W3C Exec Summary

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an International Consortium where Member and External organizations, a full-time technical staff, and the public work together to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing Web standards such as protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

• Goals: Interoperability, Universality, Functionalities
• Neutral/nonforprofit, consensus based, open participation, open results
• ~400 members, ~60 staff,
• ~50 Working Groups ~20 Coordination Groups and Interest Groups
• Hosting: MIT (America), ERCIM (Europe) and Keio University (Japan) + 17 Offices (e.g. China)
• Advisory Board, Technical Architecture Group
• Liaisons with 40+ other standards bodies, Accountable to the global Public

What Open Standards means ?

A lot of debates nowadays for a common definition of Open Standards(IGF, EC, etc)

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

W3C Eating its own dog food!

W3C works with thousands of engineers using the Web and the Internet as a platform.

• Emails, open archives (e.g. HTML5 WG today)
• Web sites under w3.org (public, member, team)
• Web 2.0 applications (action item, issues tracker, web survey)
• Web DB tools (to manager participants)
• Instant Message (IRC) + bots for teleconferencing
• VOIP, slides in HTML/CSS, etc

Many using Semantic Web technologies on the server, and accessible to participants with disabilities.

Like IETF, our process is one of our specification (bootstrap principle)

W3C Results

SOA - Web Services

A complete list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index.

• Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema
• SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism
• SOAP Resource Representation Header
• SOAP Version 1.2 Part 0: Primer
• SOAP Version 1.2 Part 1: Messaging Framework
• SOAP Version 1.2 Part 2: Adjuncts
• SOAP Version 1.2 Specification Assertions and Test Collection
• Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Core
• Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Metadata
• Web Services Addressing 1.0 - SOAP Binding
• Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 0: Primer
• Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 1: Core Language
• Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 2: Adjuncts as Recommendation.
• Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework
• Web Services Policy 1.5 - Attachment

See this full presentation.

Groups

The Activity, coordinated by one Coordination Group, is currently composed of six Working Groups:

• Web Services Choreography Working Group
• Web Services Policy Working Group
• XML Protocol Working Group
• XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group
• SOAP-JMS Binding Working Group

and one Interest Group:

• Semantic Web Services Interest Group

Previous Groups that have finished their work in this Activity are:

• Semantic Annotations for Web Services Description Language Working Group
• Web Services Addressing Working Group
• Web Services Architecture Working Group
• Web Services Description Working Group

Detailed information about the work of each of these groups can be found on their respective home pages.

A new group: WG: WSRA Web Services Resource Access

Conclusion

Principles:

• Applications (Web or not) viewed as a set of functional services, e.g. RPC
• Full service metadata = concurrent programming environment
• Vertical specificities, e.g. b2b, b2c, p2p, egov, etc
• Respect Web architecture, REST, URI, etc

Benefits

• Reuse, stability
• Cost Reductions, open markets
• Agility, Web spirit

But not finished yet!