Four W3C projects into Google Summer of Code 2013

Google has just announced the accepted projects for the Summer of Code 2013. W3C was granted four slots.

First of all, I'd like to thank all the students who participated as well as the mentors, particularly Manu Sporny who helped a lot with the proposals. The selection process was tougher than we had expected: we have had about 50 proposals and we decided to focus only on 8 of them. We think that 4 slots is good for us, as it's a good balance between the 8 strong candidates/proposals and the fact that this is our first participation, so we can learn from it. We feel sorry for those who were not accepted and we hope that they'll stay engaged in the W3C community.

Here are the students who were accepted and what they will be working on:

• Gábor Kövesdán will refactor the Validator.nu project so that the validator will be a standalone reusable Java component
• Joseph J Short will adapt the Internationalization (i18n) checker so that it is a modularised, easy to deploy API, which can be run by itself or integrated into other (Java) applications
• Vikash Agrawal will work on several applications around JSON-LD to help developers integrate with Schema.org and the LinkedIn API, among other things
• Tao Lin will extend the RDFa play tool for helping the web developers mark up their pages with RDFa for better UI experience, with dozens of predefined examples and an example submission module

Those are really exciting projects that the Web community is waiting for. I personally can't wait to see our students getting started :-)