Mission | Activities | Historical
Nearby: People of the T & S Domain.
Working at the intersection of Web technology and public policy, the Technology and Society Domain's goal is to augment existing Web infrastructure with building blocks that assist in addressing critical public policy issues affecting the Web. Our expectation is not to solve policy problems entirely with technology, but we do believe that well-designed technical tools can lead to policy approaches that are more consistent with the way the Web should operate. The Semantic Web is an important component in this endeavor, as it provides the means for various entities to instrument their interactions through formal specifications of vocabularies describing relevant policies, rules and resources. Semantic Web technologies will enable our machines to assist users in exercising more control over their online environment and interactions.
From the introduction of the eGovernment Activity Statement:
October 2013 Work conducted under The eGovernment Activity has ended or is now nearing the end of its charter. See the highlights section for the current situation.
eGovernment refers to the use of the Web or other information technologies by governing bodies to interact with their citizenry, between departments and divisions, and between governments themselves.
The eGov Interest Group (recently closed) was chartered to build and strengthen the community of people who use or promote the use of W3C technologies to improve Government. The group was to identify and discuss essential areas of technology and related policy issues. Such discussions occurred, amongst other places, on its mailing list, in teleconference seminars, and at face-to-face gatherings. On topics with sufficient interest and motivated participants, the group was able to form task forces to produce documents and otherwise reach out to relevant communities.
The Gov Linked Data (GLD) Working Group is chartered to provide standards and other information which help governments around the world publish their data as effective and usable Linked Data using Semantic Web technologies. The group is to collect and make available information about government Linked Data activities around the world. It will use that information and the experience of its participants to develop W3C Recommendations for Best Practices and for RDF Vocabularies necessary for publication of government data in RDF, as Linked Data. Concurrently with this Working Group, W3C chartered the eGovernment Interest Group for broad community discussion of government use of the Web.
Read more on the eGovernment Activity home page.
Sandro Hawke is the Activity Lead.
The Activity includes this group:
From the introduction of the Patent Policy Activity Statement:
The Patent Policy Activity's goal is to enable W3C to implement and successfully operate the W3C Patent Policy. The policy was put into place in February 2004, and the work of developing and implementing it is complete. It is important that the W3C community have an organized way to monitor application of the policy as well as remain informed about relevant developments in the legal and standards environment.
Read more on the Patent Policy Activity home page.
Rigo Wenning is the Activity Lead.
The Activity includes this group:
From the introduction of the Privacy Activity Statement:
Privacy remains one of the main activities of the Consortium in the area of social responsibility. Privacy has many different aspects in W3C:
- It is a horizontal area as most of W3C's technologies also deal with personal data and thus need to take Privacy into account. Some effort therefore goes into helping other Working Groups like e.g. the Geolocation WG to better address Privacy.
- The Tracking Protection Working Group is specifying the Do Not Track Mechanism under high public scrutiny. Within a politically difficult environment, the Working Group managed to make progress according to the plans. Additional pressures from outside stem from a timescale set by Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Information Society, and the Federal Trade Commission. While the politically simpler Tracking Preference Expression Specification is now very mature, the Specification on Tracking Compliance and Scope is maturing slowly.
- It is a technology area by itself. The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) was a foundational step and remains relevant as a basis for many of the current cutting edge privacy enhancing technologies. Currently, the Tracking Protection Working Group is chartered to improve user privacy and user control by defining mechanisms for expressing user preferences around Web tracking and for blocking or allowing Web tracking elements. The group seeks to standardize the technology and meaning of Do Not Track, and of Tracking Selection Lists.
- Privacy is an area of intense research: For the past 7 years, W3C has participated in EU FP7 research on Privacy. The last project, PrimeLife, had a budget of €11Mio and ended in 2011. In this project, the W3C Team tried to advance in the area of policy languages and social networking. Dave Raggett programmed the Privacy Dashboard, a Firefox Extension now hosted on W3C infrastructure. W3C Team continues to be an actor in the area of privacy research, actively looking for further research funding opportunities.
- Out of the combination of standardization and research, W3C has developed a profile for technology transfer. Members actively engage with privacy advocates and researchers in the public-privacy mailing-list that is run by the Privacy Interest Group.
At least since Alan Westin wrote his famous books
Privacy and Freedom (1967)andDatabanks in a Free Society (1972), Privacy has been a sustained challenge for computer science. Computing provides powerful tools that can be used for the good and for the bad of humankind. W3C has started work on Privacy with P3P and has continued to explore the Privacy challenges since then. The current highlight is the work on Do Not Track. There is no obvious end to the Privacy challenge on the Web. Nearly 10 Years after the completion of the work on P3P, much of the research in the area of privacy, accountability and data handling is still heavily influenced by the P3P 1.0 Recommendation and the P3P 1.1 Working Group Note. Even the Tracking Protection Working Group regularly addresses issues of transparency of data collection that could be solved by P3P rather than by Do Not Track.The very successful PrimeLife project allowed to explore new technologies like anonymous credentials, new policy languages and how to integrate the value of privacy into Specifications. With the Project's support, we were able to organize many interesting workshops:
It can be concluded that people need a venue for general privacy discussions related to the Web. All attempts to limit the discussion to a specific policy language or a very narrowly focused interest were rather detrimental to the overall quality of discussion and the success of the venue. This is now addressed by the Privacy Interest Group that runs the public-privacy mailing-list.
Read more on the Privacy Activity home page.
Rigo Wenning is the Activity Lead.
The Activity includes these groups:
From the introduction of the Security Activity Statement:
Read more on the Security Activity home page.
Wendy Seltzer is the Activity Lead.
The Activity includes these groups:
From the introduction of the Semantic Web Activity Statement:
October 2013 Work conducted under the Semantic Web Activity has ended or is now nearing the end of its charter. See the highlights section for the current situation.
The goal of the Semantic Web initiative is as broad as that of the Web: to create a universal medium for the exchange of data. It is envisaged to smoothly interconnect personal information management, enterprise application integration, and the global sharing of commercial, scientific and cultural data. Facilities to put machine-understandable data on the Web are quickly becoming a high priority for many organizations, individuals and communities.
The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web Activity is an initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) designed to provide a leadership role in defining this Web. The Activity develops open specifications for those technologies that are ready for large scale deployment, and identifies, through open source advanced development, the infrastructure components that will be necessary to scale in the Web in the future.
The principal technologies of the Semantic Web fit into a set of layered specifications. The current components are the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Core Model, the RDF Schema language, the Web Ontology language (OWL), and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). Building on these core components is a standardized query language, SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle"), enabling querying decentralized collections of RDF data. The POWDER recommendations provide technologies to find resource descriptions for specific resources on the Web; descriptions which can be “joined” to other RDF data. The GRDDL and RDFa Recommendations aim at creating bridges between the RDF model and various XML formats, like XHTML. RDFa also plays an important role as a format to add Structured Data to HTML, i.e., as a means to help using Linked Data in Web Applications. The goal of the R2RML language is to provide standard language to map relational data and relational database schemas to RDF and OWL. Finally, the goal of the newly proposed Linked Data Profile Working Group is to provide a “entry level” layer to manage Linked Data file using RESTful, HTTP based API.
Read more on the Semantic Web Activity home page.
Ivan Herman is the Activity Lead.
The Activity includes these groups:
From the introduction of the Digital Publishing Activity Statement:
For centuries, book publishers have used technologies in unforeseen ways to change the world. Whole industries have risen and fallen based on their ability to adapt to change. Today’s digital publishing market is dynamic, fast-changing, and strong. eBooks compete with printed versions, and there is a wide choice of hardware and software available for eBook readers. Journals and magazines are also made available digitally on the Web or in specialized applications and, in some cases, their printed version is even abandoned in favor of a purely digital version. The formats used by eBook readers and tablets for electronic books, magazines, journals and educational resources are largely based on W3C Technologies, such as (X)HTML, CSS, SVG, SMIL, MathML, or various Web API-s. Commercial publishers also rely on W3C technologies in their back-end processing all the way from authoring through to delivering the printed or electronic product and beyond. In general one can say that the Publishing Industry is one of the largest communities relying large palette of W3C technologies.
However, the alignment of the needs of the Publishing Industry and the various W3C recommendations is not perfect. Necessary features may be missing in the W3C documents, or may be in draft only; as a result, for example, EPUB3, the standard for electronic books, introduced its own extensions to cover the needs of publishing. Technical experts of commercial publishers and retailers are not present at the various Working Groups, they do not contribute to the development of the technical solutions they depend on. As a result, requirements of the publishing industry, their use cases, implementation experiences, etc., do not necessarily reach the various technical groups at the W3C in a timely manner, and do not influence the priorities taken by those groups, and the publishing industry has difficulties to be properly informed of the latest direction and changes in the dynamic landscape of new technologies of the Open Web Platform. This leads to fragmentation, interoperability issues, and a disconnect between the Publishing Industry and, for example, the browser world.
The goal of the activity is help overcoming these problems, and to build the necessary bridges between the developers of the Open Web Platform and the Publishing Industry. Through the initiatives taken by this Activity (Workshops, Interest Groups, possibly other types of Groups), as well as an extensive network of contacts with relevant industry consortia and groups (IDPF, BISG, EDItEUR, IPTC, the Daisy Consortium, NISO, etc.) the Activity should ensure that the interests and requirements of the Publishing Industry are known to other groups within the W3C, that experts of commercial publishers take part in the technical work in those groups to move the Open Web Platform forward, and that the Publishing Industry at large is well aware of the latest directions, issues, and priorities at W3C. As a first series of steps three Workshops have been organized (in New York City, in February 2013, in Tokyo, in June 2013, and in Paris, in September 2013) and the Digital Publishing Interest Group has been set up (see also its charter).
Read more on the Digital Publishing Activity home page.
Ivan Herman is the Activity Lead.
The Activity includes this group:
02 April 2003 : OWL Last Call Working Drafts Published, The Web Ontology Working Group has released six Working Drafts, five in Last Call, for the OWL Web Ontology Language 1.0, including the OWL Guide, Overview, Use Cases and Requirements, Semantics and Abstract Syntax, Reference, and Test Cases. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, providing advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management.
19 March 2003: Patent Policy Working Group publishes Proposed Policy: W3C Royalty-Free Patent Policy supported by summary and press release
24 January 2003: RDF Core publishes last call documents, The RDF Core Working Group has released six Last Call Working Drafts : RDF Primer, RDF Test Cases, RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised), RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema, RDF Semantics, and Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Syntax. Also published is a W3C Note, LBase, a framework for specifying Semantic Web languages in a uniform and coherent way.
6 January 2003: Summary Report - W3C Workshop on the Future of P3P
Last modified by $Author: sysbot $ on $Date: 2013-12-06 10:15:47 $
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