Australian W3C Office

W3C Workshop - Canberra

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a non-for-profit, vendor-independent international Web standards organisation that develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.

You are invited to a free W3C workshop on the W3C’s XForms and Semantic Web Services Activities to be held at:

Main Theatre, National Library of Australia
10:00am to midday
Friday, 25th June 2004

Workshop Program

10am to 11am – Semantic Web Services
Presenter: Dr Jane Hunter

Web services are transforming the Internet from a collection of information into a distributed computational device. They enable software applications to be distributed, accessed and executed via the Web. But current web service technologies (UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP) provide limited support for automating service discovery, service configuration and service composition (i.e., realizing complex workflows with Web services). In order to fully employ the potential of web services, they need to be appropriately described. Semantic Web Services combines Semantic Web technology with Web Service technology to enable automated and dynamic Web service discovery, execution and composition through new technologies such as OWL-S (Ontology Web Language for Services).

This presentation will provide an overview of the Semantic Web Services vision, describe recent technological developments (such as OWL-S), and demonstrate potential applications of Semantic Web services through a number of case studies.

Bio: Dr Jane Hunter (CITEC) is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the CRC for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology (operating as DSTC). She is also Project Leader of DSTC's MAENAD (Multimedia Access for Enterprises across Networks And Domains) project which is developing indexing, archival, discovery, analysis, integration, management and preservation tools and services to enable knowledge management, mining and capture within the educational, cultural and scientific domains. She is currently the liaison between MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group) and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), a member of the Dublin Core Advisory Board and the W3C Web Ontology Language Working group and on the Editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Web Semantics.

W3C Semantic Web Services Interest Group: http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/swsig/

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11am to 12noon - New Generation of Web Forms: experience with XForms trials
Presenter: Dr Zoran Milosevic

Electronic forms on the Web provide user interface to data and services offered on the Web. By using Web forms users can interact with the enterprise applications and back-end systems linked to these forms. Web applications, e-government and e-commerce solutions have sparked the demand for better Web forms – supporting richer and more dynamic interactions than what is possible with existing HTML forms.

XForms is new World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification that provides more intelligent support for Web forms to meet this demand. This is achieved by separating the data model of the form from their presentation format. Both the data and presentation models are described using XML. This design enables more efficient integration with backend systems and facilitates efficient exchange of XML data. The separation also makes it possible to have multiple presentation formats for the same data model, which enables repurposing, reuse and accessibility across different types of devices.

This presentation:

• provides an introduction to the XForms standard, and compares XForms to other approaches
• describes our XForms pilot project, which was funded by NOIE ITOL grant
• highlights our initial experience of using XForms in various business environments as part of the pilot project, including tools used and results achieved
• will provide the attendees with background information that can be valuable when making decisions about their future strategy and adoption path regarding Web forms technologies

W3C XForms homepage: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/

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This project is funded under the Commonwealth Government's Innovation Access Program. An initiative of Backing Australia's Ability, the Commonwealth Government's commitment to Innovation (Semantic Web Services) and NOIE’s Information Technology OnLine Grant Scheme (XForms) and supported by the National Library of Australia, Australian Telecommunications User Group (ATUG), The Distillery, Web Standards Group, Women In Technology, Australian Electrical & Electronic Manufacturers' Association (AEEMA) and DSTC.