W3C announces today the speakers and the schedule for W3Conf, W3C's first developer conference, in the Seattle area on 15-16 November 2011. W3Conf will feature presentations by renowned experts on mobile development, layout, script libraries, graphics, security, and Web gaming, and representatives from major browser and authoring tool vendors. The talks will focus on technologies you can use today, with a glimpse of the future; this is about developers, not products. Registration is open, with early bird rates available through 31 October. W3C would like to thank Microsoft for making this conference possible, and express our appreciation to Platinum Sponsor ATT, and Gold Sponsors Adobe and Nokia.

The Web Applications Working Group updated three Working Drafts today:

• File API, which provides an API for representing file objects in web applications, as well as programmatically selecting them and accessing their data.
• Server-Sent Events, which defines an API for opening an HTTP connection for receiving push notifications from a server in the form of DOM events. The API is designed such that it can be extended to work with other push notification schemes such as Push SMS.
• HTML5 Web Messaging, which defines two mechanisms for communicating between browsing contexts in HTML documents.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group has published a Group Note of Ontology of Rhetorical Blocks (ORB). The Ontology of Rhetorical Blocks is a formalization capturing the coarse-grained rhetorical structure of scientific publications. This note is designed to provide a general overview of the motivation and use-cases supporting ORB, in addition to the actual conceptual elements, as well as, practical examples of how to use it in conjunction with different representation languages. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The Provenance Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of The PROV Data Model and Abstract Syntax Notation. PROV-DM is a core data model for provenance for building representations of the entities, people and processes involved in producing a piece of data or thing in the world. PROV-DM is domain-agnostic but with well-defined extensibility points allowing further domain-specific and application-specific extensions to be defined. It is accompanied by PROV-ASN, a technology-independent abstract syntax notation, which allows serializations of PROV-DM instances to be created for human consumption, which facilitates its mapping to concrete syntax, and which is used as the basis for a formal semantics. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

W3C announces today the new Model-Based User Interfaces (MBUI) Working Group. The mission of the Model-Based UI Working Group is to develop standards as a basis for interoperability across authoring tools for context aware user interfaces for Web-based interactive applications. Application developers face increasing difficulties due to wide variations in device capabilities, in the details of the standards they support, the need to support assistive technologies for accessibility, the demand for richer user interfaces, the suites of programming languages and libraries, and the need to contain costs and meet challenging schedules during the development and maintenance of applications. The Model-Based UI Working Group will start from extensive experience with model-based user interface design solutions, and will provide a strong basis for interoperable authoring tools for interactive application front ends, with HTML5 as a key delivery platform. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.