Hello and welcome to the latest newsletter from the Australian W3C Office.
- Mathematical Markup Language
- W3C DRM Workshop - The Right Success!
- Workshop on Web Services
- Australian W3C Day
- WWW10 News
- Quality Assurance and Conformance for W3C technologies
- AusWeb01 Conference in April
- W3C Membership
- About this newsletter
1. Mathematical Markup Language
On the 8th January 2001, W3C announced the advancement of the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 2.0 to Proposed Recommendation status.
By describing mathematical notation in XML, MathML allows mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the Web, just as HTML enables this functionality for resources like text and images.
2. W3C DRM Workshop - The Right Success!
The W3C Digital Rights Management (DRM) Workshop (held on 22-23 Jan 2001) brought together 65 leading DRM practitioners to discuss and debate what role W3C should take in this increasingly important area. The workshop consisted of 25 formal presentations covering areas such as Privacy, Identifiers, Architectures, Social and Legal Requirements, Publishers Requirements, Standards and Interoperability, Security and Trust, and Multimedia and Mobile issues. Each session was followed by open and vigorous discussion.
There was broad agreement that W3C should instigate a new activity in this area and there were a number of specific topics that were discussed as candidates. The most mentioned was a "Rights Language". The MPEG standards group is also looking into this, and proposed that W3C and MPEG form a joint alliance and to work on this problem together.
W3C will now take these recommendations and discuss it internally before making any formal decisions. There will be Minutes and a Workshop Report generated in the next few weeks. On the Workshop website, the Position Papers as well as the slides from the presenters are available:
3. Workshop on Web Services
Date: 11-12 April 2001
Location: San Jose, CA, USA
Other key dates for the workshop:
- 12 March 2001: Deadline for W3C Member position papers for the workshop program (1 to 5 pages - send to wsws-submit@w3.org).
- 13 March 2001: Workshop participation opened to the public.
- 29 March 2001: Workshop program available.
- 1 April 2001: Registration closed.
Scope of the workshop:
From its early days, Web technologies have been used to provide an interface to distributed services (e.g., HTML forms calling CGI scripts). The advent of XML has accelerated this development, and has sparked the emergence of numerous XML-based environments that enable Web services. These environments are starting to encompass the classical components of distributed application environments such as protocol conventions, security mechanisms, mechanisms to ensure reliable delivery and provide transaction functionality, interface description languages, and marshalling mechanisms, all of which are adapted to the special needs of the Web environment, and the requirements of XML.
W3C has recently started to address some of these techniques in the XML Protocol Activity, and in the XML Protocol Working Group. Since the start of this work, Members have expressed interest in expanding the scope to also cover other aspects of an XML-based distributed application environment, such as Web service descriptions. The purpose of the Web services workshop is to gather the community interested in XML-based Web service solutions and standardization of components thereof, which includes both solution providers and users of this technology. The goal of the workshop is to advise the W3C about which further actions (Activity Proposals, Working Groups, etc.) should be taken with regard to Web services.
Topics likely to be discussed at this workshop include, but are not limited to:
* Reliable messaging
* Security
* Privacy of business data
* Transactions
* Interface definition languages
* Discovery of Web service applications
* Web service descriptions
* Message and protocol semantics
* Development environments for Web services
* Other components of Web services not yet addressed by the XML Protocol Activity
If you have additional questions regarding the workshop, please contact Philipp Hoschka ph@w3.org.
4. Australian W3C Day
Sponsors:
- World Wide Web Consortium
- National Library of Australia
- DSTC Pty Ltd
The Australian W3C Day will be held in Sydney on the 7th May 2001 at the Four Points Sheraton Hotel at Darling Harbour. Speakers include Dr Ivan Herman, W3C Head of Offices, Dr Hoylen Sue (XML), Dr Max Froumentin (XSL), Mr Dean Jackson (SVG), Dr Bert Bos (Styling), Mr Charles McCathieNevile (WAI) and Dr Sev Ozdowski (Australian Disability and Discrimination Act). These presentations will be complemented with appropriate tutorials.
More information on the event and sponsorship by contacting the conference co-ordinator Ms Kellie Shanahan (kellis@dstc.edu.au).
5. WWW10 News
Instructions for submitting conference posters are now available at:
The Poster track will provide an ideal opportunity for conference attendees to learn about new and innovative work-in progress, and to preview on-going research projects that might not yet be complete, but whose preliminary results are already interesting. Posters will be reviewed by members of the Poster Committee based on originality, significance, quality, and clarity. Accepted posters will be displayed in a dedicated poster area, and presented during a poster reception. Poster Papers will appear in a separate proceedings distributed to conference attendees. To encourage poster submissions of good quality, a Best Poster Award will be presented at the conference. For more information, please send e-mail to the Posters Chair at posters@www10.org.hk
Poster Timetable:
Submission deadline PASSED: February 5, 2001
Author notification: February 19, 2001
Poster Set Up: May 1, 2001
Poster Presentation: May 2-4, 2001
Poster Reception: May 3, 2001
The following is a partial list of topics of interest:
Hypertext and hypermedia ^ Web accessibility ^ Intelligent agents ^ Resource management ^ http and beyond ^ Performance and reliability ^ Interoperability ^ Propagation, caching, replication ^ Real-time multimedia support ^ Reliability and error recovery ^ Electronic commerce ^ Agent technologies ^ Web navigation strategies ^ Multimedia and streaming ^ Computer graphics ^ Browsers and tools ^ Web applications ^ Content and coding ^ Querying and indexing ^ XML ^ Web characterization ^ Languages and standards ^ Scalability of web servers ^ Intelligent search engines ^ User interface and interactions ^ Distributed objects ^ Metadata on the Web ^ Architecture issues ^ Naming and resolution ^ Privacy and preferences ^ Internationalization/ Mulitilinguism
6. Quality Assurance and Conformance for W3C technologies
W3C is holding a workshop on Quality Assurance and Conformance for W3C technologies.
Date: 3-4 April 2001
Location: Washington D.C. area, U.S.A (hosted by NIST)
The full Call for Participation contains information about registration requirements and procedures. The deadlines for this workshop are:
Position paper due: 16 March 2001
Registration closes: 28 March 2001
Background:
Universality and Interoperability are core to W3C's goals and operating principles. In order for specifications developed at W3C to permit full interoperability and access to all, it is very important that the quality of implementation of these standards be given as much attention as their development.
In 2000, the W3C Team suggested taking a new lead in improving the quality of implementation for W3C technologies and received strong support from the membership. We are considering a new Conformance and Quality Assurance Activity and as a first step we've started gathering and formalizing existing QA efforts for the various languages and protocols we develop (see our QA matrix under development).
As the complexity of W3C specifications and their interdependencies increases, QA will become even more important to ensuring their acceptance and deployment in the market. The past experiences of HTML, CSS or more recently SMIL (all implemented with various degrees of conformance by vendors) are strong incentives to start this activity with due diligence.
A workshop is the natural W3C way of gathering interest and establishing a charter for a new activity, so we have decided to hold one in partnership with NIST, a leader in the development of conformance tests, in particular with W3C technologies.
Workshop Goal:
The main objective of the workshop is to have W3C, its membership and the Web community involved in QA at large to share their understanding of the state of affairs for Web QA tools, technical and business practices and conformance activities at W3C or related to W3C specifications.
Furthermore, as we're planning the start of a new W3C activity, one of our goals is to get feedback on the best course of action within W3C that would improve the quality of W3C specifications' implementation in the field over time (i.e. what will be in the charter of this activity). To that effect, a DRAFT Activity Proposal will be circulated prior to and discussed during the workshop.
Scope:
Besides the shape to give this new potential W3C QA activity, there are several areas of interest related to Quality Assurance and Conformance of W3C technologies that we would like to hear about at the workshop:
- experience in validation of Web content and documents (e.g. is this CSS page valid?)
- online testing conformance of user agents (is this multimedia player correctly implementing SMIL1.0?)
- quality of W3C specifications themselves (wrt conformance statement, tutorial, etc)
- conformance testing methodology (e.g., test design and components of a test suite)
- certification/labeling of content, products or services
- common framework/harness for running test
- coordination with W3C Working Group developing specifications
- IPR and funding model
Position papers focused on general software or business QA practices (unrelated to W3C specifications or to the items above) are not in scope for this workshop.
Further Details:
Should you have questions regarding the workshop, please feel free to contact Daniel Dardailler (danield@w3.org) or Karl Dubost (karl@w3.org).
7. AusWeb01 Conference in April
AusWeb, Australia's Premier Web conference is on again this year at the Opal Cove Resort in Coffs Harbour NSW from the 21st to 25th April. A program of keynotes, tutorials, workshops, papers and panels will bring you up to date with the latest in Web developments and applications. Check out the program and register online now.
8. W3C Membership
The number of Members has risen to 495. We are approaching the 500 mark. New Members this month are:
Adaptive Media ASA.: This Norwegian Company supports
Adaptive Media Publisher. Advisor Technology Services, LLC.: provides advanced technology and business solutions to financial institutions.
Auvo Technologies, Inc.: Auvo Technologies began in 1998 when its original founder, Ira Gerson, set out to solve what he saw as fundamental flaws in the architectures designed for Wireless Internet. Ira saw certain opportunities emerging to directly apply the technical and business principles of the Internet to the wireless environment. Since then, Auvo Technologies has evolved toward creating complete, integrated software packages for the Wireless Internet. Our unique solutions are positioned to give carriers and content providers the means to bring the Internet to mobile phone users through a cost-efficient combination of speech recognition, speech synthesis, WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), VoiceXML (Voice Extensible Markup Language) and other commercial user interfaces.
Cloakware Corporation.: Cloakware is a privately owned company focused on selling products and technologies that enable e-commerce. The company has developed a radical new security technology, Cloakware Technology, that converts software into a tamper resistant form. The company is focused on commercializing this technology through partnerships with leading OEMs and by developing applications of the technology
GlobalMentor, Inc.: a member of the Open eBook Authoring Group that is defining a standard markup for e-books. GlobalMentor are also involved in developing the Electronic Book Exchange (EBX) specification, a standard for protecting copyright in electronic books and for distributing them.
IMPROVE (Improve Information Management Sweden AB).: improve content management, the core of all business.
Interactive Trust Network, Inc.: Interactive Trust has built a complex infrastructure that enables and manages the global use of electronic identities. Though ITN's Digital Signature Authorization Network (DSAN), all enterprises will have access to critical information and technology needed to accept and process digital identities. DSAN is comprised of proprietary software and multiple databases that when delivered together, provide functionality needed to mitigate risks associated with e-commerce.
MartSoft Corporation.: The MartSoft catalogue platform streamlines content creation and aggregation for online catalogues making it fast and easy to build vertical portals, procurement solutions, and supply-chain management systems.
opt[e]way SA.: Created in 1998, opt[e]way develops and markets a unique client-server software platform, named opt[e]go enabling geo-dependent services delivery through PC's, CellPhones, PDA's and In-Car Navigation terminals. The opt[e]goTM software platform allows unlimited value-added mobile location services creation using wireless/wire line connections, WAP or SMS. opt[e]way is based in Sophia Antipolis (south of France) with sales offices in Paris and Redwood City (USA).
Phocis Ltd.: Phocis is the leading European Digital Rights management solution provider whose core product is authorit-e. The authorit-e technology is particularly of interest to organisations within the areas of music, audiobooks, broadcasting, publishing, B2B secure documents and software publishers.
Propel Software Corporation: Propel is a new e-commerce software and services company founded by Steve Kirsch. The company's vision is to create a revolutionary new way to build e-commerce websites. In doing so, Propel aims to become the standard platform for developing and deploying e-commerce applications.
Rational Software Corporation.: Rational Software Corporation (Nasdaq: RATL), the e-development company, helps organizations develop and deploy software for e-business, e-infrastructure, and e-devices through a combination of tools, services and software engineering best practices.
SANYO Electric Co., Ltd.:
Software Resources (S.A.B.) Ltd.: Software Resources is dedicated to the development and distribution of unique software solutions. Since its founding in 1982, Software Resources has been a leading provider of comprehensive information technology solutions to prominent Israeli organizations. Software Resources combines advanced in-house capabilities with outstanding third-party systems to deliver total IT solutions.
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh International (TAGI).: TAGI is a group of rapidly expanding firms, established to serve the Arab countries and foreign firms interested in conducting business in this region. Their world is the Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East and North Africa. At present, TAGI operates out of offices established in every major city in the Arab world. This makes them the only regional firm of international, multilingual, highly trained professionals, providing diversified services.
VoiceGenie Technologies, Inc.: VoiceGenie Technologies Inc. builds and deploys infrastructure that enables voice access to Web content anywhere, anytime, from any phone. VoiceGenie puts customers in charge of their business, helping companies build voice services in a Web environment that integrate easily with existing systems and are scalable and flexible, providing a robust platform for growth.
9. About this newsletter
Many thanks to the UK W3C Office, Dr Ivan Herman from W3C, Dr Renato Iannella from IPR Systems and Dr Alan Ellis from Southern Cross University for contributions.
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