World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

• Leading the Web to its Full Potential
  

W3C

• Founded by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee (1994)
  
• W3C Provides the Vision and the Standards to Lead the Web:
  
  • From a Web of Documents... toward One Web:
    
    • of Data and Services
      
    • on Everything
      
    • for Everyone

Where’s Wally eGov?

Why W3C cares about eGovernment?

• The Web has become the main channel for Governments to deliver services to citizens
• Web technologies are crucial in the relationships between Govs, and Govs and Industry
• Use of W3C Technologies in eGov is increasing
  • W3C standards named in laws (e.g. Web Accessibility)

eGovernment efforts at W3C

• Series of discussions to better understand the needs of Government in deploying current Web standards and the directions that future Web standards should take to best address delivery of Government services.
  
  • European Symposium on eGovernment, Gijón, Spain, 1-2 February 2007
  • Toward More Transparent Government: Workshop on eGovernment and the Web, Washington DC, USA, 18-19 June 2007

Improving eGov through use of Open Web Standards

• Openness
• Interoperability
• Privacy, Security and Trust

Openness

What Open Standard means?

• Transparent process
  
• Open participation
  
• Technical Consensus
  
• Running code
  
• Free and Persistent Specification
  
• W3C Patent Policy for Web Technologies

Why Open Web Standards?

• Open Standards increase innovation and competition
• Increase citizens and market trust
  • not tied to proprietary solutions
    
  • avoid vendor lock-in
    

Best Practices and Methodologies

• The development of standards-based interoperable frameworks is important to improving efficiencies and increasing the value of IT investments
  
• Accessibility as an example: 
  
  • adherence to standards makes it easier for the content providers to serve browser-independent content
    
  • Government leadership is important in getting the technology vendors and the content providers to do the right thing for all citizens

Interoperability, Data Integration

Basic Interoperability

• What about Web pages that can only be accessed using a given browser?
• New technologies, old problems, e.g.:
  
  • mobile phones as enablers of Government services (e.g. in developing countries)
    
  • difficult to build an interoperable solution (too many devices, browsers...), see the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) work

Semantic Interoperability

• Lots of initiatives and interoperability frameworks built or in the works
  
  • usually work only in a given context (national, regional...), hard to interoperate between them yet
    

Data Integration

• Use Semantic Web technologies
  
  • allows mixing data from very different sources
    
  • no need to thrown away your existing data or systems, just build on top
    
  • share, publish, use standards (RDF, OWL, SPARQL...), plan for unexpected reuse
    
  • use IDs (URIs)
    

Privacy, Transparency, Trust

Creating a Trust Context

• Opacity is not the solution, transparency is the way to go
  
  • use the data for the purpose it was collected
    

Conclusions

• eGovernment Services increasing sophistication, but “good old problems” not solved yet
  
• The use of Open Standards can help
  
• Need cooperation and skip reinventing the wheel, e.g., use cases and best practices
  
• Governments should be involved in development of open standards
  
• eGovernment should be accessible to all

Thanks

• This slides at http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/1010-Paris-JA/

José M. Alonso <josema@w3.org>