W3C

To strengthen its relations with industry and research activities in France and Europe, W3C announces today the opening of a W3C Office in France, hosted by Inria (French National Computer Science Research Institute). To mark the launch, the Office is organizing a session on Open Data at the Open World Forum on 22 September in Paris, in cooperation with Inria and Paris City Hall. "Inria has a longstanding commitment to the development of free software and open standards," said Prof. Michel Cosnard, Inria Chairman and CEO. "We have supported W3C's mission since the inception of the Consortium in 1994, notably by hosting W3C's European branch". Read the full press release and learn more about the W3C Offices.

W3C announced today a new standard for the exchange of "digital ink" on the Web. The Ink Markup Language (InkML) Recommendation can be used to store and exchange the output of an electronic pen or stylus as well as handwriting, gestures, sketches, music, and other notations. InkML is part of W3C's ongoing efforts to build One Web available from any device. A host of new applications are now possible thanks to this open standard, such as: pen-based text messaging; handwritten annotation of documents, photos, or other media; collaborative white boards; archiving of hand-written notes; and more efficient approaches to filling out forms. Read the press release and testimonials and learn more about the Web of Devices.

The RDB2RDF Working Group has published two Last Call Working Drafts for bringing relational database information to the Semantic Web: R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language and A Direct Mapping of Relational Data to RDF . The former describes R2RML, a language for expressing customized mappings from relational databases to RDF datasets. Such mappings provide the ability to view existing relational data in the RDF data model, expressed in a structure and target vocabulary of the mapping author's choice. The latter document defines a direct mapping from relational data to RDF. Comments are welcome through 1 November. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) will hold an online symposium for researchers and practitioners to explore web accessibility metrics and develop a roadmap for future research and development. The Call for Papers is open until 1 November 2011. Learn more about the Symposium on Web Accessibility Metrics and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of CSS Device Adaptation. This specification provides a way for an author to specify, in CSS, the size, zoom factor, and orientation of the viewport that is used as the base for the initial containing block. The goal of this specification is to make it easier to design across devices with different viewport sizes. Learn more about the Style Activity.