Australian W3C Office
Australian W3C Office Hello and welcome to the newsletter from the Australian W3C Office. This edition includes news about the Australian W3C activities, Semantic Web, the Modularization of XHTML, XML, P3P, Membership update and more.
The inaugural W3C Day was greeted by cold, thunderous, torrential rain
- fortunately, unlike the previous day, the roof in the venue did not leak
buckets of water onto the podium during the presentations!
Aside from the weather, the W3C Day was very successful. Many thanks to
the W3C contingent - Janet Daly, Ivan Herman, Bert Bos, Max Froumentin and
Charles McCathieNevile - for their valued involvement in the event and also
for extending their travel to include Australia after attending WWW10. Lots
of thanks also to Graeme Innes from HREOC and Hoylen Sue from DSTC for their
input. The event could not have been as successful without the involvement
of the sponsors:
Delegates at the event were very impressed by all of the presentations. The feedback from these attendees strongly indicates that on-going seminars about W3C and its activities are in high demand around the country. The Australian W3C Office has budgeted for one more free W3C seminar to be delivered in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra in the second half of this year. If you have a specific W3C topic that you would like to hear about please send your suggestion to w3c-australia@w3.org. The next W3C Day will be held in 2002 - details will announced in this newsletter.
Charles McCathieNevile will be presenting two 90 minute workshops - the
first a broader overview of accessibility, what it is, and why it is necessary,
and the second will go into more detail on the technical "how-to".
There is some (very minimal at this stage) information on the web at: http://www.education.tas.gov.au/equitystandards/tech-assist/techfest.htm
W3C Day Presentations: http://evolve.dstc.edu.au/w3c_presentations.html
W3C Day Photos: http://evolve.dstc.edu.au/w3c_photos.html
Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/WAI/
ACS Queensland Branch - http://www.qld.acs.org.au/
The Semantic Web, written by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, is the cover story in the May 2001 issue of Scientific American magazine. Publishing on the semantic web, commentary by Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler, appeared in Nature magazine's 26 April issue. Read more about the Semantic Web Activity.
Scientific American - http://www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html
Semantic Web Activity - http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
(ed: Media Release from the Royal Society)
Timothy Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web, has been
awarded fellowship of the Royal Society. He is among 43 new fellows elected
to the distinguished UK scientific body.
Professor Timothy Berners-Lee, 3Com Founders Professor in the Laboratory of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been elected as a Fellow for his work in revolutionising communication through the internet. Professor Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990 while working at CERN, the European laboratory for Particle Physics. He also designed the universal resource locator (Ed: uniform resource locator), or URL, which gives each web page a unique address, and HTML, the basic language that allows web pages to be created.
The Royal Society: http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/templates/press/showpresspage.cfm?file=2001051401.txt
On 10 April, W3C released Modularization of XHTML as a W3C Recommendation. The specification is stable, and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favours its adoption by academic, industry, and research communities. The Recommendation extends XHTML's reach onto emerging Web platforms like mobile devices, television, and appliances.
W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of the XML Information Set (Infoset) to Candidate Recommendation. The Infoset defines a set of eleven types of information items in XML documents. Comments are invited through 15 June at www-xml-infoset-comments@w3.org. Read about the W3C XML Activity at http://www.w3.org/XML/Activity.
XML Information Set - http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-xml-infoset-20010514/
The Platform for Privacy Preferences 1.0 Deployment Guide has been released as a W3C Note. This guide for Web site operators explains how to write a machine-readable privacy policy, ways to publish it, and gives step-by-step instructions for deploying your privacy policy on popular Web servers. Read the answers to frequently asked questions about P3P and more on the W3C Privacy Activity at http://www.w3.org/Privacy/Activity
The Platform for Privacy Preferences 1.0 Deployment Guide -
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-p3pdeployment-20010510
FAQ - http://www.w3.org/P3P/p3pfaq
The World Wide Web Consortium recently released XML Schema as a W3C Recommendation in three parts: Part 0: Primer, Part 1: Structures, Part 2: Datatypes. The specification is stable and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favours its adoption by academic, industry, and research communities. XML Schemas define shared markup vocabularies, the structure of XML documents which use those vocabularies, and provide hooks to associate semantics with them. XML Schema was produced by the XML Schema Working Group.
Part 0: Primer - http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-0-20010502/
Part 1: Structures - http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-1-20010502/
Part 2: Datatypes - http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-2-20010502/
XML Schema Working Group - http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema
The XML Encryption Working Group has released the first Working Draft of XML Encryption Requirements. The draft provides XML syntax and processing requirements for encrypting digital content, including portions of XML documents and protocol messages. Read about the W3C XML Encryption Activity at: http://www.w3.org/Encryption/2001/Activity
XML Encryption Working Group - http://www.w3.org/Encryption/2001/
XML
Encryption Requirements - http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-xml-encryption-req-20010420
W3C is pleased to announce the publication of a revised XML-Signature Syntax and Processing Candidate Recommendation. XML digital signatures provide integrity, message authentication, and signer authentication services. The specification is the work of the joint IETF-W3C XML Signature Working Group. Read about the XML Digital Signature Activity at http://www.w3.org/Signature/Activity
XML-Signature Syntax and Processing - http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-xmldsig-core-20010419/
XML Signature Working Group - http://www.w3.org/Signature/
With the release of the recommendations for XML schemas and XML modularisation,
and the candidate recommendation for the Infoset now may be a sensible time
to consider the progress of the XML family of languages. DTD's have served
the SGML and XML communities for more than 20 years as a mechanism for describing
structured data. However, as the applications of XML move from being hierarchically
structured text to all data types, then further support is required for
those data types. DTD's call for elements to consist of one of three things:
a text string; a text string with other child elements mixed together, or
a set of child elements. XML schema has XML syntax, and supports namespaces,
while allowing a much wider range of types to be included. In the same way
that XML Schema extends the typing of XML, a raft of other supporting developments
are extending it in other ways to meet W3C's goal of leading the web to
its full potential.
The data description language syntax for XML v1.0 has of course been a W3C
recommendation since Feb 1998, with a second edition in Oct 2000. Although
XML Schemas support numerical data types required to handle data as well
as documents, they do not define a data model for XML; nor does the DOM
although it is sometimes mistakenly thought to. The XML
Information Set, to define a data model for XML has reached CR in May
2001. The family of components on which the infoset builds, and which need
to refer to information in a well-formed XML document are shown in the table
below.
Although these components allow access into the XML document, a higher
set of components transform the data for use, or render it for presentation,
built on top of these. For example, XQuery will build on XPath as a mechanism
to access XML documents, rather than developing its own mechanisms.
A third set of XML applications including SMIL, RDF, XHTML, MathML, Xforms, SVG are also under development, or revision within W3C, but they are both complex and clearly built on the platform of the family of XML languages themselves. Beyond the W3C applications are those XML applications developed outside W3C.
At the 10th WWW Conference in Hong Kong, Tim Berners-Lee presented a roadmap of the web. This shows how each of these technologies that W3C is developing, as well as others yet to be started all fit together to meet intermediate goals of clear user interfaces, document sharing, and business e-commerce, on the way to the overall goal of W3C in taking the web to its full potential. This roadmap shows the importance in the overall scheme of the XML protocol activity.
If your organisation is a member of W3C, you can be involved in establishing these technologies as W3C recommendations, and be privy to the latest details as they do develop in order to tune your organisations own IT strategy and tactics. However, if you are not a W3C member you will have to wait on the developments of others, and for W3C to make public drafts and recommendations before you can set your strategy, after your competition who are members have already done so. Maybe you should join W3C now.
Thanks to Airi Salminen at University of Waterloo for the tables reproduced above.
The number of Members has risen to 514 (14th May 2001). You can find information
on how to Join W3C at:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Prospectus/Joining
Cacheon, Inc. - Cacheon, Inc. is a software infrastructure company that helps enterprises optimise their network, device, application and IT resources.
dokoni, inc. - dokoni, inc. is a Web development tools vendor based in San Diego California.
dynamicsoft, Inc. - dynamicsoft is a provider of carrier-class infrastructure software for packet-based wireline and wireless communications networks.
Epigraph Group, Inc. - Epigraph is a supplier of flexible and highly scalable Internet data design and management software, with a mandate to "simplify the complexity" inherent in designing, developing and managing large scale web-based information systems.
Identica Limited - The Identica partnership is one of the world's leading Brand Identity experts, working all over the world with many of the biggest brands.
National Computerization Agency - NCA is the leading agency for Korean national informatization and has played an important role in IT promotion for the public sector since its establishment.
Network Inference - Network Inference creates software products and promotes the development of web standards that, together, will power the advance of machine understanding and reduce the level of human processing involved in web-based applications.
Newknow - Newknow is developing its first generation of solutions aimed at helping Internet users to optimize their attention span, which is usually too short for the amount of time spent selecting and consuming goods or services in the Internet.
Nisus, Inc. - Nisus, Inc. is a leading provider of rules-based software solutions for improving business process efficiency. Established in 2000, Nisus is headquartered in Westborough, Massachusetts with development facilities in Massachusetts and Hyderabad, India.
Society for Technical Communication (STC) - STC is an individual membership organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication - it is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 25,000 members include technical writers, editors, graphic designers, videographers, multimedia artists, Web and Intranet page information designers, translators and others whose work involves making technical information available to those who need it. Society membership provides opportunities for ongoing learning and professional networking. Through the efforts of a small, full-time staff and a large network of volunteers, STC promotes the public welfare by educating its members and industry about issues concerning technical communication. STC shares many goals with a number of related organizations and is a member of INTECOM, an international alliance of technical communication organizations aiming to improve technical documentation and communication. STC invites other organizations to promote the Society's goals through sustaining organization memberships. STC is governed on a Society level by an elected board of directors. Membership is divided into eight regions each containing approximately 20 local chapters. In addition to the Society leaders, each local chapter elects a set of chapter level officers.
SuperWings - SuperWings provide solutions that seamlessly extend the billions of dollars of existing enterprise and Internet applications and information to any smart phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), advanced pager or other mobile device.
Universitą Commerciale "Luigi Bocconi" - University based in Milan, Italy
XYZFind Corp. - XYZFind is a native XML database that employs a radical schema-independent architecture.
Waveset Technologies, Inc. - Waveset Technologies, Inc. is an emerging provider of Internet infrastructure software. Founded in January 2000 by former Tivoli executives, the company has received $7.3 million in funding from Austin Ventures, AV Labs, Origin Partners, Silverton Partners and various private investors. Waveset is developing solutions that enable and manage collaborative business.
More information on W3C Members can be located at: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
Many thanks to the UK W3C Office and Charles McCathieNevile (WAI, W3C) for their contributions.
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