W3C UK and Ireland Regional Office

The W3C UK and Ireland Regional Office is hosted by the STFC in the e-science centre at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratorynear Oxford.

For more information (about W3C, membership, etc.), you can contact:

W3C UK and Ireland Office
   Michael Wilson / Brian Matthews
   e-Science centre
   STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
   Harwell Science and Innovation Campus
   Didcot
   OXON OX11 0QX
   +44 (0) 1235 44 6619 or +44 (0) 1235 44 6648
   email: w3c-ral@rl.ac.uk

If you live outside of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, you can contact the closest W3C Office, or one of the W3C Hosts.

STFC

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is a UK government research organisation that provides access to large facilities for UK scienceand technology research. It is responsible for access from the UK to several internationalfacilities (e.g. ESRF and ILL in Grenoble, France) as well as its own facilitiess at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire (which also runs the Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire) and the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire. The facilities include the world's most powerful pulsed laser beam, the world's most powerful pulsed neutron and muon source, and a synchrotron radiation source of ultraviolet light and X-rays - for research in materials structure and interaction.

Nobel prizes have been awarded to STFC facility users for work using the synchrotron (1997 John Walker, Chemistry, F1 ATP Synthase structure) and neutron (1996 Sir Harold Kroto, Chemistry, crystal structures of carbon buckyballs) facilities,as well as previous facilities including the Daresbury Tandem Accelerator (1988 Robert Huber, Chemistry, determination of the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre).

In order to operate world class science facilities, the STFC provides an exceptional informationtechology infrastructure so that users throughout the world can collaboratively design andsteer experiments, as well as access, model and visualise data in a secure environment.Historically, RAL hosted the world's most powerful computer in 1964; the most powerful computer, and thefirst non-US computer, connected to the ARPAnet (now the Internet) in 1973; and hosted one of the first 50 web sites in the world in 1992. Today's IT infrastructure includes a 1 petabyte datastore as a CERN LHC Tier 1 regional center, 1Gb/s network connections to each site, a world top 20 supercomputer (HPCx)hosted at the Daresbury Laboratory and the UK national Grid service for e-science. In order to maintain such an infrastructure which isboth secure and open to interoperate with the hundreds of institutions that use our facilities, CCLRC undertakes anactive IT research and standardisation programme to ensure that commercial products are competitively available at commodity prices to meet our requirements.

STFC and W3C

STFC has been involved in Web technology, and its open standardisation, since its first appearance. In 1992 STFC RAL was among the first 50 sites in the world to host a web server. In 1994, when the interoperability of the Web was under threat from commercial interests, STFC were active in the establishment of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to facilitate common standards for the Web to be used by manufacturers in order to meet user requirements, and was one of the first 20 members.

In 1997 STFC established the first national office of W3C as the W3C UK and Ireland Office which it still hosts in order to encourage adoption of W3C recommendations. The most significant impact of this encouragement has been in the inclusion of W3C recommendations in the UK Government Interoperability Framework by the Office of the e-envoy in the Cabinet Office, to ensure their adoption by UK public sector bodies. Additionally, the Disability Commissioner who has responsibility to implement the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (PartIII) that includes Web accessibility has considered the W3C Accessibility guidelines as a standard for interpreting that legislation. STFC is a member of the ERCIM EEIG which has acted as the European host for W3C since 2002, being responsible for all W3C activity in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

In addition to promoting W3C recommendations to facilitate the interoperability of the Web, STFC has also initated the development of several technical recommendations themselves: PNG as a standard for bitmap graphics that is not encumbered by patents; SVG as a standard for vector graphics; SMIL as a standard for integrating multimedia over the web; and most recently SKOS as a representation for term lists and thesauri.