Click2Procure is no exception. That's why, as the system went live, Siemens BSM contracted with an outsourcer in Dallas to handle telephone calls from Click2Procure users."

"In 2004, many firms will put customer-facing Web services into production. But will those services be successful? We've synthesized the best and worst practices of early adopters into 10 tips that business and information technology managers should follow to avoid common pitfalls and build killer Web services."

As with a J2EE Web Service, a .NET Web Service supports the WSDL 1.1 specification and uses a WSDL document to describe itself. In this case, however, an XML namespace is used within a WSDL document to uniquely identify the Web Service's endpoints.

.NET provides a client-side component that lets an application invoke Web Service operations described by a WSDL document and a server-side component that maps Web Service operations to COM-object method calls as described by a WSDL and a Web Services Meta Language (WSML) file. This file is needed for Microsoft's implementation of SOAP.

.NET vs. J2EE

"Systinet's CTO Adam Blum has been writing in his weblog about a concept he calls the web services bus (or if you prefer, the services infrastructure fabric, or a range of other take-your-pick names). I'm going to call this the services bus-fabric, because I think it's important to stress that it's more than either just a bus or just a fabric."

"The time of the portal is upon us. The adoption curve for portal technology will hit its peak in late 2004. By 2004/05, more than 90 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have a B2E or B2B portal and 60 percent of organizations will select a strategic vendor by 2003.

The interest in portal technology lies not only in the proven return on investment but also in the very nature of the tools themselves. Portals are an evolutionary step in Web-based information systems and according to META Group, organizations without a portal framework by YE03 will be at a competitive disadvantage."

It allows customers to:

• Publish Content Management Server content within SharePoint Portal Server portals
• Publish WSS/SPS document library content to MCMS sites
• Leverage SharePoint Portal Server Search with MCMS sites

The connector is designed for organizations that use or plan to use MCMS 2002 with SharePoint Products and Technologies.

You can download the product (free) from the download page here. You can also find the Readme, Product Help File and the Installation Guide there.

"Service-orientation doesn't replace object-orientation - I don't see the industry (or Microsoft) abandoning objects as the primary metaphor for building individual programs. I do see the industry (and Microsoft) moving away from objects as the primary metaphor for integrating and coordinating multiple programs that are developed, deployed and versioned independently, especially across host boundaries."

The C# Design Process

"The next version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server operating system will include business process orchestration features to allow users to link together Web services, among other tasks, without the need for additional middleware."

"Advice is a dangerous gift. Give some and the best you can hope for is the other guy's natural tendency to ignore it. The next best thing you can hope for is that he never finds out you were motivated by anything but good intentions. That's a lotta' hopin'.

So, with that, here's a little advice.

You should never agree to endorse or demonstrate a vendor's product in exchange for anything%u2014anything. Furthermore, you should never accept the endorsement of another CIO who has.

The reasons are simple: You don't have to, and you shouldn't want to."

"The race to become that first stop is heating up, as Yahoo! recently decided that it will stop contracting Google for its search technology and will compete against it instead. Microsoft is beefing up its own offering, MSN search, while Google plans a splashy initial public offering this spring."

Slashdot | Google v. Microsoft

"A few years ago Toyota did some research and found that the company's average customer age was 48. There was clearly a market being neglected -- the 18 to 24 demographic. After some focus groups and research, Toyota decided to go after this demographic.

The end result is www.scion.com. It's a brand, experience, and customer relationship system built on the twin pillars of online shopping (including configurability that allows users to build and see their own cars, with all options, on the Web) and support (live chat enabled by vendor LivePerson and e-mail supported by eight customer service representatives)."