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9.3 Workpackage descriptions

WP1: Help Companies Develop Mission Critical Solutions

Evolution of the Web is proceeding at a very fast rate. Maintaining cohesion between 30 or 40 Working Drafts under development within W3C is a demanding task. It is only possible through the assignment of W3C's Technical Staff to all Working Groups and the weekly meetings of the Staff to ensure that interoperability is maintained. For these reasons, technical work on the development of Recommendations and the reference codes provided by W3C is maintained within the W3C Hosts.

W3C recognises the need to improve the quality of Recommendations as the number and complexity increases and the need to interwork becomes more important. This is being addressed in a number of ways both within and outside W3C:

• Validators for correct usage: validators for both CSS and HTML are provided (free) that check both for conformance and also good practice (as with all standards, it is possible to use a good standard badly). However, no work has yet been done in checking for a correct usage of XHTML modules. Additionally, there is a need to validate particular modules of XHTML. A specific example would be XHTML-Basic, which has been recently adopted for the next generation of WAP (WML2). Consistent XML Schemas is another area requiring attention.
• Presentation facilities: the complexity of a Recommendation such as RDF, with different representations of the same functionality (for integration with legacy systems), meant that a visual tool, SirPAC, developed under W3C-LA, was invaluable in providing a graphical representation of a set of RDF assertions. This allowed the user to check that the assertions recorded were the ones being attempted. In this context an RDF processor and editors for the SMIL and SVG XML applications are two areas that could be addressed in QUESTION-HOW. SirPAC itself has also proven its own limits in terms of interaction, the output it provides, etc, which may require further developments, too.
• Conversion tools: W3C's "tidy" is a good example of a tool that both checks a HTML document for correctness but also has the ability to translate that document into XHTML. The advent of XSLT gives the opportunity to QUESTION-HOW to improve such conversion facilities and make them customisable to user preferences. Translating a rich set of XHTML modules into a more spartan set is another area where tools would be of value.
• Test suites: the new SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) Recommendation is producing a suite of test documents that illustrate correct usage and also act as a base for developers to check their implementations against. The same is needed for PNG, SMIL, MathML and many of the other W3C specifications.
• Demonstrators: W3C Recommendations spell out in detail what the constraints are on their usage. In general, the actual use that it is applied to is for the application to decide. Providing demonstrators, particularly if they use facilities in an unusual way, help to broaden the applicability of a Recommendation and offer potential users an insight into the richness of the Recommendation, the breadth of its applicability and how that recommendation may impact their business.
• Guidelines: particularly appropriate in the Accessibility area, but useful in general, is a set of check lists and guidelines that allow users to assess their conformance with the W3C Recommendations and ensure that they are being used in a future-proof way.

This is not an exhaustive list but gives a flavour of the major approaches available to improve the quality of the W3C Recommendations in terms of understanding and adoption and encourage the correct usage of this rich architecture.

W3C is seeking funding from the Commission to resource additional expertise within the W3C European sites (Host and Offices, that are already established R&D institutions) to help provide the tools that are crucial to European industry in moving to the new technologies. This requires both raising awareness of existing tools and modification of those tools as the need arises. Developments at the level of 3 person years over 15 months would allow a number of tool enhancements to be made available to the European industry, would also broaden the technical ability of the W3C Offices further and give a pool of expertise to be used in dissemination activities throughout Europe.

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The aim of this Workpackage is to achieve a program of work with the following characteristics:

• Assess the full range of existing W3C support facilities of the type listed above and make an assessment of what the major deficiencies are in terms of the emerging Web and define a course of action to make a significant improvement in what is currently available, particularly related to the new specifications becoming available. Identify the 6 major shortcomings and create Deliverables to address these. The set of deliverables following are illustrative. The ones actually chosen will depend on the state of the Web and user expectations when the project starts. Particular attention will be given to those areas where European industry has a great invested interest (eg, mobile technologies, multilingual issues, etc).
• Validator: for example, to include checking for XHTML modules, extensions and CSS3. This is particularly needed for the mobile industry where tailoring Web pages for a range of devices will be necessary.
• Conversion tool to develop a multi functional XSLT conversion tool set that handles XML data islands with their own XML schemas and provide meaningful transformations. These conversion tools could take into consideration the client's requirements in terms of language and character set, for example.
• Privacy Tools: produce some generic tools to allow users to easily define their privacy policy and tailor their environment to include support for privacy preferences.
• Benchmark: establish a benchmark for one of the emerging specifications relevant to Europe - examples might be for XHTML modularisation, XSLT functionality and SMIL 2.0.
• Demonstrator: an example would be in the use of Metadata in application areas important to Europe.

This is not an exhaustive list but gives a flavour of the tool support that is needed. It is feasible that activities in some areas will not be required while others will need more effort. The actual breakdown will be decided as late as possible to make the deliverables as relevant as possible. The industry as a whole and W3C Members in particular provide a set of open source tools that need to be integrated with any developments progressed in this Project. The Offices need to convey information about all the open source tools that come available.

From the point of view of the W3C Offices, getting more involved in W3C developments has the added benefit that it will make their technical staff more competent in the area to answer questions and to present W3C within Europe. In W3C-LA, this was partly achieved by having demonstrators developed at both the W3C INRIA Host and also at RAL, the UK Office. In consequence, RAL staff became competent at a number of the new Technologies and were able to mount demonstrations at events as well as the INRIA Host staff and deliver technical workshops without recourse to W3C Staff.

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WP2: Provide Additional Tools to Support New Technologies

There is an urgent need to make Europe aware of a number of new W3C developments that will cause them to make major changes in their information infrastructures. Some of these are given below and will be used as exemplars of what might be achieved. The exact nature of these deliverables will not be known until an assessment is carried out at the start of the Project. They should be seen as indicative of the spread of applications that may well be pursued:

• XHTML: Europe needs to move its HTML document base into XHTML in order to get the benefits of the new tools and facilities becoming available through the move to XML. A particular benefit will be the ability to embed XML fragments from other XML applications into XHTML documents and to make easier transition toward mobile services, too (XHTML Basic having been accepted as the presentation markup for WML2). The new Forms and, possibly, the Events modules should also be finalised in 2001; these will have significant roll-in impact in terms of, for example, on-line forms (such as tax forms, e-business forms, etc).
• Metadata/Semantic Web: three W3C Recommendations will make a significant difference to the ability to add metadata to documents in a way that enhances (value-adds) the information within the document. These are RDF, XML Schemas and XLink. The role of each, and how they can be used to improve the knowledge base, requires education best achieved through tooling support. Note that the newly started Semantic Web activity of W3C (with its implication on inference and reasoning) will have a significant impact in this area.
• Multimedia: a new version of the multimedia Recommendation SMIL with new animation facilities should be available in the course of 2001. It will have a significant impact on the handset market, too: the 3GPP S4 group (regrouping all major handset producers) has recently decided to adopt SMIL Basic for multimedia interchange on future generation handsets. Similarly, the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) Recommendation will have a profound effect on some Internet application areas (particularly GIS, engineering, graphics arts) and will see a re-engineering of most computer graphics extensions to Web pages. This will have a major effect in terms of download times but will also provide additional functionality.
• Device Independence: 2001 will see a massive increase in the use of the Web from a range of devices. That will in turn require Web sites to do major redesigns to make them widely accessible. Given an understanding of all relevant technologies will allow this to be done efficiently and ensure they are future proof.
• XSL: the transformation and presentation capabilities of XSL are impressive both in terms of transforming data and style. Industry (for example, publishing) needs to realise how this can be used in a variety of contexts from reuse to validation.
• XML Based Transactions: this is a new enabling technology for supporting distributed, XML-based applications which transfer various types of information (not necessarily document based), and which will become the basis of future e-services. W3C is already active in this area (XML Protocols, XML Query, XML Fragments, etc), and it will certainly play a significant role in the coming years.

Funding is requested for a set of specific tools and demonstrators aimed at these inter-related technologies. As for WP1 the package will start with an evaluation period followed by the definitive list of new tools to be supplied. The project will concentrate initially on the existing tools and then focus on the production of new tools.

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9.4 Deliverables list

The delivery dates all relate to the start date of the Project. A date of Mi is i months from the start of the Project.

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9.5 Project planning and timetable

Figure 1: QUESTION-HOW Project bar chart

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9.6 Graphical presentation of project components

Figure 2: Dependency diagram of the project components. See explanations in the text.

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Figure 2 gives a dependency diagram of the major project components. Some highlights and explanation of the diagram:

• The diagram shows the importance of the three "evaluation" tasks: 1.1 (Accessing existing tools), 2.1 (Evaluating new activities), and 3.1 (Analysing office coverage in Europe). As emphasized above, the outcome of these tasks will shape the details of the project.
• The evaluation of new activities (taks 2.1) will also take into account the evaluation of existing tools as well as the first results of the tool developments (tasks 1.2 to 1.6). This will contribute to a harmonious fit of any new development with the rest of the technical activities within W3C (mark (1) on the figure).
• As soon as new the offices are operational they may join the technical activities, provided there is a need for technical reinforcement in specific task and that the new offices have the necessary technical abilities (mark (2) on the figure; the dotted lines represent the fact that this dependency is, in a way, optional)
• As soon as new the offices are operational they will join the outreach activities (tasks 5.1 to 5.4) contributing to handouts, demonstrations, etc (mark (3) on the figure).
• The interop and semantic tours will make use of all the new outreach material prepared during the project (mark (4) on the figure).

9.7 Project management

Even though this is a single participant submission, coordination is needed to manage the participation of W3C Offices in the project.

The co-ordinating partner, INRIA, will provide the project and technical management. Management will be done using the Web. Conference calls and face-to-face meeting will be scheduled on a regular basis to ensure the project proceeds to schedule. The management structure has already been described above

The following reports will be produced:

Progress Report (every six months)

This will be a detailed report that describes the technical progress, the effort used and the detailed plans for the next six months. The report will note any deviations from the original work plan, and the reasons. This report will be sent to the Project Officer appointed by the Commission.

Three-Monthly Internal Audit Report

This will be an internal report covering similar ground to the Progress Report. Its purpose will be to detect deviations to the work plan at an early stage. The Internal Audit Reports will form the basis for the Periodic Progress Reports.

The Work Package Managers will be responsible for their own Work Package in terms of direction and coordination of the work of the work by all Offices involved in the Work Package. They will report to the Project Manager on the progress of deliverables and expenditure of effort.

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The Project Manager and Work Package Managers will meet regularly to:

• Approve the Progress Reports and Internal Audit Reports
• Plan work for the each period
• Review deliverables for the Commission
• Control the resources assigned to each "Workpackage

Any conflicts will be resolved by this Group.

10. Clustering

While this project is not participating in a cluster of research projects, any tools developed for Metadata and the W3C Semantic Web Activity as well as the "Semantic Tour" will closely follow, interact with and benefit from W3C's Semantic Web Activity. The current international collaboration between DAML and OIL groups on a Web ontology layer is expected to become a part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity. The W3C Semantic Web Advanced Development efforts are closely connected to the DAML program as well as to other projects and these development efforts can be leveraged to make connections with developers of Semantic Web tools in Europe.

11. Other contractual conditions

Subcontracts

Total: 910,000 Euro

Subcontracts for more that 50kEuro need prior approval from the EC (Project Officer).

It is not possible at this time to define the exact location of each activity; much will also depend on the result of the initial assessment tasks which are part of this Workpackage, and which will define the exact set of tasks. It is only based on those tasks that the current or future subcontractors will finalize their exact involvement in the project. The estimated figures in the table below are included solely for illustrative purposes.

The INRIA person-month costs of a Chercheur confirme A at 134,099 Euro per annum for 2001 and 135,439 Euro for 2002. Taking the average gives a per-month cost of 11,230 euro per person month. The subcontracts to W3C Offices will be based (on average) on this rate. The cost of travel and subsistence and consumables is estimated at 20% of the personal cost.

Although the above average rate is used for planning and estimation of subcontracting costs, all QUESTION-HOW subcontracts and the corresponding invoices will be made on the basis of the actual costs incurred by the subcontractors.

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Travel and Subsistence

Total: 135,000 Euro

A majority of the travel cost will likely be consumed during the two planned "tours". Travel cost may also include travel outside of the EU e.g. for participation in W3C activities such as working group meetings.

Consumables

Total: 150,000 Euro

Consumables include primarily cost for rental of facilities and production of dissimination materials.

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