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Community & Business Groups

PDF and Open Data Community Group

PDF has a reputation of being bad for 'open data', but there are already features of PDF that can be used for storing and retrieving data associated with parts of a PDF file, and more features coming. A draft charter will be posted soon.

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

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Charter, Process Notes published

As there were no objections, I’ve now posted the group Charter (which contains not only the Scope of the effort but also the process for changing the charter).

In addition, a stable version of Process notes, details of how the group operates, which can be updated without a charter change.

The Background and Motivation document is open for comment.

Call for Participation in PDF and Open Data Community Group

The PDF and Open Data Community Group has been launched:


PDF has had a reputation of being bad for ‘open data’, but there are already features of PDF that can be used for storing and retrieving data associated with parts of a PDF file.

The group will work to improve the ability of publishers of PDF documents to include Data in those documents in a way that consumers of data can easily extract the data with readily available tools.

Please see the Charter for more details.


In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account. Please note, however, that W3C Membership is not required to join a Community Group.

This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2016-07-17 by Larry Masinter. The following people supported its creation: Larry Masinter, Rohan Thacker, Herb Jellinek, Mike Perlman, Abe Jellinek, Leonard Rosenthol. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.

We invite you to share news of this new group in social media and other channels.

If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please email  site-comments@w3.org.