Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants

Belgium

• Philipp Hoschka gives a talk entitled "W3C's Mobile Web Initiative, 3GWeb and NEM" at the " 5th NEM General Assembly" on Tuesday, 23 October 2007, in Brussels, Belgium.

China

• Ivan Herman gives an invited talk on behalf of the China Office entitled "Semantic Web Adoption" at the "首届中国语义万维网研讨会 (CSWS 2007) (First China Semantic Web Symposium)" on Monday, 19 November 2007, in Beijing, China.
• Ivan Herman gives a talk on behalf of the China Office entitled " What is the Semantic Web?" organized by the Zheijiang University, on Thursday, 22 November 2007, in Hangzhou, China.
• Steve Bratt gives a talk on behalf of the China Office entitled "The World Wide Web Needs World Wide Standards" at the "Open Standards International Conference 2007" on Wednesday, 28 November 2007, in Beijing, China. (see abstract)
  Abstract:

  The World Wide Web is a universal medium, which has already demonstrated an enormous potential to link people and information across a large and expanding portion the globe. Over 1 billion people now browse the Web through their computers, while close to 2 billion have the potential to browse the Web through their mobile phones. The fastest growth in Web usage is within emerging economies. To ensure that there be a single, universal Web, it is imperative that the diverse requirements of the world's citizens are supported by Web technologies. And to ensure that the requirements are supported, it is imperative that the world's experts are involved in the development of Web standards. This presentation will summarize (1) the World Wide Web Consortium's experience in developing the open, royalty-free standards that are the foundation of the Web, and (2) the great opportunities that we see as the Web standards development community expands across the globe.

France

• José Manuel Alonso gives a talk entitled "The increasing importance of Open Web Standards to improve eGovernment" at the "eGovInterop '07" on Wednesday, 10 October 2007, in Paris, France.
• Dominique Hazaël-Massieux gives a talk entitled "L'initiative pour le Web Mobile (The Mobile Web Initiative)" at the "MobileWeb BarCamp Paris " on Saturday, 13 October 2007, in Paris, France.
• Dominique Hazaël-Massieux gives a talk entitled "Bonnes pratiques du Web mobile (Mobile Web Best Practices)" at the "ParisWeb 2007 " on Friday, 16 November 2007, in Paris, France.

Germany

• Klaus Birkenbihl gives a talk on behalf of the Germany and Austria Office entitled "Wege zum Semantischen Web (Ways to the Semantic Web)" at the "4. Kongress Semantic Web und Wissenstechnologien " on Thursday, 18 October 2007, in Darmstadt, Germany.

Italy

• Oreste Signore gives a talk entitled "The Web is more a "social" creation than a technical one..." at the "e-Academy SMAU 2007" on Saturday, 20 October 2007, in Milano, Italy. (see abstract)
  Abstract:

  Basics of accessibility (with reference to upcoming WCAG 2.0) and of Semantic Web are explained. The emphasis is on "access for all" and "share the knowledge"

Korea

• Kangchan Lee gives an invited talk entitled "W3C 표준화 동향 (The Trends of W3C Standardization)" at the "e-Biz 표준화 컨퍼런스 (e-Biz Standardization Conference)" on Friday, 12 October 2007, in Seoul, Korea.
• Michael(tm) Smith gives a talk entitled "The Business Value of Open Standards" at the "2007 E-Biz Conference" on Friday, 12 October 2007, in Seoul, Korea.

Luxembourg

• Thomas Roessler gives a talk entitled "Cross-site access for XMLHttpRequest()" at the "hack.lu" on Saturday, 20 October 2007, in Luxembourg, Luxembourg.

Spain

• Shadi Abou-Zahra gives a talk entitled "How Web Accesibility Guidelines Apply to Design for the Ageing Population" at the "AAATE Conference" on Friday, 5 October 2007, in San Sebastian, Spain.
• Ivan Herman gives a talk entitled "Semantic Web: a Short Introduction" (see abstract) and José Manuel Alonso gives a talk entitled "How to make the most out of eGovernment" (see abstract) at the "“Webelopers Day” of the Internet NG Conference" , on Wednesday, 17 October 2007, in Madrid, Spain.
  Abstract for “Semantic Web: a Short Introduction”:

  Through a simple example, a brief overview of the goals and methodologies of the Semantic Web will be presented. The example will concentrate on one of the major areas of Semantic Web usage, namely data integration. The presentation will also include a number of examples of how the Semantic Web is used in various application, both in academia and in industry.
  Abstract for “How to make the most out of eGovernment”:

  This talk will review some common problems related to eGovernment on the citizen, government and industry sides and will suggest how governments can deliver better and more efficient services through the use of Open Web Standards and specially Semantic Web technologies improving the overall eGovernment experience
• José Manuel Alonso gives a talk entitled "Estándares Abiertos al rescate (Open Standards to the rescue)" at the "Taller de Interoperabilidad e Intercambio de Datos, Tecnimap 2007 (Interoprability and Data Exchange Workshop, Tecnimap 2007)" on Thursday, 29 November 2007, in Gijón, Spain.

The Netherlands

• Steven Pemberton gives an invited talk entitled "A Declarative Approach to Services" at the "Service Oriented Computing Platform Seminar" on Thursday, 15 November 2007, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (see abstract)
  Abstract:

  XForms is a recent technology from W3C. It arises from a redesign of HTML Forms, but despite that history, and its name, it can in fact do much more than just forms. Since it has a memory model, input, output and a calculation engine it is a declarative calculation engine, with direct access to documents and services over the network, making it ideally suited for service-oriented processing. This talk will introduce XForms and its architecture, show its applicability to services, demonstrate XForms in action, and discuss the effect on productivity that declarative approaches have compared with procedural approaches.

UK

• Philipp Hoschka gives a talk entitled "W3C Mobile Web Initiative" at the "Mobile Monday London" on Monday, 8 October 2007, in London, United Kingdom.

USA

• Jim Melton gives an invited talk entitled "Semi-structured data and XML Query " and Michael Sperberg-McQueen gives an invited talk entitled "XML Schema 1.1 and the versioning of XML vocabularies" (see abstract) at the "XML @ Boeing 2007" , on Monday, 15 October 2007, in Seattle, Washington, USA.
  Abstract for “ XML Schema 1.1 and the versioning of XML…”:

  XML offers several advantages over competing formats for data interchange. XML vocabularies can be defined formally, using schema languages (DTDs, XSDL, Relax NG, ...), which in turn makes it possible to find large classes of errors by purely mechanical means. Software to consume valid XML data can be simpler and cheaper to write and maintain, because defensive programming is less necessary.

  And XML's explicit start- and end-tags make it much easier to detect and ignore material not needed by a particular process. As new processes are added, new information can be added to an XML message format without disturbing existing software.

  At least, that's the theory. In practice, combining validation and easy versioning of your XML vocabularies has proven hard.

  This talk outlines some basic problems involved in versioning XML vocabularies and talks about ways to address them. Particular attention will be paid to several features of XML Schema 1.1 which make it easier to define XML vocabularies which can in fact be revised while preserving backwards and forwards compatibility: weakened wildcards, open content, not-in-schema wildcards, multiple substitution-group heads, extension of all-groups, default attribute groups, and conditional inclusion of elements in schema documents.

• Richard Ishida gives a tutorial entitled "An Introduction to Writing Systems & Unicode" (see abstract) on Monday, 15 October 2007 and gives a talk entitled "Hints for Designing International Web Pages" (see abstract) on Wednesday, 17 October 2007 at the "Internationalization & Unicode Conference" , San Jose, USA.
  Abstract for “ An Introduction to Writing Systems &…”:

  The tutorial will provide you with a good understanding of the many unique characteristics of non-Latin writing systems, and illustrate the problems involved in implementing such scripts in products. It does not provide detailed coding advice, but does provide the essential background information you need to understand the fundamental issues related to Unicode deployment, across a wide range of scripts. It has also proved to be an excellent orientation for newcomers to the conference, providing the background needed to assist understanding of the other talks! The tutorial goes beyond encoding issues to discuss characteristics related to input of ideographs, combining characters, context-dependent shape variation, text direction, vowel signs, ligatures, punctuation, wrapping and editing, font issues, sorting and indexing, keyboards, and more. The concepts are introduced through the use of examples from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Hindi/Tamil, Russian and Greek. While the tutorial is perfectly accessible to beginners, it has also attracted very good reviews from people at an intermediate and advanced level, due to the breadth of scripts discussed. No prior knowledge is needed.
  Abstract for “ Hints for Designing International Web…”:

  his presentation will look a number of practical issues for people who develop web pages for a multilingual audience. Topics will include the dangers of composing sentences in content using scripting, strategies for designing layout so that text expansion during translation will not destroy your efforts, and the use of pull-down lists when navigating to localized content. We will explore some of the potential difficulties that can be encountered in these areas and pull together some best practices to help you avoid them.
• Felix Sasaki gives a talk entitled "Internationalization Tag Set 1.0 – A New Standard for Internationalization and Localization of XML" at the "Internationalization & Unicode Conference 31" on Wednesday, 17 October 2007, in San Jose, CA, USA.
• Martin Dürst gives a talk entitled "IRIs and IDNs: Testing, Implementations, and Specification Evolvement" at the "31st Internationalization & Unicode Conference" on Wednesday, 17 October 2007, in San Jose, USA. (see abstract)
  Abstract:

  Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) are the internationalized version of Web addresses. The IRI specification has been available since 2005, and the specifications for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) since 2003. Implementations of IRIs and IDNs in the major browsers are well advanced, but implementations for toolkits and APIs currently still leave quite a bit to be desired. This presentation will give a short general introduction to the topics of IRIs and IDNs, stressing the role of Unicode and UTF-8. It will report on an implementation effort by the author and his group for IRIs and IDNs in the widely used Web toolkit Curl, and on progress with automatic testing and automatic generation of tests for IRIs and IDNs.
• Shawn Henry gives a talk entitled "Making the Future Web Accessible to People with Disabilities" at the ""I Invent the Future" Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007" on Friday, 19 October 2007, in Orlando, FL, USA. (see abstract)
  Abstract:

  It is vital that the Web is accessible for people with disabilities and older people with changing abilities, given its increasingly key role in education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more. This presentation discusses the current state of Web accessibility and explores how we can each play a role in ensuring that the future Web enables greater participation in society instead of creating additional barriers.
• Matt Womer participates at a panel entitled "The Ubiquitous Web: Making It Happen…" at the "Mobile Monday New York" on Monday, 29 October 2007, in New York City, USA. (see abstract)
  Abstract:

  A round table discussion with Berge Ayvazian, Chief Strategy Officer, Yankee Group; Carl Taylor, Director of Applications & Services, Hutchison Whampoa Europe; Charles McCathieNevile, Chief Standards Officer, Opera Software; Sean Owen, Software Engineer, Google; Matt Womer, Mobile Web Initiative Lead Americas, W3C; and Vance P. Hedderel, Director, PR and Communications, dotMobi, moderated by Lubna Dajani, co-founder MobileMonday New York, CEO Stratemerge.
• Tim Berners-Lee gives a talk entitled "Escaping the Walled Garden: Growing the Mobile Web with Open Standards" at the "http://www.mobilenetx.com" on Wednesday, 14 November 2007, in Boston, MA, USA.