The Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) has published an updated draft of the WAI resource Easy Checks – A First Review of Web Accessibility. Easy Checks helps you assess if a Web page addresses accessibility. It provides simple steps for anyone who can use the Web; no accessibility knowledge or skill is required. The checks cover just a few accessibility issues and are designed to be quick and easy, rather than definitive. Learn about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

W3C will be present at CeBIT 2014, in Hannover, Germany. The main topic of CeBIT 2014 is Datability which relates in many ways to upcoming W3C work e.g. in the W3C Data Activity and the Web of Things. W3C is looking forward to meeting you on 11 March, at the DFKI booth. Consider to schedule a meeting with:

• Phil Archer , Data Activity Lead;
• Alan Bird , Global Business Development Leader;
• Bernard Gidon , Business Development Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA);
• Dave Raggett , team contact in several Ubiquitous Web Working Groups and chair of the Web of Things Community Group; and
• Georg Rehm , W3C German-Austrian Office Manager.

Meeting slots are limited and decided on a first come, first served basis.

W3C announced today the seventh MultilingualWeb workshop in a series of events exploring the mechanisms and processes needed to ensure that the World Wide Web lives up to its potential around the world and across barriers of language and culture. To be held 7-8 May 2014 in Madrid, this workshop is made possible by the generous support of the LIDER project. As part of the event, LIDER will organize a roadmapping workshop on linked data and content analytics. Anyone may attend all sessions at no charge and the W3C welcomes participation by both speakers and non-speaking attendees. Early registration is encouraged due to limited space.

Building on the success of six highly regarded previous workshops, this workshop will emphasize new technology developments that may lead to new opportunities for the Multilingual Web. The workshop brings together participants interested in the best practices and standards needed to help content creators, localizers, language tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web. It provides further opportunities for networking across communities that span the various aspects involved. We are particularly interested in speakers who can demonstrate novel solutions for reaching out to a global, multilingual audience. Registration is available online.

The Government Linked Data Working Group has published today three Proposed Recommendations.

• Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT), an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs published on the Web. This document defines the schema and provides examples for its use. By using DCAT to describe datasets in data catalogs, publishers increase discoverability and enable applications easily to consume metadata from multiple catalogs. It further enables decentralized publishing of catalogs and facilitates federated dataset search across sites. Aggregated DCAT metadata can serve as a manifest file to facilitate digital preservation.
• The Organization Ontology, which describes a core ontology for organizational structures, aimed at supporting linked data publishing of organizational information across a number of domains. It is designed to allow domain-specific extensions to add classification of organizations and roles, as well as extensions to support neighbouring information such as organizational activities.
• The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary, which provides a means, by using the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard, to publish multi-dimensional data, such as statistics, on the web in such a way that it can be linked to related data sets and concepts.

Learn more about the Data Activity.

Today the RDF Working Group published three First Public Working Drafts; they are all expected to become W3C Notes:

• RDF 1.1 Primer, which explains how to use this language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web.
• RDF 1.1: On Semantics of RDF Datasets, which presents some issues to be addressed when defining a formal semantics for datasets, as they have been discussed in the RDF Working Group, and specify several semantics in terms of model theory, each corresponding to a certain design choice for RDF datasets.
• What’s New in RDF 1.1

Learn more about W3C’s new Data Activity, launched to help people share data as far as possible using their existing tools and working practices but in a way that enables others to derive and add value, and to utilize it in ways that suit them.

Today the CSS Working Group published a Working Draft of CSSOM View Module. The APIs introduced by this specification provide authors with a way to inspect and manipulate the visual view of a document. This includes getting the position of element layout boxes, obtaining the width of the viewport through script, and also scrolling an element. Learn more about CSS.

The Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG) today published the WAI-ARIA 1.0 User Agent Implementation Guide as a Candidate Recommendation. It describes how browsers and other user agents should support WAI-ARIA (the Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification), specifically, how to expose WAI-ARIA features to platform accessibility APIs. Comments and implementations are welcome by 17 January 2014. Learn about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).