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PERIODIC PROGRESS REPORTS No 3


Project acronym: QUESTION-HOW

Period: 1 September 2002 - 28 February 2003.
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: 21 March 2003.


1. Executive Summary

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 project is divided into 2 development workpackages (WP01 and WP02) and 4 outreach workpackages (WP03 - WP06), with a management workpackage (WP07).

The duration is 24 months, it started September 1st 2001.

After 18 months of activities, the project is on track with respect to its original schedule, with some technical sub-deliverables of WP2 ahead of schedule and already done.

The late sub-deliverables of WP1 have been completed and are available in this report.

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 still active.

All expected deliverables have been sent at their due date to the Project Officer.

Technical work is progressing on the items mentioned in D2.1 and more planning done for the outreach and the offices work.

The planning for our W3C Semantic Web Tour in May/June 2003 (WP06) is now well advanced.


2. Achievements and project status

Five major achievements in this third period :

The information above is classified as public use. In fact, it is available on the public home page of the project at http://www.w3.org/2001/qh

See details below for detailed achievements per workpackage.


3. Adherence to workplan

3.1 Statement of technical progress.

WP01: Help Companies Develop Mission Critical Solutions

The objectives of this workpackage was to improve the quality of existing W3C Recommendations by improving the tools (validators, presentation facilities, conversion tools, benchmarks, demonstrators and guidelines) associated with them.

The set of tools being developed has been derived from the needs of the W3C working groups, and was reported in December 2001 and in the first six month progress report and is available at the following address: http://www.w3.org/2002/03/qh-report.html

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.

We're only listing here the late deliverables for WP1 and their new status.

WP02: Provide Additional Tools to Support New Technologies

The Evaluation report and planning for tool needs for WP02, D2.1, has been delivered in Month 9, June 2002. It describes the development of additional tools to support new W3C technologies (in addition to those in WP1) .

Eleven technical projects are described in this report. The set of tools presented there are also being derived from the needs of the W3C working groups.

Here are the details of each sub-deliverables progress, several of them are already completed and only need some more detailed reporting.

WP03: Extend Outreach of Existing Offices

This workpackage was concerned with extending the outreach of existing offices through regionalization plans.

The technical annex mentions three office regionalization by Month 18 and so we considered that we are done here, since we've already done those three in the first 12 months.

The report on these activities is available at http://www.w3.org/2002/08/qh-d3-2_3_4.html.

At this moment, we're notl planning to go beyond what was scheduled as the additional regionalizations effort originally envisaged in Greece and Scandinavia do not look adequate in today's economic context.

WP04: New European Offices

This workpackage is concerned with the creation of 4 new W3C offices in Europe.

In 2002, we have started new 2 W3C offices in Hungary and Finland.

The report New Offices First phase, at http://www.w3.org/2002/08/qh-d4-1_2.html explains what has happened in details.

For 2003, we are moving forward with the creation a new W3C presence in Spain and in Czech Republic/Slovakia.

While negociations with Spain are well advanced, it is not completely clear that we will be able to create a second office in Central Europe as scheduled before September 2003 given the economic and political context in Europe, but we will notify the Commission of any change in plan if we see a big problem coming up.

See those two reports for work on a new W3C Spain office:

WP05: Infrastructure for Informed Decisions

The objective of WP5 is to produce outreach materials that can be used by office staff to present the purpose and achievements of W3C at exhibitions and to information organisations to promote W3C recommendations.

The approach taken has been to analyse the achievements of W3C as they apply to various industry sectors based on market divisions (e.g. health, commerce, broadcasting etc..) then to identify existing standards or those under development that impact on these sectors. For each of 10 sectors a draft 1 or 2 page handout has been propduced and curculated for comment. A process has been devised to maintain these up to date after the Question How project is complete.

In addition to handouts, 12 poster ideas were developed. Of these three basic posters showing the office logos and W3C strapline in various languages as well as Tim Berners-Lee's roadmap for the future of the web, and the W3C web architecture have been printed and sent to offices. Of the reminaing 9 ideas, posters on the interaction, a pro-forma poster for office events, and posters on the semantic web and web services are still under development, since these have been identified as important technologies.

Internationalisation itself has been identified as a core technology, and a poster has been designed on this as well as a primer started as previously reported. Once the primer activity was initiated in the Question How project this work has now been passed to a W3C working group who specialise in presenting the W3C internationalisation activity. Therefore the Question How project has pump primed this activity.

Materials have also been produced showing the global spread of W3C membership which can be used as slides or a poster. A set of standard talk slides have been updated in SVG including the internationalisation and membership poster materials. These are available on the web to all W3C Office staff.

The future activities before the completion of the project are to ensure that the handouts and posters are finialised, but also to ensure that presentation materials are in place to describe the demonstrators produced in the first two development workpackages of Question How.

A report is available that explains the kind of materials we're producing.

Those materials were shown at our annual Review on September 20th in Sophia Antipolis.

We've had a special f2f meeting in February 2003 to discuss the set of deliverable for this workpackage.

WP06: European Events

In 2002, we've done a conference tour accross Europe in order to promote better understanding of the interoperability of W3C technologies: the W3C Interop Tour.

In 2003, we're planning a W3C Semantic Web tour:

The current schedule is:

A page with all the logistics details is building up on our site: http://www.w3.org/2003/03/semantic-tour.html

WP07: Project Management

Thepublic Web site and the private Web site have been updated on a regular basis.

Three mailing list archives are in daily use by the participants in the projec:

More face-to-face meeting and teleconferences were held in the past 6 months (see section 4 for exact dates).

No change in overall management personel for the project:

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.

The transfer of the project Administration from INRIA to ERCIM is nearly finalized.

A new Technical Annex has been produced, and new sets of CPF for the ERCIM period.

Splitted cost statements for the Sept2002-Dec2002 (INRIA time) period and Jan2003-Mar2003 period (ERCIM time) have been produced.

3.2 Resource usage.

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 3
Date: March 2003
WP

Deliverables

Resources in person-month for the period 3 Sept 2002 - 31 March 2003

All for INRIA/W3C except when indicated

Comments
Reporting Period Cumulative
WP02 Provide Tools to Support New Technologies
D2.1 2 2 Evalutation
D2.2 7 7 XHML
D2.3 10 10 Metadata
D2.4 7 7 Multimedia
D2.5 6 6 Device Independence
D2.6 0 0 XSL (none in WP2)
WP04 New Offices
D4.3 1 1 Spain
D4.4 2 2 Czech Republic/Slovakia
WP05 Materials for outreach
D5.2 2 2 Stand Decoration
D5.3 3 3 Demonstrations
WP06 Tours
D6.2 2 2 Semantic Web tour
WP07 Management
D7.3 1 1 This report (done)
Total 6 INRIA/ 13ERCIM 6 INRIA/ 13 ERCIM
23 Offices (subcontract) 23 Offices

4. Project Meetings.

In the last six months of the project (September 1st 2002, March 31st 2003), we have held:

Our next project teleconference is scheduled in April 2003 and our next face-to-face during the Budapest W3C AC meeting in May 2003..

5. Roster of personnel on the project.

Still the same, it hasn't changed.

6. Exploitation.

It is still 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.

7. Deliverables.

8. Next Reporting Period.

For the next six months, we're are planning to:

9. Appendix to the PPR

The printed version of this report has the important document linked from this document included as appendix:

WP1 late deliverables now done:

WP2 deliverables done or in progress:

Other WPs reports.