Zepheira partner Uche Ogbuji will be presenting the Akara open source project to XML technology professionals at 2011 XML Prague.  The presentation “Akara – Spicy Bean Fritters and XML Data Services” will provide a technical overview of the project, which has been used in Zepheira work with the US Library of Congress, MIT, Sun Microsystems and much more.  To quote from the abstract:

Akara is a platform for developing data services, and especially XML data services, available on the Web, using REST architecture. It is open source software written in Python and C. An important concept in Akara is information pipelining, where discrete services can be combined and chained together, including services hosted remotely. There is strong support for pipeline stages for XML processing, as Akara includes a port of the well-known 4Suite and Amara XML processing components for Python. The version of Amara in Akara provides optimized XML processing using common XML standards as well as fresh ideas for expressing XML pattern processing, based on long experience in standards-based XML applications. Some of these features include XPath and XSLT, a lightweight, dynamic data binding mechanism, XML modeling and processing constraints by example (using Examplotron), Schematron assertions, XPath-driven streamable processing and overall low-level support for lazy iterator processing, and thus the map/reduce style. Akara does not enforce a built-in mechanism for persistence of XML, but is designed to complete a low-level persistence engine with overall characteristics of an XML DBMS.

Registration for XML Prague is sold out, but the conference is well known for the quality of its free online video access for those interested.  Details will be posted on the site as the date approaches.

• XML as new lingua franca for the Web. Why did it never happen?
• HTML 5 and XHTML: breaking-up, coexistence or convergence?
• JSON and XML love-in: how to enable Web Apps and Web Widgets?
• XML Databases role in Web architecture.
• XML and the emerging Semantic Web.
• XML-based formats for electronic books.
• …and more.

The conference will take place March 26th & 27th, 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic.

Akara is an open-source (Apache License, Version 2.0) Web framework specialized for RESTful data services, especially involving XML and other semi-structured formats. You express data models and create transforms based on these data models, plugging required inputs and outputs (XML, JSON, CSV, Atom, etc.) together into pipelines which implement the desired services. You then make these services available on the Web using simple wrappers. The wrappers are based on REST concepts and among other things make it easy to discover and reuse the services, and to connect them to local and remote systems using Web triggers (AKA Web hooks). Akara simplifies extract-transform-load (ETL), data-driven integration of systems, and makes it easy to wrap Web sites and services, turning tag soup and painful APIs into clean, RESTful end-points

The version of Akara code available in tandem with this new website include enhancements produced in association with the Library of Congress Recollection project, particularly code quality, performance tweaks and deployment support.  Akara provides the data pipelining for loading data into Recollection and processing for data augmentation.

Akara source code is available from a public repository in Zepheira’s section of the github ‘social coding’ space.

Amara XML and data toolkit 2.0a4

Akara 2.0a1, a framework for RESTful data services

These releases focus on quality and performance.

Akara simplifies extract-transform-load (ETL), data-driven integration of systems, and makes it easy to wrap Web sites and services, turning tag soup and painful APIs into clean, RESTful end-points. Zepheira uses Akara heavily, in projects for The Library of Congress and Semio Clinical, among others, and provides commercial data transform services via Akara.

At the beginning of March 2010, in Boulder, Colorado, Zepheira hosted a summit and sprint for development on the project, with invited developers from Zepheira’s extended network, and its clients. The focus was on solidifying the open source project, and working on improvements motivated by recent deployments of Akara. The summit was held at Boulder Millennium Harvest House. Topics ranged from rules-based XML processing in streaming mode (for high performance) to improved support for HTTP Caching, packaging, deployment, internationalization and more. Zepheira team members Uche Ogbuji and Mark Baker led the proceedings. Andrew Dalke posted notes on the proceedings.

1st Proposal Submission Deadline: January 31, 2010

Full Chapter Submission Deadline: April 2, 2010

Linking Enterprise Data

A book edited by David Wood, Eric Miller and Uche Ogbuji, Zepheira, USA

To be published by Springer Science+Business Media

I. Introduction

Linking Enterprise Data is the application of Semantic Web architecture principles to real-world information management issues faced by commercial, not-for-profit and government enterprises. The term LED is a play on Linking Open Data (LOD), a community project started by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group aimed at exposing data sets to the Web in standard formats and actively relating them to one another with hyperlinks.

Enterprise data is growing at a much faster rate than traditional technologies allow. The World Wide Web is the only information system we know that scales to the degree that it does and is robust to both changes and failure of components. Most software does not work nearly as well as the Web does. Applying the Web’s architectural principles (not necessarily the public World Wide Web itself) for enterprise problems may be the only way to effectively address the current and future information glut. Challenges remain, however, because the use of distributed architectures requires enterprises to give up the central control and planning traditionally applied by IT departments.

II. Objective of the Book

This book aims to provide practical approaches to addressing common information management issues by the application of Semantic Web and Linked Data research to production environments. The approaches taken are based on international standards. The book is to be written and edited by leaders in Semantic Web and Linked Data research and standards development and early adopters of Semantic Web and Linked Data standards and techniques.

III. Target Audience

This book is meant for Semantic Web researchers and academicians, and CTOs, CIOs, enterprise architects, project managers and application developers in commercial, not-for-profit and government organizations concerned with scalability, flexibility and robustness of information management systems. Not-for-profit organizations specifically include the library and museum communities.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following: – Business, technical and social values of applying Web architecture to enterprise content, such as the means by which deployment agility, resilience and reuse of data may be accomplished – Building of social (human-centered) communities to curate distributed data – Enterprise infrastructure for Linking Enterprise Data – Persistent Identifiers for the Web, life sciences, libraries and memory organizations – Linking the government cloud – Applications of Linked Data to enterprises, such as drug discovery, clinical information, organizational learning or curation of/access to distributed information – Publishing large-scale Linked Data

IV. Publisher

This book is scheduled for publication by Springer Science+Business Media. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit Springer’s site. This publication is scheduled to be released in 2011.

V. Important Dates

January 31, 2010: Proposal Submission Deadline

February 15, 2010: Notification of Acceptance

April 2, 2010: Full Chapter Submission

April 16, 2010: Review Results Notification

May 7, 2010: Revised Chapter Submission

May 14, 2010: Final Decision Notification

May 28, 2010: Final Revised and Formatted Chapter Submission

Inquiries and submissions should be sent by electronic mail to:

David Wood Partner Zepheira

GCN gave the award to NDIIPP because of its success in working with universities and libraries to model distributed preservation practices, working with state consortiums to help in the preservation of state government digital information, and working with commercial content providers to develop standards for digital preservation.

“We are honored to receive this award,” said Laura Campbell, associate librarian for strategic initiatives. “The credit really goes to our excellent network of partners around the country who have worked with us to save valuable digital content and keep it accessible over time. Digital preservation is a challenge that demands new kinds of outreach, engagement and collaboration.”

The GCN Awards, now in their 22nd year, embody one of the most sought-after and respected accolades in the government IT community, recognizing federal, state and local government project teams for extraordinary IT accomplishments and significant contributions to the performance of their agencies.

This award comes quickly on the heels of the recent European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) “best in show” award for specific collaboration within the NDIIPP program between LoC and Zepheira. That honor went to Project Recollection, a software platform developed by Zepheira that allows archival communities to easily publish, style, connect and share digital collections on the Web. It is currently in a pilot phase, but has already elicited interest throughout LoC and other government institutions.

The mission of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) is to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations. In 2008, the NDIIPP partners shared content through a simple web page. In order to explore more useful tools and processes for sharing diverse content across partners’ collections, the Library began the Project Recollection Pilot in 2009 with Zepheira to develop a proof of concept that can be used to collect and explore information about digital collections.