The Web Applications Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Indexed Database API. This document defines APIs for a database of records holding simple values and hierarchical objects. Each record consists of a key and some value. Moreover, the database maintains indexes over records it stores. An application developer directly uses an API to locate records either by their key or by using an index. A query language can be layered on this API. An indexed database can be implemented using a persistent B-tree data structure. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) requests review of draft updates to Notes that accompany WCAG 2.0: Techniques for WCAG 2.0 (Public Review Draft) and Understanding WCAG 2.0 (Public Review Draft). Comments are welcome through 29 January 2015. (This is not an update to WCAG 2.0, which is a stable document.) To learn more about the updates, see the Call for Review: WCAG 2.0 Techniques Draft Updates e-mail. Read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Digital Publishing Interest Group has published a Group Note of DPUB IG Metadata Task Force Report. The Metadata Task Force of the DPUB IG found, through extensive interviews with representatives of various sectors and roles within the publishing ecosystem, that there are numerous pain points for publishers with regard to metadata but that these pain points are largely not due to deficiencies in the Open Web Platform. Instead, there is a widespread lack of understanding or implementation of the technologies that the OWP already makes available for addressing most of the issues raised. However, some of the very technologies that are little used or understood in most sectors of publishing are widely used and understood in certain other sectors (e.g., scientific publishing, libraries). Priorities that have emerged are the need for better understanding of the importance of expressing identifiers as URIs; the need for much more widespread use of RDF and its various serializations throughout the publishing ecosystem; and the need to develop a truly interoperable, cross-sector specification for the conveyance of rights metadata (while remaining agnostic as to the sector-specific vocabularies for the expression of rights). This Note documents in detail the issues that were raised; provides examples of available RDF educational resources at various levels, from the very technical to non-technical and introductory; and lists important identifiers used in the publishing ecosystem, documenting which of them are expressed as URIs, and in what sectors and contexts. It recommends that while little new technology is called for, the W3C is in a unique position to bridge today’s currently siloed metadata practices to help facilitate truly cross-sector exchange of interoperable metadata. This Note is thus intended to provide background and a context in which concrete work, whether by this Task Force or elsewhere within the W3C, may be undertaken. Learn more about the Digital Publishing Activity.

The CSV on the Web Working Group has published First Public Working Drafts of the Generating JSON from Tabular Data on the Web and the Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web documents, and has also issued new releases of the Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data and the Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web Working Drafts. A large percentage of the data published on the Web is tabular data, commonly published as comma separated values (CSV) files. Validation, conversion, display, and search of that tabular data requires additional information on that data. The “Metadata vocabulary” document defines a vocabulary for metadata that annotates tabular data, providing such information as datatypes, linkage among different tables, license information, or human readable description of columns. The standard conversion of the tabular data to JSON and/or RDF makes use of that metadata to provide representations of the data for various applications. All these technologies rely on a basic data model for tabular data described in the “Model” document. The Working Group welcomes comments on these documents and on their motivating use cases. Learn more about the Data Activity.

The W3C and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced today a new collaboration to improve interoperability and integration of spatial data on the Web. Spatial data is integral to many of our human endeavors and so there is a high value in making it easier to integrate that data into Web based datasets and services.

The new Spatial Data on the Web Working Group will work in close collaboration with the Open Geospatial Consortium, in particular, the eponymous OCG’s Spatial Data on the Web Working Group . “Location, as well as providing context to much of today’s online information, is vital to the emerging field of connected devices,” said Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist at Google. “Through this collaboration we hope to make the understanding of geospatial knowledge a fundamental component of the Web.”

This work follows the March 2014 Workshop on Linking Geospatial Data and is supported in part at W3C by the SmartOpenData project.

Read the press release and learn more about the W3C Data Activity.