Project acronym: QUESTION-HOW
Period: 1 September 2001 - 28 February 2002.
Project Full Title: Quality Engineering
Solutions via Tools, Information and Outreach for the New Highly-enriched
Offerings from W3C: Evolving the Web in Europe
Project/Contract No. IST-2000-28767
Project Manager: Daniel Dardailler
<danield@w3.org>
Author of this document: same
Date: 25 March 2002.
QUESTION-HOW is a W3C Europe project aimed at providing the environment necessary for European companies to make mission critical decisions of quality with regard to the emerging Web specifications.
The duration is 24 months, it started September 1st 2001, and after 6 months of activities, the project is on track with respect to its original schedule.
The project is divided into 2 development workpackages (WP01 and WP02) and 4 outreach workpackages (WP03 - WP06), with a management workpackage (WP07).
Progress has been made in all workpackages, and the only delay to report in on signing new subcontracts with the W3C European offices involved in the work.. This is mostly due to the INRIA administration delays in moving to the Euro currency but it hasn't precluded pre-participation from the office staff into the project so far.
The W3C INRIA personel involved in the project and the offices personel have met several times in the period (see details below in section 4 on meetings) and the mailing list archives for the project is active.
Two deliverables have been sent at their due date to the Project Officer beginning of December 2001: WP01 D1.1 and WP03 D3.1.
Since then, technical work has progressed on the items mentioned in D1.1 and more planning done for the outreach and the offices work.
In addition to INRIA, as the European Host of W3C (main contractor), we have now identified all the W3C offices involved in the project:
We are actively planning our W3C Interop Tour in May/June (WP06), and are looking forward to our annual review in September 2002.
Five major achievements in this first period :
The information above is classified as public use. In fact, it is available on the public home page of the project at http://w3.org/2001/qh (see Annex 1 in the printed version of this report)
See details below for detailed achievements per workpackage.
The objectives of this workpackage is to improve the quality of existing W3C Recommendations by improving the tools (validators, presentation facilities, conversion tools, benchmarks, demonstrators and guidelines) associated with them.
During the first three months of the project, an assessment of the state of the current set of tools used in the W3C community has been made and as a result, new functionalities added to existing tools or new tools are being proposed.
The set of tools being developed has been derived from the needs of the W3C working groups, and has already been reported in December 2001 and is available at the following URL:
The expected result of this work is enhanced value in W3C Recommendations through the provision of tool support shifting the user from awareness to understanding of the emergent technology.
Here are the updates on each activities:
Modules have being added to the CSS3 validator as the corresponding specifications become available from the W3C working groups and the corresponding online validator is now ready to be used. The "Selectors" and "Mobile Profile 1.0," CSS specifications will probably become standards (W3C Recommendations) early summer 2002, which will be the date of the official public release of the new tool. Between now and then, testing has to be done on all aspects of the specifications.
There are in fact be as many test suites as there are modules in CSS3, and they are produced synchronously with the specifications of those modules. So far there are two test suites, for the "Selectors" and "Mobile Profile 1.0" specifications, the two modules that are furthest along the path to standardization.
An experimental MathML validator is now available, as part of W3C's HTML validator. Typing the URL of a MathML document in the validator page will fetch the document and check whether the MathML markup is valid or not. This is achieved by XML-validating the document against the Document Type Definition defined in the MathML specification. Work is now going on to make it possible to validate combined XHTML/MathML documents.
This is a subcontracted work with the technical staff of an office and the corresponding subcontract has not been signed yet, so we cannot officially report on progress here.
a prototype is running, and work in now proceeding on packaging the system into a downloadable version
This is a subcontracted work with the technical staff of an office and the corresponding subcontract has not been signed yet, so we cannot officially report on progress here.
A prototype is running.
For both QA deliverables, lots of progress have been accomplished byt the W3C staff working in the W3C QA working groups.
Internationalization of Amaya: the internal code of Amaya has now been converted to support Unicode. Half of the code works now with the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode, which is well adapted to communicating with standard libraries. The other part of the code implements formatting and editing and works with the UTF-16 encoding to get an easier access to individual characters and arbitrary strings. Improvements of formatting are the next step.
This is a subcontracted work with the technical staff of an office and the corresponding subcontract has not been signed yet, so we cannot officially report on progress here.
One part of this project is to design a generic Web page management system using XSLT. For that, an XML vocabulary has been defined to simplify the authoring and maintainance of a page's content, in the context of public Working Group pages at W3C. Another part is a transformation that generate SVG and this part is already running as a prototype.
This is a subcontracted work with the technical staff of an office and the corresponding subcontract has not been signed yet, so we cannot officially report on progress here.
See section 7 below for a summary analysis of deliverable timing.
Work isn't scheduled to start on this workpackage before next month, although we have already some ideas of new development in this area, since it is similar to what we do in WP01, with an emphasis on newer technologies.
The Evaluation report and planning for tool needs for WP02, D2.1, will be delivered in June 2002.
This workpackage is concerned with extending the outreach of existing offices through regionalization plans.
A deliverable D3.1 Analysis of W3C Office Coverage in Europe: http://www.w3.org/2001/11/qh-d31.html has been made available to the Project Officer in December 2001, and to summarize it, it says that
With a start in 2002:
With a start planned in 2003:
Work has been proceeding on the 2002 regionalization, with implementation of new logos for the extended offices:
The official names for the extended offices are:
The logos are not yet public on the office pages. The plan is to publicize the regionalization at the W3C AC meeting in Hawaii, and to issue a press release for the Interop tour which would also include press news on regionalization. All three offices have established contacts in their 'new' areas, in conjunction with the Interop tours.
This workpackage is concerned with the creation of 4 new offices.
The details of the analysis of best location are also found on the D3.1 report. To summarize:
In 2002, we should start an office in Hungary and Finland. In 2003, in Spain and either Czech Republic, Slovakia, and/or Poland (undecided).
As of the writing of this report, the bid for Hungary from SZTAKI has been worked through with, and accepted by the head of offices, and is under consideration by W3C management. The bid will most probably be accepted soon, and the office will be announced at the W3C member meeting in Hawaii.
The bid itself is available at: http://www.sztaki.hu/wrk/w3c/ (see Annex 2 in the printed version)
There are two bids from Finland: University of Tampere, and Tieke. W3C personel will visit to Finland early April and a decision will be taken right afterwards. Both bids are of a high quality, the issue is more to choose between the two.
The URL of these two bids are: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~tsysta/Tampere.html and http://www.tieke.fi/w3c/bid.html
In both cases the opening event is planned in the September/October 2002 time period, but the details are still to be worked out.
For 2003: efforts are on their way in Spain, which is the primary target.
Work has been going on to develop materials for outreach to be used in our tours in 2002 and 2003.
Topics for materials will be:
1) Handouts and materials defined by sectors to supplement the activity statements currently produced every six months by technologies.
An initial matrix has been developed of market sectors by W3C technologies that they employ. An initial brainstorming session for the e-government domain has been set up in the UK (16th May) to produce the first detailed handout for that sector.
2) Text and materials to support the demonstrators developed in Wp1 and Wp2.
No work has yet been undertaken in this area since these demonstrators are still in the early design stages.
3) Text and materials for Offices to interpret describing the roadmap and future activities of W3C. The first gathering of material for posters and handouts has been started, including addressing internationalisation and future web developments.
| Example Poster | Materials Used |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
In 2002, we're setting up a conference tour accross Europe in order to promote better understanding of the interoperability of W3C technologies.
The schedule is mostly settled now:
For each event, the program will be roughly the same:
10:00 Welcome and Introduction by Head of Europe Communications or local W3C Office manager
10:30 Overview and Future of W3C - Head of W3C European Operations
11:00 Break
11:30 W3C Technologies - Head of W3C World Offices
12:15 Discussion with panelists
12:45 Buffet Lunch + exhibits from W3C staff and local members
13:45 Technical highlight 1 (W3C staff or office speaker)
14:30 Technical highlight 2 (W3C staff or office speaker)
15:15 Break
15:45 Panel Discussion (exhibitors invited + speakers of the day)
17:00 Close of Day
Communication materials will be drawn from WP05 (localized version when available).
A press release will be issued few days prior to the first event (in Paris on the 21st of May), and W3C will advertise the whole W3C Interop tour on its home page as a news item (using RSS, an RDF vocabulary used for site summaries). This top news item will last for the whole event duration.
Invitations will be sent to local press people upon a completion of a list of important and relevant publications, both technical and large public. Press materials such as press kits will be available for each country in the local language.
As for the other participants, separate annoucements will be made in each given country, and industrial contacts will be sollicited (either through W3C membership or not).
We're still considering the exact venue for each events and whether or not they are free or fee-based.
A public Web site and a private Web site have been developed for the project.
Three mailing list archives have been set up:
Regular face-to-face meeting and teleconferences were held in the first 6 months (see section 4 for exact dates).
The overall Project Manager is Daniel Dardailler. He is also in charge of the Technical workpackages (WP01 and WP02). Ivan Herman, the Head of W3C Offices, is the Workpackage manager for WP03 (office extension) and WP04 (new offices). Michael Wilson of RAL (W3C UK Office) is in charge of WP05, while Marie-Claire Forgue, Communications Manager for W3C Europe is overseeing WP06.
In addition to the QH at-large meeting mentioned in section 4 below, Daniel, Marie-Claire and Ivan are meeting via phone every two weeks.
In addition, the names of the W3C offices manager involved in the project is indicated in section 5 below.
This table shows the level of resources (manpower) consumed. It doesn't included a "planned" column since the Technical Annex is much less detailed and only covers the entire workpackage resources, not per period, but there is no deviation from the planned resource usage overall.
| PROJECT IST-2000-28767 QUESTION-HOW | PPR 1 Date: March 2002 |
||
|---|---|---|---|
| WP
Deliverables |
Resources in person-month for the period 1 Sept 2001 -
28 February 2002
All for INRIA except when indicated |
Comments | |
| Reporting Period | Cumulative (same for this first period) | ||
| WP01 | Mission Critical Solutions | ||
| D1.1 | 3 | 3 | Evaluation (done) |
| D1.2 | 3 | 3 | Validator (mostly done) |
| D1.3 | 1 | 1 | Convertor |
| D1.4 | 0 | 0 | Privacy (moved to WP02) |
| D1.5 | 2 | 2 | Benchmark |
| D1.6 | 2 | 2 | Demonstrator |
| WP03 | Offices extension | ||
| D3.1 | 3 | 3 | Coverage Analysis (done) |
| D3.2 | 1 RAL | 1 RAL | UK-Ireland |
| D3.3 | 1 FhG | 1 FhG | Germany-Austria |
| D3.4 | 1 CWI | 1 CWI | Benelux |
| WP04 | New Offices | ||
| D4.1 | 1 | 1 | Hungary |
| D4.2 | 1 | 1 | Finland |
| WP05 | Materials for outreach | ||
| D5.1 | 1 | 1 | hands out |
| D5.2 | 1 | 1 | poster |
| WP06 | Tours | ||
| D6.1 | 1 | 1 | Interop tour |
| WP07 | Management | ||
| D7.1 | 1 | 1 | Initial report (done) |
| Total | 20 INRIA | 20 INRIA | |
| 3 Offices | 3 Offices | ||
Since the beginning of the project, we have held:
This was the launch meeting of the project, where the details of all deliverables were discussed between all the potential partners.
A technical meeting with the W3C staff and office personel discussing their coordinated efforts on project.
The goal of this meeting was mainly to work on subcontracting terms and detail the Interop tour schedule and programs.
Our next project teleconference is scheduled on April 5th 2002 and our next face-to-face beginning of June 2002, at the end of our Interop tour.
In addition, it is to be noted that the set of external participants in QH is a subset of the set of W3C offices representatives, and they have a separate meeting schedule where coordination and communication in Europe is also brought up on a regular basis. Similarly, the technical staff involved in the project (whether from W3C INRIA or from offices) in also involved in W3C working group work, and so they also have their own meeting agenda where QH work is discussed.
The list of contact for QH W3C offices is available at http://www.w3.org/2002/03/qh-office-staff.html (in Annex 4 in the printed version)
It is too early in the project to mention exploitation actions, but we can look into the future for the impact of the work done today: as an accompanying measure the role of this project is to publicise and transfer technologies which have and are being developed within W3C. The benefit of the transfer is that European industry and technology developers will be aware of the cutting edge Recommendations and proposals within W3C and be able to guide their developments to conform to these.
The benefits to European industry will be that technologies developed to conform to W3C recommendations will be more likely to be adopted and assimilated than those which do not, and more likely to interact with other technologies than those which do not. The long term benefit to industry will be increased competitiveness, early market entry, early adoption, greater market share, and ultimately greater profit and wealth creation within Europe.
Two deliverables were due Month 3, and 3 deliverables Month 6.
In addition, good progress has been made in all the deliverables started during the period:
The only deviation from the Technical annex plan is the move of D1.4, work on Privacy tool, to WP02.
For the next six months, we're are planning to:
