Juan Quemada quemada@dit.upm.es and Juan C. Dueñas jcduenas@dit.upm.es
UPM is the largest university in Spain devoted to technical and engineering studies. The Department of Telematics (DIT) is one of the departments of UPM located in ETSIT, which is the telecommunications school, and the leader and largest engineering school in Spain for communications, electronics and computer science. ETSIT accounts for 400 staff and 4000 students, including pre-graduate, postgraduate and doctorate studies.
DIT covers teaching, research and technology transfer in software engineering for distributed and real-time systems, multimedia applications and cooperative work (CSCW), tele-education, multimedia protocols and interfaces, Internet-based services, WWW, high-speed protocols, ISDN, TMN, SNMP, satellite local and metropolitan networks, cryptography, network security, natural-language processing, knowledge induction and learning, monitoring applications control and communications. Researchers at DIT usually publish in international scientific journals and contribute in international workshops and congresses; DIT has also acted as a host for some of them. DIT-UPM installed the first electronic mail account in Spain, the first Spanish Internet connection and Internet provider, and one of the first Web sites in Spain, and transferred them successfully to industry. UPM is currently in the process of affiliation to W3C.
ETSIT is located in Madrid, the capital of Spain, in the very centre of the peninsula. Madrid is at a few hours driving distance of any place in peninsular Spain, and has one of the most important international airports in Europe.
Madrid has got the highest concentration of industries in Spain, as well as information technology industries, and still grows at a high rate. All large multinational companies have offices in Madrid, and it is the location of the main national telecommunication operators, network equipment providers, content providers, banks, utilities, making it the main business city in the country; the city is equipped with many large facilities for fairs and conventions. Besides, Madrid is the location of all ministries and central government, especially the Ministry of Science and Technology.
Spain is administratively divided into regions with high degree of autonomy, being Catalunya, Basque Country and Galicia the so called “historic autonomies”, which have two official languages (Spanish, Catala, Euskara and Galician are the official languages in the country). Madrid is also an autonomy in Spain. UPM has strong relationships with the main universities in these autonomies, as well as with other technical universities in Madrid region.
Also part of the community served by the future Spanish W3C office are Central and South America countries (except Brazil), because the main language used there is also Spanish (with minor variants, so it is still recognized as the same language). Economic standards in these countries are usually lower than Western Europe, but in some of them there are local companies in the information technology area, and in most of them operate the main Spanish IT companies.
Up to now, few companies or universities are W3C affiliates, and some have been in the past. The Spanish W3C office will provide a channel for information to the candidate companies, and eventually the support for them; in the mean time will disseminate the W3C activities in Spain and South America.
Telecommunication companies, especially network operators play a key role in the sector. Among them, Telefonica is the oldest and largest in customers operator in this region. The companies that take part in the holding include mobile operators, the research centre, network operations, Internet provider, et cetera. Retevision and Amena are other companies that offer telecommunication services to customers. Vodafone has recently entered the mobile phones sector.
Broadcasting and media companies are another important group in the region that could be target for W3C: the main private-owned television channels (Tele5 and Antena3) serve to the public at large with open television productions, there are also one digital private TV platform, and several public-owned television channels (under the supervision of Radio Televisión Española). PRISA is another media holding that participates in the digital TV platform and operates several digital radio channels, as well as newspapers and books. El Mundo is other smaller but technologically active media holding around the newspaper with the same name.
University plays a key role in the introduction of technologies such as W3C is supporting, and in the dissemination of them. There are several technical universities throughout Spain that will be interested in the technical work performed by W3C; UPM maintains close relationships to most of them.
Some institutions and non-profit organisations, such as ONCE, play a central role in care of handicapped people. ONCE has several initiatives in the leveraging of technical capabilities for blinded and leaf people.
There is a long tradition of cooperation between UPM and the IT sector, in operation as well as R&D: the first kind of cooperation is because for many years UPM was the major –even unique- source of professionals in this area.
The high quality of the studies provided by ETSIT has been recognised by the telecommunication industry, that continuously asks for postgraduate programmes (such as the Master in Network Technologies), or even ad-hoc training by ETSIT staff. Large companies form the Council for the Advance of Telecommunications, which is an advisory board for the strategic development of ETSIT.
Most of the international R&D activities performed by IT Spanish companies have been seed by UPM (it is the largest public contractor to the European Commission in IV and V IST programmes). The cooperation with companies is carried out in national, European and international projects, and either in precompetitive as in scientific projects. These activities have allowed the UPM staff to grow an informal network of contacts in the main companies in Spain; among them are: Telefonica, Iberia, INDRA, Informática El Corte Inglés, RENFE, Red IRIS.
The current situation of W3C membership in the region is not representative of the weight of Spanish language in the Web, nor to the role of the Spanish companies in the sector. Up to now, there are only three public-owned affiliate W3C members including UPM (it seems that there were up to two full members some years ago).
We estimate that at least one or two full members (possibly Telefonica and INDRA companies), and several smaller private-owned companies could join, as well as some public-owned companies or institutions. As the interest in Web services, for example, raise, so will do the number of potential new members. We consider that the dissemination work that the Spanish W3C office would perform will help in rising that interest.
There are two central arguments for joining W3C, from the viewpoint of companies: the improvements in image, and the early access to technical documents. An additional but important issue is the reduction of taxes (in case this is applicable).
As a future W3C office, part of our work must be to help companies to discover if they hold activities that could be aligned to W3C standards; this is quite easy in the case of companies or institutions with WAI limitations. For technical arguments, the possibility to access to Web services documentation and tutorials will be of great help, as well as the chances to influence the specifications. In any case, and even at the individual level, the federation or join to organised communities is not seen as a strong need in Spain.
Several methods can be used to try to make them join:
In order to set the office up, we have already maintained specific conversations with:
Our plans are to spread the knowledge about our initiative to large companies, other institutions (CAM, ONCE), more universities, and industrial associations (ANIEL).
In the case of the Spanish office, most of the feedback to W3C is related to the usage of the Spanish (and the other official) languages, including internationalisation issues, and the translation of specifications and standards to these languages. Most of the Web contents in Spanish are produced in this region, so this provides us experience enough for giving some hints to the W3C.
Another kind of feedback is on pure technical issues related to the telecommunication domain. As mentioned, network operators are key companies in this region so their usage of W3C standards is also valuable information towards the consortium. Of course, the technical research produced by Spanish universities in the framework of distributed systems, open source and web services will be taken into account.
The window of opportunity of the Spanish W3C office will be mainly determined by the economic situation. It is currently a very bad one for IT companies in Spain, especially for those related to telecommunications. There are signs that this is about to change and, for example, the introduction of new Internet services, and the deployment and start of operation of third generation mobile systems, will increase again the needs for technological innovations.
If this is the case, the developments by W3C on those elements supporting web services, adaptations to different terminal profiles, accessibility improvements, and especially security, will be considered as very positive for potential W3C members in this region.
The proposed staffing of the W3C office with technical background information consists of the following:
In addition, one part-time worker will be hired later if the office is established.
UPM the host organisation will take responsibility of physical, financial, organizational and staff resources needed. More specifically, the operational costs, offices, equipment and initial staff will be provided by DIT-UPM; UPM will provide the W3C member fees as an affiliate member; the Ministry of Science and Technology will provide grants for the supporting network. In any case, the long-term survival of the office is aimed, and its operation under autonomous conditions.
Previous attempts to create the Spanish office have not succeeded, partly because only a large organisation such as UPM will be able to support the office operation under hostile circumstances. The group that is proposing to hold the office, DIT-UPM has a long tradition in support of standards, and in support of the creation and advance of other pair organisations. The conversations we have had so far (mainly with universities and MCYT), have recognized the role of UPM as a future W3C office.
We only foresee two sources of discrepancies of the UPM as leader of the Spanish W3C office: the attempts to create autonomy or regional offices (this discussion goes beyond of our technical context and it is not our intention to enter into it); the second source of troubles is the existence of several candidates to hold the office. This situation is also out of the scope of DIT-UPM.