W3C UK and Ireland Regional Office
W3C UK and Ireland Regional OfficeThe World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential as a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding. The UK and Ireland W3C Office (W3C-UK) is the national contact point for W3C activities in the UK and Ireland.
The Oxon SWIG (Semantic Web Interest Group) is a monthly get-together to discuss semantic web theory and practice. Archives include previous presentations.
Demonstrators of some recent W3C technologies are now available to show how they can be used and their potential.
W3C is not responsible for policing that the content of information on the World Wide Web conforms to the laws of any nation. If you have concerns that a web site contains information that is potentially illegal under UK law, please contact the Internet Watch Foundation, and for Irish law please contact ISPAI Hotline. In the UK, the National High Tech Crime Unit provides guidance on reporting fraud and other Internet crimes.
2009-10-06: The W3C community convenes next month in Santa Clara, California for Technical Plenary Week (TPAC) 2009, this year's edition of an annual week-long opportunity for W3C group participants to share news of progress and to address hot-button technical issues face-to-face, including the future of HTML 5, privacy challenges in an era of powerful Web Applications, and how governments are using the Web to increase transparency and accountability. This year, the Internet Society (ISOC), as part of its mission to support the development of open standards, will sponsor TPAC 2009 and actively participate in the event. In addition to ISOC representatives, participants from other standards development organizations will join in discussion about the health of the "Internet Ecosystem" during the Plenary Day. As previously announced, W3C invites the public to a Developer Gathering on 5 November. In addition, the press are invited to attend a Media Breakfast on 3 November from 7:30-8:30am (Pacific Time) for presentations on some of the key topics W3C will cover during the week. Read the press release and learn more about TPAC 2009. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-10-08: A Patent Advisory Group (PAG) for the Web Applications Working Group published its report, which suggests that W3C should continue the work on the Widgets 1.0: Updates Specification. W3C launched the PAG when Apple Computer, Inc excluded patent claims from the W3C Royalty-Free licensing commitment. The Group concluded that the US Patent Number 5,764,992 is considered not essential according to Section 8 of the W3C Patent Policy, and provided a set of Recommendations to the Web Applications Working Group. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-10-08: The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Widgets 1.0: Widget URIs. Resources inside a widget package are identified and located using a method that is specific to widgets technology. Widget URIs reflect this by providing these specific locators with their own syntax so that resources in widget packages can be readily identified. Comments are welcome through 10 November. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-10-08: The Product Modelling Incubator Group has published their final report. The mission of the Incubator Group was to enable the use of the (Semantic) Web for Product Modelling (PM): the definition, storage, exchange and sharing of product data. Product data is information about the structure and behaviour of things that are realized in industrial processes. So principally product data is about things that are manmade, but it can also be about things in the natural world that interact with those industrial processes and/or its resulting products. The report describes the role and scope of product data, and initial work in two technical areas (1) quantities, units, and scales; and (2) product structure - the decomposition of wholes in parts and the interconnection relationships between these parts. This publication is part of the Incubator Activity, a forum where W3C Members can innovate and experiment. This work is not on the W3C standards track. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-10-06: The third and possibly final run of the successful online training course An Introduction to W3C Mobile Web Best Practices is due to start on Monday, 12 October. Participants work at their own pace at times to suit them throughout the 9-week course. The program is well-suited to developers with experience of desktop design and production who wish to apply their HTML and CSS skills to the mobile environment. A mixture of lectures and assignments provide hands-on practical experience in using W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices. Participants will work with both W3C instructors and peers who can share experiences about the real-world challenges of mobile Web design. (News archive)
2009-10-06: The Web Applications Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Widgets 1.0: View Modes Media Feature. This specification is part of the Widgets 1.0 family of specifications. It introduces a feature that allows designers to specify different presentations according to "view modes" (e.g., when a widget is running like any other application, when it is running without "chrome," or when occupying all of the screen). Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-10-06: The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has published two Last Call Working Drafts: Mobile Web Application Best Practices and Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies 1.0. The former describes Best Practices for the development and delivery of Web applications on mobile devices. The recommendations expand upon statements made in the Mobile Web Best Practices, especially those that relate to the exploitation of device capabilities and awareness of the delivery context. The latter document provides guidance to implementers of Content Transformation proxies as to whether and how to transform Web content. Content Transformation proxies alter requests sent by user agents to servers and responses returned by servers so that the appearance, structure or control flow of Web applications are modified. Content Transformation proxies are mostly used to convert Web sites designed for desktop computers to a form suitable for mobile devices. Comments on both documents welcome through 6 November. Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-10-06: The Math Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of A MathML for CSS profile. This document describes a profile of MathML 3.0 that could be used to capture structure of mathematical formulae in the way suitable for further CSS formatting. This profile is expected to facilitate adoption of MathML in web browsers and CSS formatters, allowing them to reuse existing CSS visual formatting model, enhanced with a few mathematics-oriented extensions, for rendering of the layout schemata of presentational MathML. Learn more about the W3C Math Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-10-05: W3C and XBRL International, Inc. are co-sponsoring a Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web today and tomorrow, hosted at the offices of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in Arlington, Virginia (USA). The main goal of the Workshop is to identify opportunities and challenges for improving access to financial data on the Web. Participants will discuss how Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) and related XML data standards can best be utilized, and how using XBRL to provide financial data via the Web relates to broader opportunities for Semantic Web technologies. More than 15 speakers and 100 participants will discuss topics such as interoperability and harmonization of standard data formats and the impact of the increased transparency on the economy and society as a whole. For more information, see the Program Agenda and Media Advisory. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-10-01: The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published six Candidate Recommendations. Together, they allow systems using a variety of rule languages and rule-based technologies to interoperate with each other and with Semantic Web technologies. (News archive)
2009-10-01: The SVG Working Group has published First Public Working Drafts of SVG Color 1.2, Part 2: Language and SVG Color 1.2, Part 1: Primer. The former defines features of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Language that are specifically for color-managed environments, including document interchange, publishing, and high-quality display. SVG Color extends the control of color, relative to SVG Tiny 1.2, in three ways. Firstly by adding an additional color space for interpolation and compositing; this means that colors are no longer constrained to the sRGB gamut. Secondly by extending the syntax for Paint, thus allowing colors to be specified as calibrated (ICC and named) and uncalibrated ('device') color. Thirdly, it mandates the color management of embedded images. The Primer explains the technical background and gives guidelines on how to use the SVG Color specification with SVG 1.2 Tiny and SVG 1.2 Full modules. Learn more about the Graphics Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-10-01: Browse W3C presentations and events also available as an RSS channel. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-09-29: The XSL-FO subgroup of the XSL Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Design Notes for Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) 2.0, which contains initial and early work on XSL-FO 2.0. XSL-FO defines an XML vocabulary for formatting and layout of XML documents; use XSLT to transform documents into XSL-FO for on-screen or paper formatting, for example into PDF. Public comments are requested, both from users and implementors of XSL 1.x and from people who have been waiting for new features before using XSL-FO. Lean more about XML. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-09-29: The Web Applications Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of WebSimpleDB API. User agents need to store large numbers of objects locally in order to satisfy off-line data requirements of Web applications. Whereas the Web Storage specification is useful for storing pairs of keys and their corresponding values, it does not provide in-order retrieval of keys, efficient searching over values, or storage of duplicate values for a key. The new WebSimpleDB API specification provides a concrete API to perform advanced key-value data management that is at the heart of most sophisticated query processors. It does so by using transactional databases to store keys and their corresponding values. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-09-24: The Timed Text Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Timed Text (TT) Authoring Format 1.0 - Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP), used to represent timed text media for the purpose of interchange among authoring systems. Timed text is textual information that is intrinsically or extrinsically associated with timing information. The specification provides a standardized representation of a particular subset of textual information with which stylistic, layout, and timing semantics are associated by an author or an authoring system for the purpose of interchange and potential presentation. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-09-24: The Math Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0. MathML is an XML application for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text. Comments are welcome through 11 November. Learn more about the Math Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-09-24: The Web Services Resource Access Working Group published updates to five Working Drafts: Web Services Enumeration (WS-Enumeration), Web Services Eventing (WS-Eventing), Web Services Resource Transfer (WS-RT), Web Services Transfer (WS-Transfer), and Web Services Metadata Exchange (WS-MetadataExchange). The first describes a general SOAP-based protocol for enumerating a sequence of XML elements that is suitable for traversing logs, message queues, or other linear information models. The second describes a protocol that allows Web services to subscribe to or accept subscriptions for event notification. The third defines extensions to WS-Transfer that deal primarily with fragment-based access to resources to satisfy the common requirements of WS-ResourceFramework and WS-Management. The fourth describes a general SOAP-based protocol for accessing XML representations of Web service-based resources. The fifth defines how metadata associated with a Web service endpoint can be represented as resources, how metadata can be embedded in endpoint references, and how metadata could be retrieved from a Web service endpoint. Learn more about the Web Services Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-09-22: With more than a dozen implementations of OWL 2 reported, the OWL Working Group has published its OWL 2 Web Ontology Language as a Proposed Recommendation. An ontology is a structured set of terms that a particular community uses for organizing data, such as "title", "author", and "ISBN" for data about books. OWL 2 is a compatible extension to OWL 1, providing additional features for people using ontologies. The OWL 2 document set contains 13 documents, of which 4 are instructional: overview , primer, new features and rationale, and quick reference. The rdf:PlainLiteral datatype, developed for use by OWL 2 and RIF, is also a Proposed Recommendation. Learn more about the Semantic Web. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-09-22: W3C invites people to participate in a Workshop on Access Control Application Scenarios on 17-18 November 2009 in Luxembourg. This Workshop is intended to explore evolving application scenarios for access control technologies, such as XACML. Results from a number of recent European research projects in the grid, cloud computing, and privacy areas show overlapping use cases for these technologies that extend beyond classical intra-enterprise applications. The Workshop, co-financed by the European Commission 7th framework program via the PrimeLife project, is free of charge and open to anyone, subject to review of their statement of interest and space availability. Position papers are due 23 October. See the call for participation for more information. Learn more about the Privacy Activity. (Permalink) (News archive)
2009-09-22: W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the Provenance Incubator Group, whose mission is to provide a state-of-the art understanding and develop a roadmap in the area of provenance for Semantic Web technologies, development, and possible standardization. The group will be chaired by Yolanda Gil. The following W3C Members have sponsored the charter for this group: Renssealaer Polytechnic Institute, Talis Information Limited, University of Manchester, University of Southampton, University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC / ISI), and Vrije Universiteit. Read more about the Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of emerging Web-related technologies. Incubator Activity work is not on the W3C standards track. (Permalink) (News archive)
The W3C UK and Ireland Regional Office is hosted by the STFC at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
Last updated 2010-02-09
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