Position Statement for W3C I18N Workshop

Martin J. Dürst, W3C/Keio University

This position statement is divided into three parts: My expectations as a chair, my expectations as the W3C Internationalization Activity Lead, Staff Contact for both the WG and the IG, and Interest Group Chair, and my technical interests. A last section gives a very short overview over my personal background.

Workshop Chair

As a workshop chair, I hope I can contribute to a successful workshop. This includes preparing the program together with the other members of the program committee, and making sure the workshop runs smoothly.

This is my first priority.

Activity Lead

As an Activity Lead, my main interests are to find more people who are willing and able to contribute to the internationalization (i18n) of the Web and the work of W3C and the Internationalization Activity.

Together with other participants from the W3C team, I will also try to help make sure that we concentrate on the Web and W3C aspects of i18n, and make sure the ideas we have can fit together with the rest of W3C technology and meet the needs of the Web (e.g. scalability, no private assumptions).

Technical Interest

• IRIs: Internationalization of URIs. This is rather advanced, but needs some more work on pushing spec review and implementation and on the test suite. See http://www.w3.org/International/O-URL-and-ident.html for further material.
• Guidelines: I think we should concentrate on guidelines for XML document types and related issues. This is within the core competence of W3C, and should achieve a high leverage effect. It would also work together rather well with WAI.
• Outreach: the public site at http://www.w3.org/International seems to be quite useful in various ways, but would benefit from more frequent updates.
• Internationalization-related data on the Web: I have various questions, but no fixed answers yet:
  • What are the usage scenarios that require such data exchange (e.g. viewing HTML pages; Web services,...)?
  • What is the data exchanged (e.g. instance data in locale-dependent or independent form, identifiers, actual configuration data)?
  • How can we use Web technology and W3C technology to improve the situation (e.g. URIs as identifiers, XML as a data format,...)?
  • To what extent do we have the bandwidth/processing power/willingness of implementers to work with configuration data?
  • What kind of data is exchanged (collation, format preferences, shoe sizes,...)? How can we find the right granularity?
  There is also some relationship with the W3C Workshop on Delivery Context (see http://www.w3.org/2001/12/2002-03-05-di-workshop.html), which I plan to attend.
• Rare characters and glyphs: At the borderlines of Unicode, there is some need to allow indication/transmission of characters that are not (yet) encoded, or of specific variant glyphs. Although these are two different problems, the solution for them can be virtually the same. Various organizations have been or are working on solutions, including the W3C itself, but there is a need for better coordination (because this is a 'marginal' area, pooling resources makes a lot of sense). See http://www.w3.org/International/O-MissCharGlyph for further material.

Personal Background

I have joined W3C in Dec. 1997 to work on Internationalization for W3C at Keio University (as a Project Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Media and Governance). He has since contributed to a wide number of W3C specifications and related work.

Before that, I have done internationalization research in the context of the IETF (RFC 2070) and for the object-oriented application framework ET++. As a senior research associate, I was at the University of Zurich from 1990 to 1997. I received a PhD from the University of Tokyo, where I stayed from 1987 to 1990, and masters degree from the University of Zurich in computer science, business administration, and Japanese studies.