W3

Technical Plenary Week

27 February - 3 March 2006, Hotel Royal Casino / Cannes-Mandelieu, France


Technical Plenary Day Agenda

Wednesday, 1 March 2006



Minutes | IRC log | Post-Meeting Survey

The Wednesday of the Technical Plenary Week offers a unique opportunity for our broad W3C Community (Working, Interest and Coordination Groups; Advisory Committee Representatives; Advisory Board; Technical Architecture Group; and Team) who have registered to gather in one room and discuss technical topics of broad interest to the attendees, and of significant importance to past, present and future of the World Wide Web Consortium. Discussion during this Technical Plenary day will not be considered Member confidential. Slides will be publicly accessible.

If you have IRC, you are welcome to join channel #tp on irc.w3.org:6665 to help record the meeting.

Agenda

08:30 Session 1: Welcome

Description: Two unique features of the World Wide Web Consortium are its broad spectrum of foundational work, coupled with its strong emphasis on coordination across and outside of that spectrum. The Technical Plenary week is a unique occasion when the people responsible for the work and coordination facilitate their objectives face-to-face. This session provides highlights of the W3C's spectrum of near-past, present and near-future work, and introduces the subsequent sessions of the Tech Plenary.

Meeting Chair: Steve Bratt (W3C Chief Executive Officer) [slides]

09:00 Session 2: My Data, Your Data, The Web's Data: Challenges of Data Ownership

Description:As the Web has grown and matured, people have started to view their contributions to it differently. Users expect our content we create to be shared widely and transparently, while still controlling both its copyright and personally identifying information. This panel will explore the social forces behind this, give some examples of technical approaches to the problem, and discuss the growing tensions between the actual sharing of information versus the desire to maintain copyright and privacy rights.

Moderator: Mark Nottingham (Yahoo)

Presenters and Topics:

  • Daniel Appelquist (Vodafone; Compound Document Formats, Mobile Web Best Practice, Device Independence, and Web Application Formats Working Groups, Hypertext Coordination Group, MWI Steering Council, Content Label Incubator Group)
  • Sandro Hawke (W3C; Rule Interchange Format Working Group; MIT Decentralized Information Group)
  • Bruno von Niman (ANEC; AC Representative)
  • Daniel Weitzner (W3C; Technology and Society Domain Leader; Patents and Standards Interest Group, P3P Coordination Group)
10:00 Break
10:30 Session 3: Microformats

Description: Leveraging the widespread adoption and understanding of CSS and semantic (X)HTML among web designers and publishers, microformats are a set of simple, practical, open data formats that are designed for humans first and machines second. Microformats are designed by researching and adapting to current human web publishing behaviors and usage patterns, and then reusing bits of existing widely adopted standards. This session will demonstrate the capabilities that have been quickly developed with microformats on today's Web, review current microformats, and open discussion on what microformats and related efforts mean for the future of the Web.

Moderators: Tantek Çelik (Technorati, CSS Working Group) and Dan Connolly (W3C; URI Interest Group, RDF Data Access Working Group, Technical Architecture Group)

Presenters and Topics:

  • Ian Hickson (Google; CSS Working Group) "A billion documents and no semantics anywhere" [slides]
  • Tantek Çelik (Technorati; CSS Working Group) "What are microformats?" [slides]
  • Håkon Wium Lie (Opera; CSS Working Group) "Cascading Markup Languages ‹ boom!" [slides]
  • Rohit Khare (CommerceNet) "Where Angle Brackets Fear to Tread" [slides]
  • Dan Connolly (W3C) "Microformats for practical Semantic Web deployment" [slides]
11:30 Session 4: SQL, XQuery and SPARQL: What's Wrong with this Picture?

Description: Does the world really need yet another query language? A new language for querying RDF, names SPARQL, is emerging from W3C. Some observers say that the W3C's own XQuery is sufficient for query RDF, at least in its XML incarnations, while others suggest that SQL is a more mature, widely-implemented language for querying tuples. This presentation explores the issues and positions the three languages.

Presenter: Jim Melton (Oracle; XML Query Working Group, XML Coordination Group) [slides]

12:00 Session 5: Lightning Talks (A)

Description: Presenters will provide strictly-monitored 3-minute talks on topics that range from interesting, informative, controversial or all of the above. The audience will have the opportunity to engage in a lightning question and answer period following each presentation.

Moderator: Paul Downey (BT; Web Services Addressing and Web Services Description Working Groups and Chair of XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group)

Presenters and Topics:

  • "Services and the Web" by Mark Nottingham (Yahoo)
  • "XG-1" by Phil Archer (Internet Content Rating Association; Mobile Web Best Practice Working Group, Content Label Incubator Group) [no slides]
  • "SVG Statistics Demo" by Ignacio Marín (Fundación CTIC; Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group) [slides for Web browsers with SVG support using <object> XHTML tag, and for Web browsers with SVG support using <embed> XHTML tag]
  • "SVG and XForms Processing Language" by Mark Birbeck (x-port.net, HTML and XForms Working Groups)
  • "Standard RDF mappings for everything?" by Jacek Kopecky (DERI Innsbruck; Web Services Description Working Group) [summary]
12:30 Lunch

Birds-of-a-Feather Tables. Participants may add to provided sign-up sheets any topic they like for discussion at each lunch table, and all are welcome to sign-up to sit at a particular table where a discussion of interest (an, hopefully, an interesting discussion) is proposed to take place.

14:00 Session 6: The Grid: What is the Grid and Why Does it Matter to W3C?

Description: The objectives for this session are to inform and encourage discussion on the GRID, including the technical context (What is the Grid? Where do Web standard, such as Web Services and Semantic Web, fit-in?) and the standards landscape (W3C, Global Grid Forum, Enterprise Grid Alliance, OASIS, DMTF, etc.)

Moderator: Ian Jacobs (W3C) and David De Roure (University of Southampton; GGF W3C liaison, Chair of Semantic Grid, Area Director Technology Innovators, W3C Advisory Committee)

Presenters and Topics:

  • Dave Snelling (Fujitsu; GGF Vice Chair of Standards) "What is the Grid?" [slides]
  • David De Roure (University of Southampton) "What is the Semantic Grid?" [slides]
  • Don Deutsch (Oracle; W3C Advisory Board; EGA President) [slides]
15:00 Session 7: Adventures in Formal Methods

Description: The work of various Working Groups who applied formal methods to support their work or to ground it will be presented, as a means of share experiences and discussing the benefits and costs of using these formalisms.

Moderator: Jonathan Marsh (Microsoft, Web Services Addressing Working Group, Chair of Web Services Description Working Group)

Presenters and Topics:

  • Jerome Simeon (IBM; XML Query Working Group) / Liam Quin (W3C; XML Coordination Group, XML Plenary Interest Group and XML Query and XSL Working Groups) "The XQuery1.0 and XPath2.0 Formal Semantics" [slides (PPT)]
  • Dan Connolly (W3C) "DTD/UML/OWL" [slides]
  • Charlton Barreto (Adobe; Web Services Choreography and Web Services Description Working Groups) "The π of Choreography" [slides, PDF]
  • Arthur Ryman (IBM; Web Services Description Working Group) / Hugo Haas (W3C; Web Services Coordination Group, Web Services Addressing and Web Services Description Working Groups) "Using Z Notation to Specify WSDL 2.0" [slides]
  • Q&A
16:00 Break
16:30 Session 8: Rich Web Application Backplane

Description: Introduce the idea of a backplane for compound documents to allow for more powerful markup combinations and reduce duplication in functionality across the combined markups.

Moderator: Kevin Kelly (IBM; XForms Working Group, Hypertext Coordination Group, Chair of the Compound Document Formats Working Group) [slides (PDF), demo (requires Firefox Deerpark alpha with xforms.xpi installed (FTP)]

Presenters and Topics:

  • John Boyer (IBM) "Intelligent XML Data Model" [slides]
  • Steven Pemberton (W3C/CWI; HTML and XForms Working Groups) "Events" [slides]
  • Mark Birbeck (x-port; HTML and XForms Working Groups) [slides]
  • Al Gilman (Protocols and Formats Working Group, Hypertext Coordination Group) "Accessibility" [slides]
  • Q&A
17:30 Session 9: Lightning Talks (B)

Description: Presenters will again provide strictly-monitored 3-minute talks on topics that range from interesting, informative, controversial or all of the above. The audience will have the opportunity to engage in a lightning question and answer period following each presentation.

Moderator: Paul Downey (BT, Web Services Addressing and Web Services Description Working Groups, and Chair of XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group)

Presenters and Topics:

  • Reports from BOF Tables
  • "What if a rose didn't have a name?" by Steven Pemberton (W3C/CWI) [slides]
  • "Signatures and Namespaces" by John Boyer (IBM, Chair of the XForms Working Group) [slides]
  • "Single Transferable Vote" by Jonathan Marsh (Microsoft)
  • "An Audience with Chad" by Paul Downey (BT) [slide]
18:00 Wrap-Up and Adjourn

An evening reception will close the day and start at 7pm in the restaurant of the hotel.


Send your reviews, comments on Technical Plenary

Those who attended this Technical Plenary meeting are kindly requested to complete the post-Meeting Survey, to help us make next year's Tech Plenary even stronger: http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/35125/tp2006-feedback/

The deadline for responding is midnight Eastern US time, Friday 17 March 2006.

Those with Member-access accounts (if you registered for this meeteing using the WBS Web form, you have one) can complete the Survey. However, if other attendees wish to provide their input, please see a Team member for assistance. Thanks!


Many thanks to the Program Committee:

Al Gilman, Protocols and Formats WG Chair

Kevin Kelly (IBM) Compound Document Formats WG Chair, XForms WG

Mark Nottingham (Yahoo!) P3P Specification Working Group

Amit Sheth (Semagix) Advisory Committee Representative

Susie Stephens (Oracle) Health Care and Life Sciences IG

Rachel Yager (Financial Services Technology Consortium)

Yves Lafon (W3C) Web Services Choreography, XML Schema Patters for Databinding and XML Protocol WGs; Semantic Web Services IG Team Contact

Susan Lesch (W3C) Communications Team

Danny Weitzner (W3C) Technology and Society Domain Leader, Patent and Standards IG Co-Chair

Steve Bratt (W3C) Chief Executive Officer, Technical Plenary Day Program Committee Chair

... and thanks to all Moderators, Panelists and Participants.


Steve Bratt ()