Adobe, Google, Microsoft Sponsorships Bolster W3C Staffing of HTML5 Work
24 July 2012
| Archive
W3C is pleased to announce commitments from Adobe, Google, and Microsoft for sponsorship funding that will enable W3C to provide additional staffing in support of the HTML Working Group's full range of activities, including editing several specifications and developing tests. These sponsorships will help W3C fill a position announced in June in response to an April call for editors from the HTML Working Group Chairs. In their April email, the Chairs also outlined the group's parallel efforts to finalize a stable HTML5 standard by 2014 and engage with the community on future HTML features. Learn more about the HTML Working Group.
Three Provenance Last Call Drafts Published
24 July 2012
| Archive
The Provenance Working Group published three Last Call Working Drafts today. Provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness.
- PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model introduces the provenance concepts found in PROV and defines PROV-DM types and relations. The PROV data model is domain-agnostic, but is equipped with extensibility points allowing domain-specific information to be included.
- PROV-O: The PROV Ontology expresses the PROV Data Model using the OWL2 Web Ontology Language (OWL2). It provides a set of classes, properties, and restrictions that can be used to represent and interchange provenance information generated in different systems and under different contexts. It can also be specialized to create new classes and properties to model provenance information for different applications and domains.
- PROV-N: The Provenance Notation is introduced to provide examples of the PROV data model: aimed at human consumption, PROV-N allows serializations of PROV instances to be created in a compact manner. PROV-N facilitates the mapping of the PROV data model to concrete syntax, and is used as the basis for a formal semantics of PROV. The purpose of this document is to define the PROV-N notation.
Comments on the Last Call Working Drafts are welcome through 18 September. The group also published a Working Draft of PROV Model Primer, which provides an intuitive introduction and guide to the PROV specification for provenance on the Web. The primer is intended as a starting point for those wishing to create or use PROV data. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.
Last Call: SPARQL 1.1 Query Language
24 July 2012
| Archive
The SPARQL Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Query Language. RDF is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web. This specification defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF. SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also supports aggregation, subqueries, negation, creating values by expressions, extensible value testing, and constraining queries by source RDF graph. The results of SPARQL queries can be result sets or RDF graphs. Comments are welcome through 21 August. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.
W3C Report on Using Open Data: Policy Modeling, Citizen Empowerment, Data Journalism
20 July 2012
| Archive
As part of its ongoing commitment to eGovernment
and its participation in the EU-funded Crossover Project, W3C ran a
very successful workshop last month in Brussels titled Using Open Data: policy modeling, citizen empowerment, data
journalism. Today W3C published the Workshop report, which summarizes discussions about the interplay between open government data, citizens and policy makers, challenging certain assumptions sometimes made about open government data.
Several themes emerged from the workshop. For example, social media plays an important route through which governments can access citizen reactions. The combination of open government data and social media data is surely a critical aspect of future policy modeling. Read the full report for more
about discussions of the value chain from raw data, through processing and
interpretation, to data that is of actual use and interest and that can
form the basis of active engagement with citizens. The report links to all papers and slides sets. Read more about W3C's eGovernment Activity.
W3C Identifies how the Web will Transform the Digital Signage Industry
18 July 2012
| Archive
W3C announced today new momentum for making the Web the future interoperable platform for Digital Signage. W3C issued a summary of key topics and use cases for bringing Digital Signage to the Web, as well as a first gap analysis of enhancements to the Web to enable the transformation of the Digital Signage ecosystem. Digital signage covers a spectrum of display sizes and locations, from sports arenas and urban video terminals of every shape, to monitors in elevators, storefront windows, train stations, and public kiosks featuring rich interactivity. In June, an initial opportunity to discuss next-generation Web-based Digital Signage services drew industry stakeholders to a W3C Workshop "All Signs Point to the Web," hosted by NTT. Read the full press release about the Workshop report and join the Web-based Signage Business Group to develop use cases and requirements for standardization.
