To increase and broaden participation in its activities, W3C announces today a new startup membership level for small organizations new to W3C. Organizations are eligible for the new level depending on their size (10 or fewer employees) and annual revenues. This new level is available for the first two years of Membership. Please see the startup level description for details and more information about eligibility. Please contact membership@w3.org if you have any questions.

The Device APIs Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Vibration API. This specification defines an API that provides access to the vibration mechanism of the hosting device. Vibration is a form of tactile feedback. The API is designed to tackle high-value use cases related to gaming, and is not meant to be used as a generic notification mechanism. Comments are welcome through 01 March. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The Provenance Working Group has published a Working Draft of The PROV Data Model and Abstract Syntax Notation. PROV-DM is a data model for provenance for building representations of the entities, people and activities involved in producing a piece of data or thing in the world. PROV-DM is domain-agnostic, but is equipped with extensibility points allowing further domain-specific and application-specific extensions to be defined. PROV-DM 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.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) has updated the Before and After Demonstration (BAD). BAD shows an inaccessible website and a retrofitted version of the same website with the accessibility barriers fixed. Read the update e-mail and learn about Accessibility.

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published three Last Call Working Drafts today:

• RDFa Core 1.1,
• RDFa Lite 1.1 and
• XHTML+RDFa 1.1.

Together, these documents outline the vision for RDFa in a variety of XML and HTML-based Web markup languages. RDFa Core 1.1 specifies the core syntax and processing rules for RDFa 1.1 and how the language is intended to be used in XML documents. RDFa Lite 1.1 provides a simple subset of RDFa for novice Web authors. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 specifies the usage of RDFa in the XHTML markup language.

A number of improvements have been made to RDFa 1.1 over the past year by working closely with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and the other search engine developers. Public review and comments have resulted in a number of further refinements to the language that eases the learning curve for beginner Web authors.

The release of these documents as Last Call Working Drafts is a signal to the public that the Working Group believes that all of the technical requirements, public comments and reported issues have been addressed. It is also an open invitation to the general public to review and provide feedback on the finalization of this technology via the RDF Web Applications Working Group mailing list, by 21 February. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

In accordance with the W3C Patent Policy, W3C has launched a Patent Advisory Group (PAG) in response to disclosures related to the Touch Events version 1 Specification. The Web Events Working Group develops this specification. W3C launches a PAG to resolve issues in the event a patent has been disclosed that may be essential, but is not available under the W3C Royalty-Free licensing requirements. Public comments regarding these disclosures may be sent to public-te-pag@w3.org (with public archive). Learn more about Patent Advisory Groups.