Project acronym: QUESTION-HOW
Period: 1 March 2003 - 31 August 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: 26 August 2003.
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, started September 1st 2001, and ending August 31st 2003, with a one month extension to hold the final review meeting within the project timeframe.
After 2 years of activities, and now reaching its final date, the project is on track with respect to its original schedule, expect for the opening of a fourth office in central Europe, which didn't happen as originally planned. See below for details on why this didn't happen.
Technical work for the items mentioned in D2.1, aka the second phase, is completed, and the outreach work associated with this second phase (W3C Semantic Web Tour in May/June 2003, part of WP06) is done as well.
A section at this end of this report on what we've done to react on the first annual review reviewers' comments is available in the Project Management section of this report.
The only work item left is the run of a successful final review in Bruxelles on Sept 16th 2003.
Five major achievements in this fourth 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.
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.
None for this period, all done in the first phase in 2002.
The report on these activities is available at http://www.w3.org/2002/08/qh-d3-2_3_4.html.
This workpackage was concerned with the creation of 4 new W3C offices in Europe.
In 2002, we 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.
In 2003, after conducting a market study, we created only a new W3C presence in Spain.
The following report details the reasons and the work that went into creating only one office in Spain and not a fourth one in Central Europe.
The objective of WP5 was 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.
A report is available that explains the kind of materials produced in the area of
Those materials were shown at our annual Review on September 20th in Sophia Antipolis and were used during our Semantic Web tour in 2003.
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 conducted a W3C Semantic Web tour:
The schedule was:
A page with all the logistics details is available at http://www.w3.org/2003/07/qh-wp6-semantic.html
The public 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 now finalized.
A new Technical Annex has been produced, and new sets of CPF for the ERCIM period.
The two main comments received were:
On the first comment, and although we were limited in our choice at the time we received the message (since the D2.1 deliverable, listing the phase 2 technical deliverables, was already done at that time), we can report that all of the technical demonstrators done during the second year were either standalone (that is, not dependent on W3C Open Source code) or ported on top of major Open Source code base, like the CC/PP module in Apache or the Multimodal demonstrator with Tomcat (part of D2.5).
On the second comment, we have two responses: first, our Semantic Web tour was a series of events directly geared toward the external world, and not the W3C community, as the report on D6.2 and the resulting press coverage shows. Second, the W3C maintains a public page listing all the appearances of its staff (and office staff) in public conferences and presentations. Although not all the W3C talks done during the period were done by the European staff and using the technical output of the QH project, many were and some directly using the QH demonstrators.
So overall, we think that we have reacted positively to the first annual review comments.
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 4 Date: August 2003 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| WP
Deliverables |
Resources in person-month for the period 4
1 March 2003 - 31 August 2003 All for INRIA/W3C except when indicated |
Comments | |
| Reporting Period | Cumulative | ||
| WP02 | Provide Tools to Support New Technologies | ||
| D2.2 | 1 | 8 | XHML |
| D2.3 | 8 | 18 | Metadata |
| D2.4 | 4 | 11 | Multimedia |
| D2.5 | 3 | 9 | Device Independence |
| D2.6 | 0 | 0 | XSL (none in WP2) |
| WP04 | New Offices | ||
| D4.3 | 4 | 5 | Spain |
| D4.4 | 0 | 2 | Czech Republic/Slovakia |
| WP05 | Materials for outreach | ||
| D5.2 | 1 | 3 | Stand Decoration |
| D5.3 | 2 | 5 | Demonstrations |
| WP06 | Tours | ||
| D6.2 | 2 | 4 | Semantic Web tour |
| WP07 | Management | ||
| D7.4 | 1 | 1 | This report (done) |
| Total | 12 ERCIM | 24 ERCIM / 6 INRIA | |
| 13 Offices (subcontract) | 36 Offices | ||
In the last six months of the project (April 1st 2003, August 31st 2003), we have held one plenary QH face-to-face meeting in Budapest (May 2003) and we have had several two-ways or three-way meetings in person during the Semantic Tour town stops.
In addition, we held 2 plenary teleconferences and several two-way or three-way coordination calls.
For the technical work coordination, a number of W3C working group face-to-face, not just in Europe, have been held, where the W3C European staff from ERCIM has had to travel too to present their work related to WP02, and a number of technical presentation in Europe from the staff. These are detailed in the cost statements.
Our next project meeting is going to be for the rehearsal of the Final Review presentations.
Still the same, it hasn't changed.
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.
None.
The printed version of this report has the important documents linked from this document included as appendices:
WP2 technical deliverables done:
Other non-technical WPs reports.