Australian W3C Office

W3C Workshop - Melbourne

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:

Seminar Room 1,
Monash Conference Centre,
Level 7, 30 Collins Street
Melbourne
Thursday, 24 June 2004

Workshop Program

1pm to 2pm– 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.

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

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, 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.

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2pm to 3pm - 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/

Bio: Dr Zoran Milosevic is Principal Scientist at Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC). He leads a project which focuses on enterprise modelling and architectures of distributed systems. He has been actively involved in producing OMG standards, most recently the UML profile for Enterprise Distributed Object Computing and is now contributing to the OASIS LegalXML e-contracts standard. He also leads an Australian Federal Government project that focuses on the use of the XForms W3Cstandard in e-business and e-government. Zoran is the founder of IEEE's Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC) conference and a frequent speaker at many international events. He has published more than 50 research papers in international journals and conference proceedings.

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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 DCITA’s Information Technology OnLine Grant Scheme (XForms). Both events are supported by DSTC, Multimedia Victoria, Australian Telecommunications User Group, Web Standards Group, Women In Technology, Monash University, and Australian Electrical & Electronic Manufacturers' Association (AEEMA).