UWA Road map and publications
See also former page on publications.
This page is used to track plans for each of our work items, including who is leading the work, and commitments in regard to preparing materials for group discussion. We also expect to use the UWA Wiki to facilitate shared editing of materials. Ideally, we should be able to reduce the reliance on the working group teleconference, given the wide range of timezones for working group participants.
See also the Issue/Action Tracker (Members only)
Delivery Context Ontology
Lead: Jose Manuel Cantera Fonseca
- Working Draft, 16 June 2009
This is an OWL ontology of key properties for content adaptation and is being developed in cooperation with the Device Description working group and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). The aim is to provide a common basis for a number of programming interfaces for accessing the delivery context that are currently under development within UWA WG (DCCI), MWI DD (Repository API) and OMA (DPE).
Current work is focusing on modularizing the ontology and resolving concerns about the modeling of units. New work is underway on modeling personal preferences, see below. A primer for the delivery context ontology is in preparation and expected to be published by Spring 2009.
We plan to add further properties in future drafts, e.g. device location, calendar and contact information, based upon existing work. We are also hoping to cover a much wider range of devices, such as printers and cameras. Note for location, we plan to update the ontology to track progress by the proposed new Working Group on Geo-location.
Rhys Lewis kindly provided a guide to how the ontology was constructed.
Personalization
Lead: Richard Schwerdtfeger and Andy Heath
The UWA working group has recently started work on mechanisms to support personalization of Web applications through exposing personal preferences as part of the delivery context. This will allow content developers to provide an enhanced user experience for people based upon their individual needs. A Working Group Note is planned on use cases and requirements.
Delivery Context Client Interfaces (DCCI)
Lead: Keith Rosenblatt
- Candidate Recommendation, 21 December 2007
- Editor's draft for PR
- Editor's draft disposition of comments
- Editor's draft implementation report
This define interfaces for exposing the delivery context to Web page scripts. It provides a framework for a hierarchy of properties and is designed to enable applications to dynamically adapt to changes in user preferences, device capabilities and environmental conditions. We have received implementation reports from France Telecom and Nokia and are currently preparing DCCI for transition to Proposed Recommendation.
Further work is anticipated on exposing the Delivery Context Ontology through the DCCI framework, for example, screen size/orientation, battery level, and signal strength. A W3C Workshop is being planned to address the security issues associated with providing Web applications with access to device capabilities in the delivery context.
Further reading on implementation work for the DCCI:
- Delivery Context Access for the Mobile Web, Sailesh Sathish, May 2007
- Location-based Mashups for Nokia Internet Tablets, Andreas Brodt, August 2007
Content Selection for Device Independence (DISelect)
Lead: Rhys Lewis
- Candidate Recommendation, 25 July 2007
Defines markup for selecting between versions of content according to the delivery context. Content developers have a choice between embedding content selection rules within the content markup, or embedding content within a rule language, e.g. an XSLT style sheet. This specification is normatively referenced from DIAL, but is also intended for use with other markup languages.
This is currently in Candidate Recommendation status.
Delivery Context: XPath Access Functions
Lead: Rhys Lewis
- Candidate Recommendation, 25 July 2007
Defines functions for use in XPath expressions as part of markup for selecting content according to the delivery context(DISelect). These functions can be used from both DISelect markup and XSLT stylesheets.
This is currently in Candidate Recommendation status. This work item is normatively referenced from DIAL. The UWA Working Group is currently looking into how to expand the XPath Access Functions to cover a much broader range of the Delivery Context Ontology.
Device Independent Authoring Language (DIAL)
Lead: Kevin Smith
- Working Draft, 27 July 2007
A combination of XHTML2, XForms and DISelect that is designed for adaptation to a wide range of delivery contexts. Further work is expected to lead to a second version (DIAL v2) that also includes support for XBL, SVG and SMIL.
Progress on DIAL has been delayed by the slow pace of work on XHTML2. As a result, the UWA Working Group is now considering redefining DIAL in terms of a profile of markup elements from XHTML 1.1 and XForms 1.1, plus a few features from the XHTML2 Working Draft. We are looking carefully into the criteria for including and excluding features and plan to progress this in collaboration with the XHTML2 and XForms Working Groups.
Note: a new W3C Incubator Group is planned to advise W3C on the potental of model-based design for future Web authoring solutions. This involves a multilayered architecture that models Web applications from an end-to-end basis. For more details see the minutes of the Pisa meeting on model-based design.
Pagination and Layout
Lead: Jose Manuel Cantera Fonseca
- No documents as yet, a Working Group Note is in preparation on use cases and requirements
When adapting content to work on a wide variety of devices, there is a need to split content into chunks as appropriate to match the memory, network and processing capabilities of the target device. This work item is studying requirements and solutions that content developers can use for control over pagination and layout according to the delivery context.
Device Coordination and Resource Binding
Lead: Kangchan Lee
Ubiquitous Web Applications can access a mix of local and remote services on multiple devices. This involves the means to identify devices and describe the services that they provide, together with a means to search for services and bind to them. A few examples of services include printing, playing an audio-visual media stream (speaker and display), capturing an image or video with a camera, setting the desired temperature for an air conditioning system, operating locks on doorways, and sensors for detecting fires or intruders.
Access to services may be managed or unmanaged. Devices may range widely in their capabilities from RFID tags to powerful server arrays. Devices may act as clients, servers or a combination of both. Web technologies offer the promise of simplifying authoring of distributed applications, and the means to represent and reason over rich descriptions of device capabilities, their current states, and associated access control policies.
The UWA Charter calls out for work on an interface by which Web applications can bind to local and remote resources via DOM objects that act as proxies for those resources. Applications would then be able to access such resources by exchanging events with the proxy objects. Some further details can be found in a message posted in June 2007. The binding interface should permit a range of access control mechanisms which are likely to be standardized separately, and to exploit rich metadata and trust management services. A workshop on access control and associated trust models is being planned for December 2008.
Resource binding is just one aspect of device coordination. The next step will be to write up use cases and requirements, and to show the relationship to existing mechanisms. Kangchan Lee presented ideas on managed services on 11 October 2007, where access to resources is managed by a server to minimize conflicts. This exploits rich metadata for services, including state models as a basis for detecting potential conflicts.
Work Items that are currently on hold
Rich metadata for device capabilities and services
Lead: Kazuhiro Kitagawa
- No documents as yet
This work item will provide descriptions of common devices such as printers, cameras and media players. The descriptions cover the device capabilities and a model of how to control the device via an exchange of events. The aim will be enable such devices to be directly integrated into web applications.
This work is likely to leverage the efforts of PUCC.
Composite Capability/Preference Profiles: Structure and Vocabularies 2.0
Lead: Stephane Boyera
- Last Call WD, 25 July 2007
This updates the CC/PP 1.0 Recommendation bringing it in line with the latest revision of RDF, and ensures its interoperability with OMA's UAProf2.
Following the Last Call, we are preparing this for transition to Candidate Recommendation. This is a low priority work item, and essentially on hold.
Remote User Interfaces and Distributed DOMs
Lead: we are looking for volunteers
This looks beyond Web browsers to new kinds of applications based upon distributed document object models, where an application running on one device is coupled to a user interface running on another via an exchange of events.
A related issue is how to enable events to be passed from one device to another across different addressing schemes, with gateways coupling different networking technologies, and across security boundaries such as NAT, Firewalls and gateways. Incoming HTTP connections are typically blocked, but work arounds exist using long lasting outgoing connections for routing messages via proxies on the public Internet.
Work on VoIP and videotelephony has led to the development of techniques to tunnel RTP-based media streams across NATs, for example, ICE, STUN and TURN, with derivatives like STUNT for setting up peer to peer TCP connections suitable for reliable delivery of events.
It would be valuable to define how to serialize events as XML with bindings to protocols like SIP, XMPP and HTTP, and together with the means for initiating communication paths for event streams, and options for managed flows. HTTP is commonly used for accessing Web pages and for SOAP or REST based Web Services. SIP is mostly used for VoIP and forms a key part of IMS for mobile networks. XMPP is an increasingly popular alternative to SIP for instant messaging and managing media streams via the Jingle extensions.
The stack of Web Services standards are clearly relevant, although they shouldn't be required for all transports. Should we also consider self organizing mesh networks and what kinds of addressing schemes would this entail? Should we also consider JSON as an alternative representation for serializing events?