W3C announced today a Workshop on Open Data on the Web, 23-24 April 2013, in London (England). The event is hosted by Google and jointly organized with the Open data Institute and the Open Knowledge Foundation. Participants will help prioritize W3C's agenda in the area of data on the Web at a time when a number of working groups have either completed or are close to completing their charters. As well the promises of government transparency and efficiency, the claim that is made most frequently of open data is that it is the "new oil" that is driving the digital economy. At this workshop, participants will discuss their experiences of realizing this aim and identify what's needed to make it easier. W3C membership is not required to participate. The event is open to all, but limited to 80 attendees. All participants are required to submit a position paper by 3 March 2013.

The RDFa Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of HTML+RDFa 1.1. This specification defines rules and guidelines for adapting the RDFa Core 1.1 and RDFa Lite 1.1 specifications for use in HTML5 and XHTML5. The rules defined in this specification not only apply to HTML5 documents in non-XML and XML mode, but also to HTML4 and XHTML documents interpreted through the HTML5 parsing rules. Comments are welcome through 28 February. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

W3C today published the Second Edition of the Rule Interchange Format (RIF). RIF was developed through a joint effort of members of the Business Rules, Semantic Web, and Logic Programming communities. It allows rules systems to be connected together for highly-structured knowledge to be accurately exchanged as explained in RIF Use Cases and Requirements. The Second Edition includes editorial improvements and a number of small corrections to the original specification, along with a new RIF Primer.

The six new standards are:

• RIF Core Dialect (Second Edition), which provides a standard, base level of functionality for interchange,
• RIF Basic Logic Dialect (Second Edition) and RIF Production Rule Dialect (Second Edition), which provide extended functionality matching two common classes of rule engines,
• RIF Framework for Logic Dialects (Second Edition), which describes how to extend RIF for use with a large class of systems,
• RIF Datatypes and Built-Ins 1.0 (Second Edition), which borrows heavily from XQuery and XPath for a set of basic operations,
• and RIF RDF and OWL Compatibility (Second Edition), which specifies how RIF works with RDF data and OWL ontologies.

Along with these standards, the RIF Working Group published today six related documents: RIF Overview (Second Edition), RIF Use Cases and Requirements (Second Edition), RIF Test Cases (Second Edition), OWL 2 RL in RIF (Second Edition), RIF Combination with XML data (Second Edition), and RIF In RDF (Second Edition). Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

The Web Real-Time Communication Working Group and Device APIs Working Group have published the First Public Working Draft of MediaStream Recording. This document defines a recording API for use with MediaStreams as defined in Media Capture and Streams. This API attempts to make basic recording very simple, while still allowing for more complex use cases. The contents of the recording will be made available in the platform's default encoding via the dataavailable event. Functions are available to query the platform's available set of encodings, and to select the desired ones if the author wishes. The application can also choose how much data it wants to receive at one time. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The System Applications Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Web Alarms API Specification. This specification defines a System Level API to provide access to the device alarm settings, which can schedule a notification or for an application to be started at a specific time. For example, some applications like alarm-clock, calendar or auto-update might need to utilize Alarm API to trigger particular device behaviors at specified time points. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

The Timed Text Working Group has published a Group Note of TTML Simple Delivery Profile for Closed Captions (US). This document specifies the Simple Online Delivery Profile (US) of the Timed Text Markup Language (TTML). The primary goal of the profile is to establish a minimum level of interoperability between TTML 1.0 and legacy caption formats employed in US markets. This is accomplished by (1) defining a set of constraints that apply to TTML document instances that claim adherence to this profile, and (2) defining a set of mandatory features and behaviors that must be supported by implementations of a TTML Presentation Processor that claim adherence to this profile. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity.