March Brings Progress on RDF and XML Key Management

Advances in the Specification and Application of RDF

The RDF Core Working Group was chartered to respond to the need for a number of fixes, clarifications and improvements to the specification of RDF's abstract graph and XML syntax. As part of that work, two RDF-related Working Drafts were released in March 2002.

On March 25,2002, a revised Working Draft of the RDF/XML Syntax Specification with new support for XML Base, the document updates the grammar in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification in terms of the XML Infoset and RDF Model Theory was published. This specification defines an XML syntax for the Resource Description Framework that has been updated in terms of the XML Information Set with new support for XML Base.

On March 21, 2002, the RDF Core Working Group released the first public Working Draft of the RDF Primer. The RDF Primer provides the fundamentals required to use RDF in applications. Resource Description Framework is a general-purpose language for representing information in the Web. It is particularly intended for representing metadata about Web resources, such as the title, author, and modification date of a Web page, the copyright and syndication information about a Web document, the availability schedule for some shared resource, or the description of a Web user's preferences for information delivery. RDF provides a common framework for expressing this information in such a way that it can be exchanged between applications without loss of meaning. Since it is a common framework, application designers can leverage the availability of common RDF parsers and processing tools. Exchanging information between different applications means that the information may be made available to applications other than those for which it was originally created. This Primer is designed to provide the reader the basic fundamentals required to effectively use RDF in their particular applications.

The new RDF Primer is intended to augment the other parts of the RDF specification, to help designers and developers understand the features of RDF and how to implement it. In particular, the Primer is intended to highlight the metadata that RDF can be used to represent, how RDF metadata is created, accessed and processed and provide examples of RDF usage. The RDF Primer is a non-normative document. This means that it does not provide a definitive specification of RDF but simply provides examples and other explanatory material in this document to help readers better understand RDF. Since the Primer does not always provide definitive or fully-complete answers, the reader is referred to the relevant normative parts of the RDF specification, itself.

XML Key Management

This March, the XKMS Working Group published three first Working Drafts:

The XML Key Management Specification (XKMS 2.0) specifies protocols for distributing and registering public keys for use with XML Signature and XML Encryption. The specification is made up of two parts -- the XML Key Information Service Specification (X-KISS) and the XML Key Registration Service Specification (X-KRSS).
XML Key Management (2.0) Requirements specifies design principles and scope.
X-BULK allows bulk registration necessary for systems such as smart card management.

XKMS protocols are defined in terms of structures expressed in the XML Schema Language and are intended to employ the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) v1.1 [SOAP] and relationships among messages defined by the Web Services Definition Language v1.0 [WSDL]. Expression of XKMS in other compatible object encoding schemes is also possible.