Project acronym: QUESTION-HOW
Period: 1 March 2002 - 31 August 2002.
Project Full Title: Quality Engineering
Solutions via Tools, Information and Outreach for the New Highly-enriched
Offerings from W3C: Evolving the Web in Europe
Project/Contract No. IST-2000-28767
Project Manager: Daniel Dardailler
<danield@w3.org>
Author of this document: same
Date: 2 September 2002.
QUESTION-HOW is a W3C Europe project aimed at providing the environment necessary for European companies to make mission critical decisions of quality with regard to the emerging Web specifications.
The project is divided into 2 development workpackages (WP01 and WP02) and 4 outreach workpackages (WP03 - WP06), with a management workpackage (WP07).
The duration is 24 months, it started September 1st 2001.
After 12 months of activities, the project is marginally late with respect to its original schedule (only for some technical sub-deliverables), but nothing important enough to require a correction in the Technical Annex. Some deliverables in the Outreach are are ahead of schedule on the other hand (regionalization of offices)
The delay reported below in the completion of some of the technical deliverables is due:
The expectation of the Project Manager is that this work will be completed over the second phase of the project (end 2002/2003) without taking additional resources to the project.
The W3C INRIA personel involved in the project and the offices personel have met several times in the period (see details below in section 4 on meetings) and the mailing list archives for the project is still active.
All expected deliverables have been sent at their due date to the Project Officer and the reviewers.
Technical work is progressing on the items mentioned in D2.1 and more planning done for the outreach and the offices work.
We are already starting the planning for our W3C Semantic Web Tour in May/June 2003 (WP06).
Five major achievements in this second period :
The information above is classified as public use. In fact, it is available on the public home page of the project at http://w3.org/2001/qh (see Annex 1 in the printed version of this report)
See details below for detailed achievements per workpackage.
The objectives of this workpackage is to improve the quality of existing W3C Recommendations by improving the tools (validators, presentation facilities, conversion tools, benchmarks, demonstrators and guidelines) associated with them.
The set of tools being developed has been derived from the needs of the W3C working groups, and was reported in December 2001 and in the first six month progress report and is available at the following URL:
The expected result of this work is enhanced value in W3C Recommendations through the provision of tool support shifting the user from awareness to understanding of the emergent technology.
Here are the updates on each activities:
Modules have being added to the CSS3 validator as the corresponding specifications became available from the W3C working groups and the corresponding online validator is updated as well. Since the CSS3 specification is not done, this work is not completed.
The MathML validator is now available, integrated in W3C's online HTML validator and the test suite is also running online from the W3C site and can be downloaded.
This is a subcontracted work with the technical staff of a W3C office (FhG) and the corresponding subcontract has been signed very late, so there is little progress to report, but some nevertheless.
A system is running that lets users enter RDF metadata associated with pictures.
This is a subcontracted work with the technical staff of a W3C office (UoJ) and the corresponding subcontract has been signed late, The work has started anyway and the current state is described in the technical report.
The tool is running and can be downloaded from the W3C site.
The QA Specification Guidelines has been released as public draft.
The QA Matrix and its tools are online and used in production.
Internationalization of Amaya and added support for XML languages.
This is a subcontracted work with the technical staff of a W3C office and the corresponding subcontract has been signed late like all the others. There is some good progress to report, but the project is not completed.
A demonstrator of the use of XSLT in various environments is available: W3C specification generation, Web site management and generation of dynamic SVG graphics
A coherent platform supporting the W3C XML specifications is now available.
The work is done and has been demonstrated during the W3C QH Interop tour.
This is a subcontracted work with the technical staff of a W3C office and the corresponding subcontract has been signed late. Good progress has been made on the theoritical feasability study and the demonstrator implementation is starting now.
See section 7 below for a summary analysis of deliverable timing.
The Evaluation report and planning for tool needs for WP02, D2.1, has been delivered in Month 9, June 2002. It describes the development of additional tools to support new W3C technologies (in addition to those in WP1) .
Eleven technical projects are described in this report. The set of tools presented there are also being derived from the needs of the W3C working groups.
Work has started already on some of these projects, in particular in D2.2, the Namespace-ware validator, the shrink-wrap requirements, and the collaborative web editing tools (almost done).
Even though the Technical Annex has a D2.2 technical deliverable due in Month12, we now consider that all deliverables for D2 are due in the course of the second year/phase of the project, and, not in the first phase. In exchange, we consider that all the deliverables for D1.6 technical demonstrators are due now (modulo the delay in subcontract signing).
This workpackage is concerned with extending the outreach of existing offices through regionalization plans.
A deliverable D3.1 Analysis of W3C Office Coverage in Europe: http://www.w3.org/2001/11/qh-d31.html has been made available to the Project Officer in December 2001, which details the feasability study for new offices and regionalization plans.
The technical annex calls for a minimum of three office regionalization by Month 18 and so we are ahead of schedule here, since we've already done those three in the first 12 months.
The report on these activities is available at http://www.w3.org/2002/08/qh-d3-2_3_4.html and we're still planning to go beyond what is scheduled by doing 2 new additional regionalizations in Greece and Scandinavia.
This workpackage is concerned with the creation of 4 new W3C offices in Europe.
The details of the analysis of best location are also found on the D3.1 report. To summarize:
In 2002, we have started new 2 W3C offices in Hungary and Finland.
The report New Offices First phase, at http://www.w3.org/2002/08/qh-d4-1_2.html explains what has happened in details.
For 2003, we are now considering creating a new W3C presence in Spain and either Czech Republic, Slovakia, and/or Poland.
The Technical Annex has an error/typo in it: the third new office is not planned for the first year but for the second (2 new offices each year). Instead of Month 10, D4.3 should be marked as Month 18.
Work has been going on to develop materials for outreach to be used in our tours in 2002 and 2003.
A report is available that explains the kind of materials we've produced.
Those materials will also be shown at our annual Review on September 20th in Sophia Antipolis.
In 2002, we've done a conference tour accross Europe in order to promote better understanding of the interoperability of W3C technologies.
The schedule was:
A report including pictures is available on these events.
A public Web site and a private Web site have been developed for the project.
Three mailing list archives are in daily use by the participants in the project:
More face-to-face meeting and teleconferences were held in the first 6 months (see section 4 for exact dates).
No change in overall management personel for the project:
The overall Project Manager is Daniel Dardailler. He is also in charge of the Technical workpackages (WP01 and WP02). Ivan Herman, the Head of W3C Offices, is the Workpackage manager for WP03 (office extension) and WP04 (new offices). Michael Wilson of RAL (W3C UK Office) is in charge of WP05, while Marie-Claire Forgue, Communications Manager for W3C Europe is overseeing WP06.
This table shows the level of resources (manpower) consumed. It doesn't included a "planned" column since the Technical Annex is much less detailed and only covers the entire workpackage resources, not per period, but there is no deviation from the planned resource usage overall.
| PROJECT IST-2000-28767 QUESTION-HOW | PPR 2 Date: August 2002 |
||
|---|---|---|---|
| WP
Deliverables |
Resources in person-month for the period 2 March 2001
- 31 Aug 2002
All for INRIA/W3C except when indicated |
Comments | |
| Reporting Period | Cumulative (same for this first period) | ||
| WP01 | Mission Critical Solutions | ||
| D1.1 | 0 | 3 | Evaluation (done) |
| D1.2 | 3 | 6 | Validator (mostly done) |
| D1.3 | 1 | 2 | Convertor |
| D1.4 | 0 | 0 | Privacy (moved to WP02) |
| D1.5 | 9 | 11 | Benchmark |
| D1.6 | 10 | 12 | Demonstrator |
| WP03 | Offices extension | ||
| D3.1 | 0 | 3 | Coverage Analysis (done) |
| D3.2 | 1 RAL | 2 RAL | UK-Ireland |
| D3.3 | 1 FhG | 2 FhG | Germany-Austria |
| D3.4 | 1 CWI | 2 CWI | Benelux |
| WP04 | New Offices | ||
| D4.1 | 0 | 1 | Hungary |
| D4.2 | 1 | 1 | Finland |
| WP05 | Materials for outreach | ||
| D5.1 | 0 | 1 | hands out |
| D5.2 | 1 | 1 | poster |
| WP06 | Tours | ||
| D6.1 | 1 | 2 | Interop tour |
| WP07 | Management | ||
| D7.1 | 4 | 5 | Initial report (done) |
| Total | 27 INRIA | 48 INRIA | |
| 3 Offices | 3 Offices | ||
In the last six months of the project (March 1st, August 31st 2002), we have held:
Our next project teleconference is scheduled on September 13th 2002 and our next face-to-face the day before our annual review on September 19th 2002.
The list of contact for QH W3C offices is available at http://www.w3.org/2002/03/qh-office-staff.html (in Annex 4 in the printed version)
It is still too early in the project to mention exploitation actions, but we can look into the future for the impact of the work done today: as an accompanying measure the role of this project is to publicise and transfer technologies which have and are being developed within W3C. The benefit of the transfer is that European industry and technology developers will be aware of the cutting edge Recommendations and proposals within W3C and be able to guide their developments to conform to these.
The benefits to European industry will be that technologies developed to conform to W3C recommendations will be more likely to be adopted and assimilated than those which do not, and more likely to interact with other technologies than those which do not. The long term benefit to industry will be increased competitiveness, early market entry, early adoption, greater market share, and ultimately greater profit and wealth creation within Europe.
One deliverable was due Month 9, and ten others were due Month 12.
For the next six months, we're are planning to: