Impact on Science and Industry

Michel Cosnard

W3C Tenth Anniversary

1 December 2004

Impact on Science and Industry

Denis Lacroix (Amadeus e-Travel)
Teri Richman (National Association of Convenience Stores)
Moderator: Michel Cosnard (INRIA and ERCIM)

The World Wide Web has strongly impacted Science...

• Scientists and researchers have drastically changed their way doing research
• New avenues for research have been opened and are becoming increasingly important
• Big progress ... new difficulties and challenges

...and Industry

• New services, new products, new markets, new companies
• New relationships between customers and vendors
• New production methods
• Impact on stock exchange

Big progress ... new difficulties and challenges

Web for scientists: changing the way research is done and published

• Giving access in real time to an enormous amount of data and information
• Standards for data and information
• Creating research communities on increasingly specialized domains
• Facilitating cooperation between communities for multidisciplinary research
• Publishing papers asap and under the authors' responsibility
• New ways of recording and evaluating research impact

...thanks to global standards and universality

Research for the Web

• New formats have been discovered for data and information publication
• New tools have been invented for text and data processing
• New tools for Web browsing and information searching
• Research on usage

Difficulties

Research communities have data stores and programs to share

Key Web technologies are:

• Web Services: communications for applications
  • Standards for interactions between programs on the Web
  • Easier to Expose and Use services
• Semantic Web: meaning of data
  • Standards for data, relationships, descriptions on the Web
  • Easier to Understand, Search for, Share, Aggregate, Extend information

Challenges

• From information and data to KNOWLEDGE
• From access to PROCESS
• From ad-hoc components to GENERIC components
• From manual interpretation and reasoning to (semi-) AUTOMATIC

Keys for Success

• Key factor: STANDARDS
• Key player: W3C

Leveraging the Internet to bring e-Commerce to the Travel Industry Worldwide

Denis Lacroix
Director of Development
Amadeus e-Travel

Introducing Amadeus e-Travel

• Leading e-Commerce technology provider to airlines, online agencies and corporations
• Over 60 airlines worldwide
• 300+ corporations worldwide
• Hundreds of online agencies
• …in 24 languages

Some Of Our 60+ Airline Customers

What’s So Special about Amadeus e-Travel?

• Our customers use the Web as a key Sales channel
• We are the “Brand behind the Brand,” and use the Web to serve them
  • E-Travel is an Application Service Provider “pure play” to the travel industry, the only one of its kind
  • All our customers worldwide are served with the same application, using a community mega farm at our data center in Germany

Server Usage Snapshot

Aggregated Air Volumes

Lessons Learned

• The Internet can be a mission critical backbone for a global operation
• The infrastructure is good enough that you can serve customers anywhere in the world from a single location
• It’s harder to serve them with a single application, but you can too…
• The World Wide Web standards are incredibly ubiquitous

The World Wide Web and the Convenience Store Industry

Teri Richman
Sr. VP Research and Public Affairs
National Association of Convenience Stores

About NACS

• Formed in 1961, located in the Washington, D.C. metro area
• 1900 retail company members, 1800 suppliers, over 60,000 stores represented domestically
• Very involved in standards efforts of all kinds…product, payments, POS/Back Office and device integration

Discussion Areas

• Customers
  • Enhancing convenience, speed and access to new products and services — satisfaction
• Employees
  • Recruiting, training, intranets, labor scheduling, communication
• Operations
  • Item catalogs/images/pricebook maintenance
  • B2B
  • Open Site Architecture

Customers

Pay at the pump ... the first self checkout

Making life easier…

Financial Services,
Car Insurance ...

ATMs – Next Generation Functionality is exciting!!

Print digital photos... Download music & movies fast! ... Event tickets... Directions... Weather... the list goes on and on...

Stay connected wherever you are, for whatever you need

Customer satisfaction tools

Finding What's New

New products and Services

New Item Specifics

Employee Applications

• Recruiting
• Training (computer-based or online)
• Intranets / Communication
• Policies
• Necessary store level documents
• Labor scheduling

Operations Applications

• Item catalogs
• Product information
• Images
• Pricebook maintenance
• Data synchronisation catalogs
• e-Business-to-Business

Open Site Architecture

Future of site control and maintenance

Fuel price changes

High water alarms

How the W3C Has Helped our Industry

• Data Formats and Semantics
  • HTML, XML, XML Schema 1.0 (including document vocabularies for doing work)
  • Common data format (XML) and common way of expressing the document format or XML Schema via standards that work across all vendors
• Information Interchange
  • Exchange of data using URLs
  • Emphasis on Web services, has gone a long way toward standardizing interoperation model for collaborating partners to implement e-Business-to-Business

How W3C Can Help Us Going Forward

• Data Formats Semantics
  • Two new features of XML schema: versioning and co-constraints
  • Continued support for XForms as we believe that it will enable us to define business processes that are out of reach today
• Information Interchange
  • Web services going forward

Next Session

After the break, the Impact on Society and Culture by Lee Rainie (Pew Internet & American Life Project). Moderator: Daniel J. Weitzner (W3C)

All W3C10 Sessions