W3C published today the final report of the W3C Workshop on the Web of Things that was held on 25-26 June 2014, in Berlin (Germany).

The workshop examined the opportunities for open Web standards for service platforms in the network edge and the cloud, along with the challenges for security, privacy and the integration with the Web of data.

The workshop gave a strong message of support for W3C to initiate work on standardization for the Web of Things. The foundations include RESTful HTTP and pub-sub protocols, but the detailed requirements vary across the use cases. Building upon these foundations, the workshop identified the need for standards for Web APIs that abstract away from the protocols, including the wide range of IoT technologies used at the network edge to connect to sensors and actuators. Through standardization, we can encourage re-use of APIs and data models.

The W3C staff will drive the process of chartering an Interest Group through reaching out to a wide range of interested stakeholders. Initial ideas for the scope are included in the workshop report.

The Tracking Protection Working Group has published a Working Draft of Tracking Compliance and Scope. This specification defines the meaning of a Do Not Track (DNT) preference and sets out practices for websites to comply with this preference. Learn more about the Privacy Activity.

The Web Application Security Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Referrer Policy. This document describes how an author can set a referrer policy for documents they create, and the impact of such a policy on the referer HTTP header for outgoing requests and navigations. Learn more about the Security Activity.

A report of the MultilingualWeb workshop in Madrid is now available from the MultilingualWeb site. It contains a summary of each session with links to presentation slides and minutes taken during the workshop in Madrid. The workshop was a huge success, with approximately 110 participants, and with the aligned LIDER roadmapping workshop. The Workshop was hosted by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, sponsored by the EU-funded LIDER project, by Verisign and by Lionbridge. A new workshop in the MultilingualWeb series is planned for 2015. Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.

W3C today updated its privacy policy to reflect current technology and W3C practices. The policy does not make material changes to what W3C does with information resulting from visits to our site. If you have questions, please write to site-policy@w3.org.

W3C and its European host, ERCIM, announce the report from the first workshop in the Share-PSI 2.0 series. Share-PSI 2.0 is the European network for the exchange of experience and ideas around implementing open data policies in the public sector. It brings together government departments, standards bodies, academic institutions, commercial organisations, trade associations and interest groups to identify what does and doesn’t work, what is and isn’t practical, what can and can’t be expected of different stakeholders.

In the first workshop, held as part of the 5th Annual Samos Summit on ICT-enabled Governance, the focus was Uses of Open Data Within Government for Innovation and Efficiency. The report shows the many different strategies being adopted to foster a culture of data sharing across the public sector leading to significant efficiencies in operation, more effective delivery of the public task, reduced corruption and greater trust in important institutions like the police. From Helsinki to Athens via Dublin and Zagreb, from Oslo to Madrid via Tirana, Tenerife and Trentino – the public sector is making smarter use of the Web.

The Samos workshop also sets us up nicely for the next workshop in the series. Taking place in Lisbon in the first week in December, Encouraging open data usage by commercial developers will be highly interactive with many facilitated discussions and very few presentations.

W3C membership is not required to participate. The event is open to all, but all participants are required to submit a position paper or statement of interest by 5 October 2014. Share-PSI 2.0 is coordinated by W3C/ERCIM as part of the Data Activity and is closely aligned with the Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS Ruby Layout Module Level 1. “Ruby”, a form of interlinear annotation, are short runs of text alongside the base text. They are typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation, or to provide a short annotation. This module describes the rendering model and formatting controls related to displaying ruby annotations in CSS. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. Learn more about the Style Activity.