The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Progress Events. The Progress Events specification defines an event interface that can be used for measuring progress; e.g., HTTP entity body transfers. This specification is primarily meant to be used by other specifications. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

To strengthen its relations with industry and research activities in France and Europe, W3C announces today the opening of a W3C Office in France, hosted by Inria (French National Computer Science Research Institute). To mark the launch, the Office is organizing a session on Open Data at the Open World Forum on 22 September in Paris, in cooperation with Inria and Paris City Hall. "Inria has a longstanding commitment to the development of free software and open standards," said Prof. Michel Cosnard, Inria Chairman and CEO. "We have supported W3C's mission since the inception of the Consortium in 1994, notably by hosting W3C's European branch". Read the full press release and learn more about the W3C Offices.

W3C announced today a new standard for the exchange of "digital ink" on the Web. The Ink Markup Language (InkML) Recommendation can be used to store and exchange the output of an electronic pen or stylus as well as handwriting, gestures, sketches, music, and other notations. InkML is part of W3C's ongoing efforts to build One Web available from any device. A host of new applications are now possible thanks to this open standard, such as: pen-based text messaging; handwritten annotation of documents, photos, or other media; collaborative white boards; archiving of hand-written notes; and more efficient approaches to filling out forms. Read the press release and testimonials and learn more about the Web of Devices.

The RDB2RDF Working Group has published two Last Call Working Drafts for bringing relational database information to the Semantic Web: R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language and A Direct Mapping of Relational Data to RDF . The former describes R2RML, a language for expressing customized mappings from relational databases to RDF datasets. Such mappings provide the ability to view existing relational data in the RDF data model, expressed in a structure and target vocabulary of the mapping author's choice. The latter document defines a direct mapping from relational data to RDF. Comments are welcome through 1 November. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.