The mission of W3C Offices can be summarized as follows: "To promote adoption of W3C recommendations among developers, application builders, and standards setters, and to encourage inclusion of stakeholder organizations in the creation of future recommendations by joining W3C." http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/ 2010-12-07 2010-12-07: On november 24 the second semantic meetup with the W3C Benelux Office took place in Amsterdam. This time it was located at Mediamatic. Among the speakers was Ivan Herman who presented "Some of the newest SW technologies at W3C: RDFa1.1 and R2ML". Other topics were about careers, practical use of Semantic Web technology in publishing and legal information retrieval. After the presentations there was time for informal discussions supported by food and drinks. The participants enjoyed the easy athmosphere of the event and the discussions as documented by a quote from a participant: "meetups are fun, but informal meetups are even more fun." http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#dec12 2010-12-07 2010-11-26: The W3C India Office has published a report on the "W3C India Workshop on Internationalization of E-governance Applications" held in August 2010. The event was organized in cooperation with Opera software. The event addressed topics specific to India an many other developing countries like the problem of last mile connectivity and reaching the larger section of society due to limited availability of web based services with local language support. One building stone in resolving such problems are the W3C internationalization best practices coupled with other W3C standards. Because of last mile problem mobile technologies play also an important role when trying to reach the citizens with e-government services. Also see news item. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Nov26 2010-11-26 2010-10-22: The W3C Office Hungary is organizing a one-day event on HTML5 on 28th October 2010. Invited guest speaker is Michael Smith from W3C Keio host. People are invited to deliver a lecture or presentation, in case they have an interesting topic or project related to either HTML5 or other W3C technologies. Participation is free, but needs advance registration. Conference languages are Hungarian and English. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Oct22 2010-10-22 2010-10-21: In the tradition of its Café com Browser the W3C Brasil Office opened the Café Semântico on October 15th. Speaker was Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity lead. 30 participants gathered in th eCafé and more than 120 participated remotely on the Web. Participants were very actively commented and raised questions on twitter (@w3cbrasil, #cafecombrowser, #cafewithbrowser, #cafesemantico) and in the live chat. Ivan herman presented the basic concepts of Semantic Web, examples and the technologies behind and under them. This presentation will be available in video in the W3C Brazil Office web site. Slides are already available. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Oct21a 2010-10-21 2010-10-21: As reported before the W3C Brasil Office held the second edition of W3C Brazil Web Conference, on October 5 and 6, in Belo Horizonte. About 200 attendees had the opportunity of talking about the future of the Web with W3C special guests. Paul Cooton, co-chair of W3C HTML Working Group and Microsoft Partner Group manager, addressed the future of HTML 5. His presence was timely perfect to clarify the great repercussion on news headlines to not deploy HTML 5. Noshir Contractor, professor at Northeastern University, USA, addressed the researches on the social network lificycle. Fernanda Viegas, a Brazilian researcher at Google, in Cambridge, USA, gave a a vibrant talk on the Web. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Oct21 2010-10-21 2010-10-13: Under the title "Dimensions and characteristics of the Brazilian Web, a study by the gov.br" the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) and the Network Information Center – NIC.br published a study about the size, technology and use of the Brazil Web. The study was conducted by the W3C Brazil Office in cooperation with the Center of Study and Research in Network Technology and Operations (CEPTRO.br). http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Oct13 2010-10-13 2010-10-06: The W3C Australia Office organizes a track named W3C South on the upcoming Web Directions South 2010 conference. W3C South will be held on Oct 14-15 in Sydney. Topics will be Web development, Widgets, HTML 5, accessibility, RDFa, and Linked Open Government data. See program for information on details and speakers. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Oct06a 2010-10-06 2010-10-06: W3C welcomes Armin Haller as new manager of the W3C Australia Office. Armin is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Information Engineering Laboratory in the ICT Centre of CSIRO, Australia. He received a PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research interests are in workflow management, Web services and the Semantic Web. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Oct06 2010-10-06 2010-10-05: For the second time W3C Brasil Office organizes the W3C Web.br 2010 Conference. The conference takes place in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in October, 5 and 6. Talks on the impact of the web on business, on government, and on community are scheduled for the first day of the Conference. On the second day, the W3C Brazil Office will launch the English version of the “Dimensions and Characteristics of the Brazilian Web: a study of the gov.br”, the first outcomes of Web Census Project. Keynotes will be by Paul Cotton, co-chair of W3C HTML Working Group and Microsoft Canada representative on "The future of the web and HTML 5", Noshir Contractor, a member of The Web Science Trust and director of research group in Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) at Northwestern University, USA, will speak about "Web Science and the study of social networks", Sergio Amadeu, associate professor at the Federal University of ABC will address "The Future of Internet and the communication ecosystem". Demi Getschko, NIC.br's CEO, will speak on "The Future of Internet in Brazil and in the world" and the closing session will bring computing designer Fernanda Viégas, one of the leaders of Google's Big Picture project. The W3C Web Conference seeks to offer to the audience an annual forum for discussion and debate on the evolution of the Web, the standardization of its technology and its impact on society and culture. More information on the agenda can be found at the conference Web site. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Oct05 2010-10-05 2010-10-01: W3C announces that the W3C UK and Ireland Office has a new home. STFC (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) that hosted the eldest W3C Office since 1997 hands over to Nominet. W3C would like to thank STFC and the Office Manager Michael Wilson for all the years of their great support. Nominet runs the Internet registry for .uk domain names. This is one of the world’s largest Internet registries with over eight million domain names. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Oct01 2010-10-01 2010-09-17: The W3C Germany and Austria Office held its W3Cday 2010 at the Xinnovations event on Sept. 15th 2010 in Berlin. The Office had managed to engaged some dedicated speakers on some hot subjects. Jens Grochtdreis from Webkrauts gave the view of a Webdeveloper on W3C work. In his talk "Knockin' on heaven's door - Die Praxis zu Besuch beim W3C" he emphasized that he loves open standards from W3C - but he would appreciate them to be published more timely. He thinks that HTML5 and CSS3 are urgently needed. Unfortunately the talk of Patrick Lauke from Opera on HTML5 had to be cancelled because the speaker had fallen ill. Benjamin Adrian from DFKI and the W3C RDFa WG introduced the audience to new features of RDFa followed by Klaus Birkenbihl, W3C Offices coordinator, who gave an overview on how RDFa is used today by big players like Facebook, Google and Yahoo. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Sep17 2010-09-17 2010-09-02: W3help.org, the Website of China Web Standards Promotion Community was officially launched on Google DevFest event, Sep 2nd 2010 in Beijing. Prof. Dianfu Ma, Dean of School of computer Science and engineering, gave an opening speech to share his thoughts on the future of web and web standards on behalf of W3C China Office. He said: "I'm happy to wish the community success and I expect, that with all the effort and support we can build a better Web in China, based on open standards." The China Web Standards Promotion Community, formerly known as W3C China Community, is a joint effort of the industry, standards bodies, research institutes, volunteer communities or other organizations bodies who care about web standards in China and the W3C China Office. W3help.org focuses on the promotion and application of web standards by way of providing standards related technical reports, cross-browser development and compatibility resources, Chinese translations, online courses and local news. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Sep02 2010-09-02 2010-09-01: On August 5th and 6th the W3C India Office held a Workshop on Internationalization of e-Governance Applications. The objective and focus of the workshop was to create awareness and provide training. The audience were developers and users of e-Governance applications and all associated stake holders interested in using W3C web standards especially in the perspective of internationalization. The workshop also aimed at capturing the requirements for Indian languages implementation of e-Governance solutions. It also covered hands-on examples and training to develop e-Governance solutions in Indian languages using W3C standards. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Sep01 2010-09-01 2010-08-31: W3C China Office cooperated with Tsinghua University to host "the 4th Chinese Semantic Web Symposium, CSWS 2010"from August 19th to 21st 2010 in Beijing. To maintain the tradition of the CSWS series, the 2010 Symposium provided effective opportunities for the researchers of Semantic Web technology and related areas, especially young scholars, to communicate and do some academic exchanges. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Aug31 2010-08-31 2010-08-13: The W3C Korea Office held a Korean Member Workshop in Seoul on 21 July 2010. Participants were from the Korean membership as well as from the regional W3C host in Keio University, Tokyo. It was an opportunity to have a face to face membership gathering, and also to share interests and discuss plans for Web standardization activities among the members. The program started with talks on trends of new Web technologies including HTML5 and Augmented Reality on the web. Michael Smith and Kazuyuki Ashimura from W3C team, Keio, presented new features of HTML5 and HTML5 IG activities in Japan. Augmented Reality on the web and some issues to be resolved by standardization were introduced by W3C Korea Office. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Aug13 2010-08-13 2010-08-12: On June 29 the First Amsterdamse Semantic Meetup took place in the ‘Tuinzaal’ of the Brakke Grond in the center of Amsterdam. The focus of the Meetup was on bridging academic research to business applications. The meetup were joined by 27 participants. Contributions were by 5 speakers: Sam Coppens, Multimedia Lab University Ghent, 'Deep Archiving...a Provenance Story'; Bastiaan Deblieck, TenForce, 'Using SKOS and Semantic Technologies to support smart, sustainable and inclusive growth in Europe' (pitch of the SemTech2010 talk); Lieve Janssen, Explore+ 'Summer of Code - Bridging the gap between academy and industry'; Balthasar Schopman, VU Amsterdam - Computer Science - Web & Media, 'Serendipitous search on the Web of Data' and Orri Erling from OpenLink Software. The event was supported by the W3C Benelux Office. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#Aug12 2010-08-12 2010-07-17: Targeted at Web developers that want to promote and use advanced Web technologies, W3C China Office and WebReBuild.org had invited to the symposion "W3C day - WebRebuild 2010". More than 250 participants enjoyed a day filled with various topics related to Website development. The symposion was well organized and offered the audience many ways of participation and some entertainment. Participants could send their comments on the talks diretly to a second screen using a micro blogging service, provided by one of the biggest local online protal providers. A lottery amongst the microbloggers encouraged comments and offered entertainment. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/News/2010#jul18 2010-07-17