Kingsley Idehen's Blog Data Space

By Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com

The World Wide Web consortium, the standards body in charge of developing XML, said Tuesday that it has issued three recommendations designed to make handling XML-formatted data more efficient. The specifications have the backing of large industry software providers, including IBM, Microsoft and BEA Systems, which provide the software infrastructure to build and run XML data and Web services applications.

The W3C and vendors are looking at a variety of methods of speeding up the performance of XML, which can be slow for certain applications.

By Jeremy J. Carroll, MultiLingual Computing and Technology

The author gives a brief introduction to the Semantic Web and describes difficulties -- and occasionally solutions -- related to building multilingual Semantic Web sites and applications. The initial drivers for the Semantic Web came from metadata about web pages. Who wrote it?

When? Who owns the copyright? And so on. Conveying such metadata requires agreement about the key terms such as author and date. This agreement has been reached by the Dublin Core community. For example, they have an agreed definition for the term creator, generalizing author for use in metadata records. The Semantic Web does not, however, draw a sharp distinction between metadata about the page and data contained within the page. In both cases, the idea is to provide sufficient structure around the data to turn it into information and to connect the concepts used to express such information with concepts used by others so that this information can become knowledge that can be acted upon.

By Clint Boulton, InternetNews.com

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force

(IETF) have created a new standard and specification to improve the efficiency with which users leverage resources on the Web. The standards address Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) and Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRI), which take users to such resources as documents and Web sites from all over the world, with a few clicks.

The W3C describes URIs as the "glue that holds the Web together." As a replacement to the URI specification released in 1998, RFC 3986, STD 66 Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax is an IETF standard that describes the design, syntax and resolution of URIs. It also addresses security considerations and determines if two URIs are equivalent. While the natural scripts of the world's languages use characters other than A-Z, the new IRI standard expands characters from a subset of US-ASCII to the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646).

This will allow content developers and users to identify resources in their own languages.

By Peter Sefton, XML.org

The author explores some of the ways that OpenOffice.org's Writer application is open to customization and configuration. He coveres a few techniques that will be of interest to template maintainers working with OpenOffice.org writer: how to crack open the file format, how to maintain large sets of styles, and how to customize menus and macros, all without using anything except standard tools, zip, an XSLT processor, and a text editor. All this can, of course, be further automated with a programming language of some kind, even a batch file.

There are some changes coming in version 2 of OpenOffice.org, but all these techniques will be forwards compatible, although some things like the location and name of the menu-bar files look like they will change. If you are also trying to store and manipulate content in XML but want to use a word processing environment for authoring, then well-crafted templates are even more important.