A report summarizing the MultilingualWeb workshop in Romeis now available from the MultilingualWeb site. It contains a summary of each session with links to presentation slides and more detailed scribing done on site in Rome. Links to video for each session will be posted soon.

With approximately 150 attendees, the Rome Workshop focused on the theme “Making the Multilingual Web Work” and emphasized information about the best practices and standards that help content creators and localizers ensure that the World-Wide Web lives up to its name, across boundaries of language and culture. Attendees heard from a variety of perspectives, with fruitful dialogue between various stakeholder groups involved in trying to expand the multilingual scope of the Web.

Taking place over two days (12 and 13 March, 2013) at the headquarters of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Workshop featured twenty-four conference-style presentations, seven poster presentations, and an “open space” discussion that featured six breakout sessions focusing on key topics that emerged during the Workshop. In addition, it showcased technology implementations of the forthcoming internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 standard.

The Workshop was sponsored by the EU-funded QTLaunchPad project and Verisign . It was run by the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group.

The Semantic Web Interest Group has published a new draft for the vCard-in-RDF Ontology , edited by Renato Iannella and James McKinney. The new draft updates the previous version by aligning it with the latest IETF vCard specification, ie, RFC6350.

This is a draft; If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please send them to semantic-web@w3.org ( subscribe , archives). The goal is to publish an Interest Group Note once there is a consensus in the community.

Stefan Schumacher published a German translation of the  “RDFa 1.1 Core”, under the title  “RDFa 1.1 Core”.

上綱 秀治 (Shuji Kamitsuna) published a Japanese translation of the  “SPARQL 1.1 Overview”, under the title  “SPARQL 1.1概要”.

Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts
This tutorial has been modified to bring it in line with the current tutorial format. Rather than contain duplicate content, it now introduces the novice to key concepts and points off to useful further reading in an organized fashion. It has been completely rewritten.

Text direction and structural markup in HTML
This article has been created from material formerly in the tutorial “Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts” and augmented with information about new HTML5 markup constructs that are beginning to see adoption. It should be regarded as a new article, focusing on applying bidi markup to document- and block-level content, including forms.

What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup
This is an update of an existing article, but it has been almost completely rewritten. The most significant changes are the new parts describing how to apply the new HTML5 constructs which are beginning to see adoption. Additional changes will be needed as HTML5 bidi markup is finalised over the coming months. The article also proposes a simpler way to approach markup of bidi text, particularly useful for those with less experience, that relies less on a deep understanding of the issues involved.

Visual vs. logical ordering of text
This is a new article created from material that has been removed from the previously mentioned articles. It was removed into a separate article because visual ordering is much less important these days, and to avoid duplication. Only a few changes have been made to the content itself.

During a breakout session held at the MultilingualWeb Workshop in Rome it was decided to form a W3C Community Group to push forward the concept of Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data. This group has now been formed and there are already 24 participants. See the group home page.

The group plans to crowd-source ideas from the community regarding best practices for producing multilingual linked open data. Key topics for discussion are naming, labeling, interlinking, and quality of multilingual linked data, but there may be others. Use cases will be identified to motivate discussions. Participation both from academia and industry is expected. The main outcome of the group will be the documentation of patterns and best practices for the creation, linking, and use of multilingual linked data.

You can join the group with either a full W3C member account or by getting a W3C Public Account . Over the coming weeks Felix Sasaki, Jose E. Gayo and Jorge Gracia will work on a roadmap, publication plan and strategy for the group. Any queries can be directed to Dominic Jones.

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has published an updated working draft of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0.

The draft reflects changes since the last call publication 6 December 2012 and asks for feedback on the remaining open issues.

ITS 2.0 provides metadata to foster the adoption of the multilingual Web.

The JSON-LD Community Group and the RDF Working Group are pleased to announce the Last Call publication of the JSON-LD 1.0 specification and the JSON-LD 1.0: Algorithms and API specification.

JSON has proven to be a highly useful object serialization and messaging format. JSON-LD is a JSON-based format that can be used to serialize Linked Data. The syntax is designed to not disturb already deployed systems running on JSON, but provide a smooth upgrade path from JSON to JSON-LD. It is primarily intended to be a way to use Linked Data in Web-based programming environments, to build interoperable Web services, and to store Linked Data in JSON-based storage engines. JSON-LD is capable of serializing any RDF graph or dataset and most, but not all, JSON-LD documents can be directly transformed to RDF.

The JSON-LD 1.0 Algorithms and API specification describes useful Algorithms for working with JSON-LD data. It also specifies an Application Programming Interface that can be used to transform JSON-LD documents in order to make them easier to work with in programming environments like JavaScript, Python, and Ruby.

This is a Last Call publication for both specifications. All substantive technical work on each specification is complete. Feedback on both specifications is encouraged and should be sent to public-rdf-comments@w3.org. The Last Call period will end in 4 weeks, on May 10th 2013.

You can learn more about JSON-LD in the video introduction to JSON-LD.