Planet Web Standards

I chatted recently with Olivier Thereaux, Yves Raimond (senior technologist in R&D), and Silver Oliver (data architect) of the BBC about the Web, publishing, and linked data.

Ian: The BBC is prolific and large. How do you view yourselves?

Silver: The BBC is primarily a broadcasting organization. Content is developed or commissioned within different editorial domains (such as News or Music or Sports) then distributed through diverse channels (TV, Radio, web, apps, etc). This fragmentation exists also on the web, with development of individual sites being largely delegated to dedicated teams.

Ian: How do you move beyond silos?

Yves: We have a lot of data that we are now using to draw connections among various BBC TV and radio programs and entities in other domains, like music or nature. We also expose the corresponding data. For example the programmes site exposes data views giving details about all the music tracks played in a given radio programme, and those details link to (and draw from) artist profiles on the BBC's music site… which themselves are also available as data views.

Olivier: We also reuse data that's available on the Web (e.g., from musicbrainz and wikipedia). Because the public is curating the information they can update it more rapidly than we could on our own. In a way, the Web is our Content Management System.

Ian: What are you using to aggregate and expose the data?

Yves: For the programmes and music site we use a relational database internally but then we expose the information in RDF.

Olivier: And we benefit from the ways that people have innovated around the RDF data we expose. When people play with the interfaces and massage the data, we can build on their experience.

Ian: Why not use RDF internally?

Yves: I think the main reason is that the people who originally built these sites site were unaware of RDF, or were concerned about using an unfamiliar technology on such a big project. But we use it with other projects.

Ian: How has your uses of data affected reporting?

Silver: In the past our editorial efforts have been captured in whole HTML documents. This causes problems for reuse in new data views and across platforms and applications (including IPTV). The key is in working with existing editorial workflows to capture a sub-set of machine readable information. In its simplest form this might be a byline and small number of tags the story is about.

Ian: How do reporters use the data to make connections between stories?

Silver: Connections have always happened, but it didn't scale. Linking between sports and news was a manual process and reliant on a journalist's knowledge of BBC output. But now we have rich data models behind the scenes. These models help the BBC editorial staff represent their understanding of the world and our audience's interests, and let us make connections in a scalable fashion.

Olivier: The data is a substrate that pre-populates a lot of the site, and then journalists can focus on the stories and not re-entering the data bits.

Silver: In sport, for example, we pay for the sport data (fixtures, results and statistics) then we write stories about match reports, and tagging ensures that everything gets linked properly. That's how we built the sites for the 2010 world cup or the 2012 olympics.

Ian: Do the reporters add data to the system directly?

Silver: Yes, we ask them to tag the stories they pull together so that we can put those stories into different contexts (or aggregations). We were quite happy to realize the natural curatorial process was already happening, we just needed to give people a way to capture data.

Ian: You mentioned buying and using data from various sources, including commercial ones. Do you make use of data provenance information?

Yves: We need to be very transparent about where our data comes from. Our reporters, partners, official organisations, sometimes our audience too.

Olivier: There is an interesting tension between making use of provenance information and ensuring user privacy. These days people expect to receive personalized content. To achieve that we make use of "attention data": what you watch or like. We have been looking at how to guarantee that we uphold privacy while at the same time asking for the minimal amount of information to tailor the best experience. That's probably less about "Do Not Track" and closer to the spirit of W3C's older P3P technology. On the other hand, we want to know whether information is reliable. This is challenging for user-generated content in particular: who is the user? how much do we trust them?

Ian: Do you think making provenance information available to readers can help digital literacy?

Silver: We had an interesting debate internally whether to include links from health stories to the journals that published the original research. Some felt that readers would not be interested in the links or would find the research complex. Others encouraged the links so that the community could respond to our articles with their own interpretations, including challenging the articles from various angles. This, in turn, would generate more discussion and perspectives from a much larger audience.

Ian: How did it turn out?

Silver: In stories about politics we have begun to include links to relevant legislation. And we are exploring how to extend the linking to pull in data from these sources to weave into BBC story-telling. For example data about committees that commented on bills, which members of parliament commented, and so on. These data models allow us to make more connections among stories, as we discussed earlier.

Ian: This sounds like a linked data project!

Silver: Internally we have wholesale signed up for and understood the value of linked data as way to manage our organizational complexity. We will draw data from various sources and use RDF to stitch them together. We can make use of the information in ways we could not do before because it was either too costly or unmanageable. Semantic Web technology is now core to our strategy as an enterprise.

Ian: Have you measured cost savings by using Semantic Web technology?

Silver: It's still too early to say. There were costs associated with our initial projects, since we needed to acquire expertise. But we have since been able to roll out highly trafficked BBC content using Semantic Web technology.

Ian: Thank you all so much for your time!

The new mobile Web training course launched last February was so well received (full course!) that we are announcing a new session before this summer. The "Mobile Web 2: Applications" online course will be 6 weeks long, from 11 June to 22 July 2012, and registration is now open.

Based on students' feedback, our trainer Marcos Caceres will teach an updated program which covers all the important aspects of mobile Web application development: basics of creating a Web application that runs on mobile devices, HTML5 elements and new CSS properties, powerful Javascript APIs and libraries, and finally how to make Web apps available off-line.

This course is also looking at device APIs (geolocation, device orientation, touch events) as well as looking at what new standards are coming from the W3C.

We encourage you to follow this course to learn how to develop open mobile Web apps with HTML5, accessible from any browser on any system. As Tim Berners-Lee urged conference participants in his last month WWW2012's keynote: “The solution is in your hands: develop Web apps, not apps!”

In summary:

• W3C Course: "Mobile Web 2: Applications"
• Start Date: 11 June 2012
• Duration: 6 weeks
• Trainer: Marcos Caceres
• Early bird rate: 195€ - register soon!
• Full Price: 225€ (after May 25)

Take a look at the course sections on “Who Should Attend?” and “What do I need?” to find out about the target audience and pre-requesites for this course. Looking forward to welcoming you soon online!

As Mobile Web Initiative Activity Lead, and through my involvement in the European MobiWebApp project, I spent a lot of my time looking at what it takes to make the Web on mobile a strong platform for developing new applications and services.

The Web promises an interoperable platform across devices and operating systems; meanwhile, a regular issue that most Web developers face when targeting mobile devices is that support for a given set of features varies a lot from one device to another. The W3C CoreMob Community Group tries to reduce that difficulty by defining set of Web technologies that developers expect to find on mobile devices.

Three weeks from now, a series of event in Paris organized by the European Mosquito project in collaboration with MobiWebApp will bring its own contributions to the topic.

First, on May 29th, a single-day workshop will offer the perspectives of a variety of players on the current fragmentation challenges of the mobile Web, see what solutions are under consideration and possibly identify issues that need further attention.

Then, on May 30th and 31st, we will gather interested Web developers to explain the potential of HTML5 on mobile through a half-day training, followed by a day and a half of interoperability testing: with more than 40 mobile devices available, both old and recent, developers will be asked to test their applications and services on mobile devices, and identify the main interoperability issues they encounter in the process.

Registration is free, but the number of seats is limited, so register on-line as soon as possible!

The fourth WebAIM screen reader user survey is now available at http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey4/. The survey results provide invaluable data for web developers, disability advocates, and standards bodies. Please take the survey and spread the word. You can view the results of our previous surveys at: Original Survey – January 2009 Survey #2 – September 2009 Survey [...]

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 became a W3C Recommendation (code for “finalized specification”) in December 2008. I am proud to have my name listed as a contributor to WCAG 2.0. All of WebAIM’s current clients are working toward WCAG conformance. None of them are seriously considering only the antiquated Section 508, the update of [...]

It's time to take stock of the last two months in Do Not Track. Since the White House announcement in February, a lot has happened, both in the policy conversations that surround the work in the W3C Tracking Protection Working Group, and in the working group itself.

Late last fall, the W3C Tracking Protection Working Group had published extended outlines of the Tracking Preference Expression and Tracking Compliance and Scope specifications as First Public Working Drafts. Tracking Preference Expression is the specification that lays the technical groundwork for a Do Not Track header, and related JavaScript APIs, to permit users to express a preference not to be tracked online. The Tracking Compliance and Scope specification says what the tracking preference actually means, and what Web sites are expected to do when they encounter a user with a preference to not be tracked.

After the group's meeting in late January in Brussels, we followed up with a more substantive second round of drafts.

Since then, we've seen vigorous discussion of what Do Not Track should be, both within the Working Group, and on the policy stage. The White House's announcement of the US government's privacy initiative in February, and the publication of the FTC's report on Protecting Consumer Privacy were the most prominent events to call out the importance of Do Not Track for the future of privacy online. And in Europe, the debate about the "Cookie Directive" has been heating up, as we approach the end of Neelie Kroes' one year challenge for industry to agree on Do Not Track.

The Tracking Preference Expression specification has been on a steady path toward completion since the beginning of the Group. We have agreement that the group is pursuing an approach that permits three different Do Not Track states: A user has explicitly consented to tracking; a user has explicitly chosen not to be tracked; and, a user has expressed no preference. With this approach, the expected site behavior when users have not expressed a preference would not be covered by the specifications developed by the W3C Tracking Protection Working Group. In the absence of regulatory, legal, or other requirements, servers may interpret the lack of an expressed tracking preference as they find most appropriate for the given user, particularly when considered in light of the user's privacy expectations and cultural circumstances.

And we now have the definition of a mechanism that can be used by sites to tell user agents whether they comply with Do Not Track, and we have worked out most of a JavaScript API that permits sites and users to communicate about Do Not Track.

For the Compliance and Scope specification, we came out of Brussels with no fewer than five competing proposals on core aspects of the work.

Fast forward to the outcomes of the group's latest face-to-face meeting (minutes) in Washington, DC -- thanks, Microsoft, for hosting 60 people on K Street! The momentum of the conversation is now focused on two proposals, and we are seeing tentative agreements on a number of important topics:

• The fundamental shape of first and third parties (think publishers and advertisers). First parties will have fewer responsibilities out of Do Not Track than third parties.
• How the specification deals with service providers that act on behalf of another party.
• The basic idea that certain data can be collected even with Do Not Track active, to support essential business needs.
• The basic notion that server logs can be held in raw form for a limited amount of time.
• Data that's not linked to a person or their user agent (e.g., the collective behavior of a sufficiently large set of people) can be used.

But some important disagreements remain for the group to work through: What is the exact extent of a party? And, for permitted uses of data, what exact mechnanisms are permissible?

Finally, some areas that will be important for the real-life shape of Do Not Track are out of scope for W3C's work. Particularly noteworthy: The Tracking Protection Working Group's charter explicitly rules user interface out of scope. UI is an area in which different browser vendors differentiate within the marketplace, and at times, it will depend on localization and other choices well outside the realm of what is suitably discussed in a standards working group.

Next up, then, hard work for everybody involved, and agreements on the remaining issues. We look forward to more agreements, resolutions, and progress over the months of May and June, leading up to the group's next meeting in late June.

When the HTML5 specifications advanced to Last Call, we wrote in this forum HTML5: Are We There Yet?. We're posting here today to give an update on progress made with the HTML5 specifications, and where we're heading next.

The HTML Working Group Chairs have developed a draft stabilization plan with a timeline for advancing the HTML5 specifications to W3C Recommendation. Given some substantive changes based on feedback, the Chairs plan to start a second Last Call review for the HTML5 specifications. Some further details:

• As part of the plan to move the HTML5 specifications through the second Last Call round and beyond, the HTML Working Group chairs have begun a search for new editors for the Recommendation-track versions of the HTML5 and HTML Canvas 2D Context specifications; for details, see the full announcement.
• At the same time, we plan for standardization of the next version of HTML to take place in the HTML Working Group. W3C will be rechartering the group so that it may begin that work on new features for that next version in parallel with work on taking the HTML5 specifications to Recommendation.

We also measure progress through implementations, market adoption, updated publications, and test-suite contributions:

• The implementation progress on HTML5 continues to be exceptionally strong; shipping versions of all major browsers now have good support for many key HTML5 features, and the development versions of those browsers have even better support. Authoring tools continue to innovate and improve their HTML5 support as well.
• Market adoption of HTML5 also continues to be strong—in a wide variety of areas: Web-based gaming, major media sites, mobile content, and much more.
• The HTML Working Group recently published ten updated Working Drafts, including a document that lists the changes that have been made to the HTML5 specifications since the published of the initial Last Call Working Draft in May 2011.
• We continue to get test submissions for the HTML5 specifications, and we welcome test submissions of any and all tests that help determine conformance to the specifications and that help lead to better interoperability.

Yesterday we closed the W3C Incubator Activity. We had launched it in February 2006, with the mission to foster rapid development, on a time scale of a year or less, of new Web-related concepts. Target concepts included innovative ideas for specifications, guidelines, and applications that are not yet clear candidates as Web standards developed through the more thorough process afforded by the W3C Recommendation Track.

In its 6 years of operation, W3C Members started 28 Incubator Groups. A third of them became W3C Working Groups and a handful of them transitioned to Community Groups, which design was informed by the Incubator Activity itself.

The Incubator Activity provided the valuable experience on which we built W3C Community Groups and Business Groups, a more solid and more inclusive program.

Anyone can propose a Community Group, anyone may join at no cost, groups start quickly, participants contribute materials under a Royalty-Free patent license and permissive copyright, groups have no chartered end date, W3C provides participants a more useful (and growing) set of collaborative tools, and more. In 8 months, the extended W3C community has launched more than 75 Community Groups.

I took over leadership from Mauro Nuñez in early 2010. I launched 10 Incubator Groups and helped 15 of them throughout their completion. I was glad to be the W3C interface for the Incubator Group participants and enjoyed working with them. So yesterday I edited the Incubator Activity homepage for the last time with a twinge of emotion.

The end of one thing being the beginning of another (or the continuation, in this case), you can find me as one of the W3C contacts for W3C Community Groups and Business Groups, through the Community Council.

The Open Web Platform weekly

HTML5

translate attribute - no more conflicts

Adam Barth noted that there was a conflict between the HTML5 translate attribute and some pages on Orange Web site. An Orange implementer chimed in to say that they will remove it from their properties. It was a "legacy" feature.

location.parentOrigin for Widgets

Adam Barth sent a proposal for a location.parentOrigin to enable a different behaviour for embedded widgets in a Web page.

Canvas

ImageSmoothing and more

The 2D Canvas specification will be updated (once the issue 201 is resolved) to add ImageSmoothingEnabled on drawImage() method in case of resizing. Once you have bitmap image defined by Canvas and you resize this image, two behaviors are possible: Big pixels or smoothing the image. This is part of a long list of additions to Canvas

WebGL

Endianness of typed arrays which is related to the performance of WebGL and the uneven distribution of computers that developers and users have access to.

WebApps

Registration mechanisms for Web Intents

Ian Hickson proposes to unify the registration mechanisms for registerProtocolHandler(), registerContentHandler(), and Web Intents.

Technical Architecture Group

Privacy by Design in APIs

Robin Berjon and Daniel Appelquist have been working on a new TAG finding about Privacy by Design in APIs to provide some background on the threats to users' privacy that Javascript APIs help create on the Web. It also provides some strategies to mitigate such threats at the API design level.

This column is written by Karl Dubost, working in the Developer Relations team at Opera Software.

The Open Web Platform is expanding rapidly, and with it, the pace of new ideas for the Web. We launched Community Groups as a scalable way for Members and non-Members alike to come together around their Web interests.

This grassroots approach to introducing new ideas is necessary to ensure that W3C's agenda remains highly relevant to industry, but it may not always be sufficient. Longer term projects or efforts that may require significant resources demand a more strategic approach.

In recent weeks W3C created task forces to develop strategic proposals for eleven topics. Six would affect W3C's technical agenda:

• Social networking standards
• Cloud computing standards
• Digital publishing standards
• Payment standards
• Digital marketing on the Web
• Network usage good practices

Three would strengthen our developer outreach:

• Strategic developer relations
• Developer certification
• Updated mobileOK checker

Two relate to organizational growth:

• Working Group infrastructure
• W3C Twentieth Anniversary in 2014

The eleven task forces are underway and are developing proposals with community participation. The W3C Membership will devote time to the proposals at its May Advisory Committee meeting, so the task forces benefit from the input of the entire Membership of W3C. The task forces will refine the proposals in June. In July, W3C management will prioritize them and allocate resources to a portion of them.

To learn more about the proposals, please see our public wiki.

After introducing the new W3C startup program in February, I am very pleased to welcome our first Startup Members:

• Joshfire in France;
• Data2Type in Germany;
• Temesis in France.
• SC IQ Tech Labs in Romania.

These four first Startup members demonstrate the merit of the new program and we anticipate many more will follow.

The Startup program allows them, among other Membership benefits, to influence the development of Web technologies, increase their global visibility on the market, expand their interactions with the Web community.

Welcome!

The Open Web Platform weekly summary with HTML, ARIA, ITS, Webapps, DOM and Canvas. See also Anne's blog post about Path API for SVG and Canvas.

HTML5

HTML 4 and HTML5

There is a thread on proposing to update HTML 4 to inform readers about HTML5 being developed. Not everyone agrees.

HTML5 microdata and ITS

Jirka Kosek is working on a mapping of ITS vocabulary to HTML5 and microdata. ITS is a way to express that a content should not be translated and keep as-is. It also gives the possibility to give specific instructions for localization. A discussion started on what would be the most appropriate way of doing it.

ARIA role in HTML5

What does that mean for implementations when there is a redundancy of markup with the same semantics such as in the ARIA case for button.

<button role="button" aria-pressed="true">
<button aria-pressed="true">

Implementations seems to behave differently on these two examples of code.

startTime for videos

When using the video API, startOffsetTime seems to be misunderstood by people and then barely implemented, Odin Hørthe Omdal (Opera Software) is proposing to have a startTime which is a not normalized to UTC value. This would enable to do things like

startTime + currentTime

to get the actual timestamp that the stream is at, at that point.

Canvas Elliptical Arcs

You could already draw circular arcs with canvas. A new property to draw Elliptical arcs has been added to Canvas. We can now easily draw spaceships orbits.

WebApps

Meeting in the Silicon Valley

The Webapps Working Group is meeting on May 1-2, 2012 in Mountain View, USA. The agenda is being worked on.

Undo Manager

Ryosuke Niwa (webkit) pointed out that there was an issue in the Undo Manager in nested transactions and execCommand on

<div id="um1" undoscope><span id="um2" undoscope></span></div>
<script>
...
um1.undoManager.transact({ // transaction 1
executeAutomatic: function() {
um2.undoManager.transact({ // transaction 2
  executeAutomatic: function () {
    um2.appendChild(document.createTextNode('In um2')); // statement 1
    um1.appendChild(document.createTextNode('In um1')); // statement 2
  }
}
});
</script>

NodeList

Ojan Vafai (Chromium) proposed to deprecate NodeList.

Dynamic NodeLists have a significant memory and performance cost. Static NodeLists are basically just under-powered arrays. We should just return Node arrays from any new APIs that return a list of Nodes.

WebMessaging and Workers Last Call

WebMessaging allows you to pass messages in between window contexts in a browser. The deadline for commenting on WebMessaging Last Call is April 3, 2012. There is also a last call for the Workers specification.

DOM

String encoding and decoding API

Jonas Sicking (Mozilla) mentioned the need for an API for encoding/decoding ArrayBuffers into text. But it was mentioned that maybe a better solution was to build on the work of Joshua Bell, a string encoding and decoding API, separable from the core typed array API. The discussion is going on.

SVG

New SVG charter draft

A new SVG charter draft has been submitted for review by the public. The chairs will be Erik Dahlström (Opera), Cameron McCormack (Mozilla). It includes the definition of a markup syntax, compatible with XML and HTML5 parsing, an API compatible with the DOM, and style properties.

HTTP

Christian Schmidt proposed to have a new HTTP header, Window-Target:, to cope with the time when we do not know yet if the link should be opened in _blank or _self at the moment the user clicks on the link.

This column is written by Karl Dubost, working in the Developer Relations team at Opera Software.

This past month WebAIM staff had an opportunity to attend CSUN 2012. As always, CSUN was a great opportunity to see what others are doing, share what we’ve been up to, and connect with good friends in the accessibility world. Prior to the conference, the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) hosted an all-day meeting to [...]

The Open Web Platform weekly.

HTML5

Modal dialogs

Jochen Eisinger (Chromium) made a proposal for non-modal versions of modal prompts. Basically, when users have to interact with a modal dialog, it blocks the UI for all tabs. People might want to interact with other websites and still not replying right aways to the modal dialog.

Pixel Ratio for canvas

Edward O'Connor (Apple) is asking for a new feature for canvas to store pixel ratio. window.devicePixelRatio expresses the ratio of device pixels to CSS pixels. This new feature would express the ratio of backing store pixels to CSS pixels.

WebApps

Notifications for disconnected Web Apps

Brian Sullivan (ATT) is pushing for adding to the Web stack about for the server to send notifications to the Web apps even when disconnected. In the case Server Sent Events, it is still the client which makes the initial request and there is no way for the server to connect again to the client if the connection has been lost.

Pre-rendering the pages

Gavin Peters is discussing the issues related with the preRendering feature of Chrome browser. There is a timeout of 30s which annoys some sites. It is also not possible for Web sites to get statistics on the benefits (or not) of the feature.

Shadow DOM

Dimitry Glazkov (Chromium) has given an update about the Shadow DOM and HTML Templates.

HTTP

HTTP Working Group is meeting in Paris this week and will be starting work on HTTP/2.0. Microsoft has published a strawman proposal for HTTP 2.0. Previously Google has also submitted SPDY as an input document for discussions. There is a thread about what to expect of HTTP/2.0.

Andrew Oakley pointed out that some browsers seem to not follow the Expiry date for caching images.

This column is written by Karl Dubost, working in the Developer Relations team at Opera Software.

Every year, since 2006, the W3C Spain Office and its host, CTIC, organize W3C Day, an event on Web standards for the Spanish community. The 2012 edition was held in the spectacular city of Granada, Andalusia, and was framed as a parallel track in the Open Source World Conference, an event which gathered together more than 8000 people for a couple of days.

W3C Day was initially created as a private forum, only for W3C Members. Nowadays, Members are still the protagonists, but in a public event. All of them are invited to share their professional experiences, challenges, and thoughts taking part either in panels or giving talks. The speakers attracted over 200 attendees from all around Spain, most of them with a high technical profile. As in previous years, the event served as a forum to discuss common topics regarding standards, and Web technologies in general. The Open Web Platform was the cornerstone of the conference, complemented with a recurrent and interesting subject: Open Government Data, which is in the limelight at all levels of the Spanish public administration.

The Open Web Platform

Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, MWI Activity Lead, opened the conference with a great keynote on HTML5. He showed some striking demos on Mobile Web Apps developed using HTML5 and some Javascript code. According to the public, Dom’s talk was extremely eye-opening and motivating.

Linked Data and the Semantic Web technologies also had an important slot in the agenda. After Dom’s keynote, Alberto Abarca (Linkatu), presented some interesting use cases of Linked Data in industry. Linkatu is a success story of a start-up providing eHealth solutions based on Linked Data.

A novelty of this year’s edition was the call for lightning talks announced weeks before. Eight 5-minute talks were presented by enthusiastic developers, students, professors, and professionals from different sectors. An interesting experience, because this served as a bridge between the public and the speakers.

Open Government Data in Spain

The Open Government Data session was particularly interesting. Seven well-known panelists from different Spanish public administrations and other sectors related to Public Sector Information (PSI) reuse broke the ice writing provocative posts on their blogs some days before. On these posts, all the speakers brought up awkward questions and answers which served with preparation for the panel.

Carlos de la Fuente, Head of Technology Services at CTIC moderated the panel which represented a picture full of Linked-Data stars and technical commitment, but lacking political impulse in Spain. Of course, politicians' minds are changing and there are exceptions such as some recent announcements of transparency and PSI reuse laws in Spain. In this regard, Emilio García, Technical Advisor at the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Public Administration, emphasized the recently issued Royal Decree on Reuse of PSI, which urges Spanish public bodies to write and support a strategy on reuse of PSI. María Jesús Fernández (Zaragoza City Council), Alberto Ortiz de Zárate (Basque Government), and Cristina Puente (Andalusia Government), who lead mature OGD initiatives, presented the issued they are faced with. To complement the discussion of public sector representatives, in the panel were Jorge Campanillas, expert on ICT legislation, and José L. Marín, CEO at Euroalert, a company which processes public procurement information from different European administrations.

The need of a coordinated Open Government Data community in Spain was one of the conclusions that arose from this session. This was a serious proposal, and after some conversations with the speakers and other stakeholders, the W3C Spain Office decided to launch a public group, where government bodies, citizens, and industries are invited to discuss about legal issues (definition of licenses, and terms of use), technical challenges (definition of common taxonomies, vocabularies, and repositories to store them), and more. This group is in an early stage, and focused on Spain, but further actions are being considered. Why not a W3C Community Group on OGD in Spain?

Session on Government Linked Data

Most of the panelists of the day explained the benefits of exposing public information in Linked Data. The last session was focused on how a developer may reuse that data. Asunción Gómez, Head of the Ontology Engineering Group (UPM), presented several Linked-Data-based applications, some of them using public administration data, and others industrial data. Her speech was complemented by a short workshop on reusing Government Linked Data: SPARQL, libraries, and visualization/mashup tools.

During the W3C Day in Spain, some people demanded more technical training events. Although the next edition of the W3C Day is far away, the W3C Spanish Office will hold a workshop on HTML5 in a couple of months. Stay tuned!

Only a few years ago, governments began to open their data. Portals like data.gov and (it's Dutch equivalent) data.overheid.nl are just two examples of the many similar services that have been established in jurisdictions around the world to make public sector data available directly on the Web. Often this is in the form of CSV files but at least some is available as linked data. As strong advocates of the publishing of data in this format, W3C set up the Government Linked Data Working Group in 2011. Its charter is divided in two parts.

First it is defining a set of Best Practices in this area — guidelines designed to make it easier for the public sector to make more of its data available as 5 star linked data. The document is evolving and, like most W3C standards, the editor's draft is publicly visible.

Secondly, the GLD WG is chartered to standardize or, where necessary, create vocabularies that help to increase interoperability of data sets. The choice of vocabulary terms can make all the difference between data sets being interoperable and impenetrable. If you are describing a creative work the chances are you'll use Dublin Core's terms for things like title and creator. But where are the equivalent stable vocabularies for public sector data?

Several exist and are in use, but governments generally require a level of reassurance on the quality and stability of vocabularies that only standards bodies can provide. It is for this reason that the Organization Ontology and Data Cube Vocabulary — both in use by the government that commissioned Epimorphics to create them (UK) — are being put through the W3C Recommendations Track. Joining these two is DCAT, the Data Catalog vocabulary, in widespread use amongst existing data portals (it's used in CKAN for example).

Alongside this work, in September last year W3C began working with PricewaterhouseCoopers on the development of a number of vocabularies on behalf of the European Commission under it's ISA Programme (see promotional video). Work on three 'Core Vocabularies' is now close to completion:

• people — a vocabulary for describing a natural person (things like name, family name, date and place of birth etc.);
• business — a vocabulary for describing legal entities as found in company registers;
• location — geographical locations and addresses, noting the importance of interoperability with the EU's INSPIRE Directive on spatial information.

These vocabularies are being developed to a good degree of maturity by working groups comprising EU Member State representatives and others.

But in this field, as in so many others, we quickly run into the problem of discoverability. Not just discovering what vocabularies are available, but which ones are being used by others. What code lists are available and being used? What standards should I choose? To help solve this, a further important vocabulary is being developed. Called the Asset Description Metadata Standard, ADMS, it provides terms for describing these Semantic Assets — the infrastructure elements needed to make data interoperable. It's designed for use in portals that serve public sector data publishers such as Denmark's Digitaliser, vocab.data.gov and the EU's own Semantic Asset portal Joinup which launched recently.

Following agreement between the W3C and the European Commission, and the chairs and members of the working group itself, ADMS and the three ISA Programme Core Vocabularies will join DCAT, the Organization Ontology and Data Cube Vocabulary as Government Linked Data WG work items. Furthermore, we expect to enrich our own RDF description of W3C TR space using ADMS in the near future.

This does not mean that W3C is rubber stamping any of this work. On the contrary, the "completed" vocabularies will be published by the GLD WG as First Public Working Drafts and, like any other draft, they may change through working group agreement, public comment and/or implementation experience. Furthermore, all four of these ISA Programme outputs are within the scope of the existing WG's charter. In other words, the working group can achieve more of what W3C has already asked it to do by taking the ISA Programme's work as input to its own.

What really makes this such a positive development in my mind though is that the combined efforts of a variety of public administrations look as they're coming together to create stable, well tested infrastructure elements that will maximize the interoperability of open data sets. It's no more than another step along the road but, I hope, an important one.

A final thought. With so much effort going in to publishing data and making it interoperable, what are people doing with it? That's the subject of a workshop we're running as part of another project, Crossover, in June: Using Open Data: policy modeling, citizen empowerment, data journalism.

A long overdue Open Web Platform weekly summary, check also Anne's blog post about http+aes and control Referer as well as the new API canvas features.

HTML5

There is a joint meeting in the Silicon Valley (California) on May 1-4, 2012. If you are around at this time, you may want to join the discussions. This meeting would be in addition to the TPAC 2012 in November (Lyon, France).

Quirks Mode had never really been documented in the past. Simon Pieters (Opera) decided to write a specification for it.

The big thread these last few weeks was about Encryption mechanism for media in HTML (or what people summarize with DRM). Google, Microsoft and Netflix proposed a document on Encrypted Media Extensions v0.1 that generated a series of thread. Some companies and organizations are worried about the possibility for opensource software to implement a reasonable and performant solutions.

Web Apps

Should Web Apps be installable? The same way you download an application on your system? You might want to be able to download an app and install it on your machine as an individual package.

MS2ger is writing a specification about DOM Parsing and Serialization. It is not clear yet where it would be published in the HTMLWG or WebApps WG.

HTTP

http+aes is a proposal for a new scheme in HTML specification with the intent of giving another layer of security when connecting through HTTP. The HTTP Working Group discussed the issues around http+aes.

A first draft of SPDY has been published by Belshe (Twist) and Peon (Google). SPDY is a protocol which was initially created by Google and implemented on their servers and Chrome and has the intent of removing some of the roundtrips of HTTP connections. It also tries to compress the headers across connections. There is a prototype implementation in Firefox and it is being deployed in twitter.

Julian Reschke maintains a list of issues about Encoding Parameter for HTTP Basic Authentication

HTML+RDFa

Manu Sporny proposed to have href, src, rev and rel attributes to all elements in HTML5. rel and rev are accepted on all elements, but not href and src as mentioned in the bug report.

Web Architecture

Why the tag is publishing Findings, musing documents about Web Architecture? Noah Mendelsohn found in the archives a message from Tim Bray giving context about TAG Findings.

This column is written by Karl Dubost, working in the Developer Relations team at Opera Software.

As reported in the Semantic Web Activity Blog, a new Interest Group Note has just been published, documenting the extraction algorithm from HTML5+Microdata to RDF. The algorithm replaces the one that was part of an earlier version of the Microdata+HTML5 draft.

In the past few days I worked on an implementation of this extraction algorithm in RDF distiller for microdata. It is still an alpha release, meaning that I am sure it has bugs; but it may be useful nevertheless. Comments are, of course, welcome!

Several months ago I decided to spend some time using a few common, but often overlooked, assistive technologies and then report on my experiences and insights. The first two posts of this series presented my recommendations on designing for users of ZoomText and Dragon NaturallySpeaking. As the final part of this series, I will cover [...]

Karl Groves recently published automated web accessibility test data for many of the Alexa Top 100 web sites. The results paint a rather stark picture of web accessibility. We agree with Karl’s suggestion that while automated testing is not a direct indicator of true accessibility issues, “poor performance in automated testing is strongly correlated with [...]