In this article I am going to introduce you to the open source, free (GNU LGPL license), native XML database eXist (www.exist-db-org). Data is important, no question about it. Data that can't be queried is not very useful. Users expect to have good query response time. From my personal experience and testing, I am confident in saying that eXist is a fairly good database. It has very good query response time, it is very user friendly, it's easy to set up and operate, and it's written in Java, therefore it is platform independent.

Microsoft Corp has announced it will take steps to offer the file format technology behind billions of documents to customers and the industry 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.

XML use is widespread across modern information systems in all industry, government, and academic sectors. The core technologies for processing XML (XML, XSLT, XPath, XML Schema, and others) are maturing steadily - thanks to support from standards bodies like the W3C and OASIS, and from major industry players such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. XML is also the basis for a growing body of industry standards for data exchange, and it is well on its way to becoming a mainstream technology for data integration. XML is transforming not just data - it is transforming information processing in general.

The Semantic Web is a hot topic in information circles today, and its adoption will largely depend on stakeholders understanding its potential benefits and tools vendors providing an easy entry for developers to learn and work with its related technologies.

Really Strategies worked with J.J.Keller to identify requirements and solutions for all aspects of its new single-source content management system and integrated the system components. After pilot-testing two representative looseleaf books, J.J.Keller is now putting publications through the entire workflow.

At the XML 2005 Conference & Expo in Atlanta, Georgia, Justsystems announced the release of xfy Enterprise Solution 1.0, an integrated development and runtime environment for enterprise XML applications. xfy Enterprise Solution 1.0 helps application developers quickly create innovative user interfaces for service-oriented architectures (SOA) and web services.

The Working Group will have to balance the needs of a diverse community - including Business Rules and Semantic Web users - specifying extensions for which it can articulate a consensus design and which are sufficiently motivated by use cases.

The OASIS WS-SX Technical Committee will advance a set of modular specifications that standardize the concepts, WSDL documents, and XML Schema renderings for trusted brokering of SOAP message exchanges, shared security contexts, and security policies.