Microsoft Corp. announced it will take steps to offer the file format technology behind Micosoft Office as an international standard. Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba will co-sponsor a submission to Ecma International, the standards organization, of the Microsoft Office Open XML document format technology. Microsoft will also make available tools to enable old documents to capitalize on the open standard format. These organizations have agreed to work together as part of an open technical committee that Ecma members can join to standardize and fully document the Open XML formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint from the next generation of Office technologies, code-named Office “12,” as an Ecma standard, and to help maintain the evolution of the formats. The group will ask Ecma to submit the results of their collaboration to the International Organization for Standardization for approval. Since its inception in 1961, Ecma International (Ecma) has developed standards for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Consumer Electronics (CE). Publications can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.ecma-international.org
Author: NewsShark (Page 238 of 740)
Antenna House, Inc. announced that XSL Formatter V3.4, their newest XSL-FO processor, is now available. As an option Antenna House is offering with V3.4 the ability to support PANTONE Colors. The PANTONE Option provides the ability for more than 1000 PANTONE Colors to be converted into RGB or CMYK values automatically. V3.3 also offers improvements many new enhancements that have been implemented through FO extensions. These include: 1) PANTONE Colors can now be supported using the new PANTONE Option; 2) show-distination is now effective with Distiller; 3) axf:document-info has been extended and the magnification and the action, etc. when opening PDF can be specified. The document information dialog for this function is also newly added; 4) in SVG is supported; 5) Line Numbering is now able to be output; 6) Extension for European Rule is newly provided; 7) axf:avoid-widow-words is now available to specify so that the last line of the paragraph does not become one word; 8) overflow=”error-if-overflow” is supported; 9) When layout=”auto” is specified for the table, the number of rows can now be controlled by the option setting file.
Ipedo announced the latest version of its EII platform. Ipedo XIP 4.1 incorporates several new product enhancements that focus on improving the user experience in enterprise deployments. Web Services Tables, a dynamic mapping of Web Services to virtual relational tables, allows seamless integration between SQL-based business intelligence applications and XML-based Web Services. The release also features a new management console that improves system manageability, and several additions to Ipedo’s query optimization engine that improve the performance of large and complex queries. Ipedo XIP leverages SQL and XQuery to integrate and manage information from disparate, complex data sources to enable real-time business decisions. A complete set of Ipedo XIP demos is available online. Ipedo XIP 4.1 will be available on December 20, 2005 for Windows 2000, Windows NT, Sun Solaris, Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux. Pricing is on a per-CPU basis. http://www.ipedo.com
Nexidia announced the formation of a media business unit to address audio-video search and content management using Nexidia’s core phonetic search technology. Currently, Nexidia’s technology is used to enable both government and commercial enterprises to leverage untapped information previously locked away in audio files. The growth in rich media content has created a market need to go beyond traditional metadata approaches and unlock the rich information contained in audio and video in order to easily index, search and access this content. http://www.nexidia.com
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced a W3C Feed Validation Service, a free online tool which helps check the syntax of syndication feeds in formats such as RSS and Atom. This service is based on the open source software feedvalidator (the same software running the service at feedvalidator.org). Feedvalidator was written by Sam Ruby, Mark Pilgrim, Joseph Walton, and Phil Ringnalda and is under development over at sourceforge. In addition to the existing features of the feedvalidator, the W3C has made available a SOAP web service for the W3C feed validation service, and hopes that it will be a useful resource for the automatic or batch validation of feeds. This service is, for the moment, still quite experimental, and may have bugs or problems. http://validator.w3.org/feed/
SDL International introduced the SDL Partner Program for technology partners. This new initiative is designed to accelerate the delivery of GIM solutions. The SDL Partner Program establishes an ecosystem for global information management (GIM). Technology partners offer content-related technology that can be incorporated into GIM solutions, ranging from authoring to content management to localization to publishing. The SDL Partner Program proactively assists partners to effectively deliver GIM solutions by providing marketing and sales support, technical materials and SDKs, and access to SDL software and technology. The program so far includes EMC Documentum, Interwoven, Blast Radius, Trisoft, Tridion, Astoria Software, Day, XyEnterprise, Alchemy, and PASS. http://www.sdl.com
Justsystems Inc. announced that it is working with IBM to deliver a solution for native XML applications based on IBM’s next version of DB2, code-named ‘Viper’. The combination of Viper and Justsystems’ xfy front-end application platform will provide native support for XML content handling and business intelligence. xfy Enterprise Solution for DB2 Viper1 serves as a platform for creating and running native XML applications extremely rapidly. It is based on xfy Basic Edition 1.0, released in Oct. 2005. On the xfy platform, a document becomes the fundamental executable unit of an XML application, an “XML Object” that contains both data and business logic. xfy Enterprise Solution for DB2 Viper provides semi-automated, real-time application creation from existing XML resources, such as XML Schema or XQuery results. xfy Enterprise Solution for DB2 Viper is written in Java and runs on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. xfy Basic Edition 1.0 and xfy Developer’s Toolkit 1.0 are available free for noncommercial individual or academic use. xfy Enterprise Solution for DB2 Viper consists of xfy Enterprise Solution 1.0 and DB2 Viper Extension kit. xfy Enterprise Solution 1.0 is scheduled for release in June, 2006. The DB2 Viper Extension Kit will follow.
Inxight Software announced Inxight SmartDiscovery Awareness Server 5.4, which allows users to query a variety of internal and external sources from one search box, and then to cluster and filter the results by the most relevant people, companies, concepts (noun phrases), places and other entities mentioned in them, speeding access to information. For example, government analysts can access open and classified sources with a single query and then see and filter by the most relevant concepts, weapons, organizations and people mentioned in documents to pinpoint information of interest. Brand managers can search multiple news agencies, analyst reports and internal information to see the companies, concepts and products most often mentioned in conjunction with their own company and a search term of interest. Drug researchers can access Medline, subscription journals and other relevant websites to see and filter results by the genes, kinases and other information most commonly associated with a given search term. SmartDiscovery Awareness Server is preconfigured out of the box to search and track data from more than 600 online and enterprise sources. It ranks this information by relevance and provides a variety of intelligent filtering and preview options, including entity, category and source clustering. Customized alerts and page tracking automatically inform users of new and updated information. Entity extraction is accomplished when used with Inxight SmartDiscovery Analysis Server, which “reads” text and automatically detects people, companies, places, concepts (noun phrases) and many other entities out-of-the-box, without the need for complicated taxonomies, tuning or pre-defined lists. The system leverages existing Single Sign-On (SSO) and authentication schemes to provide secure access to subscription and other password-protected data sources.
