Use-Case for EU SNAP Project

Trial X - Standardisation

Reason for selection as a trial group: We have chosen the standardisation as a trial because standardisation bodies such as the W3C require co-ordination of a large experts with a high-level of professional across various institutional and national boundaries. Therefore, we can test whether or not the SNAP platform can be deployed successfully to co-ordinate amongst multi-lingual and multi-skilled networks that stretch across European borders and involve both the governments, large corporations, SMEs, universities, non-profits and expert individuals such as consultants.

Exemplar Scenarios:

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the leading multi-national standardisation body for Web standards, including high-profile standards such as HTML5, XML, and the Semantic Web/Linked Data initiatives. It features a well-known and described process, but currently that process lacks any social features to enable the W3C to discover experts for both joining standardisation efforts in the form of W3C Working Groups.

Example scenario: A group of companies and research universities want to begin a new standardisation effort on using sensor networks to enable new features for mobile browsing with augmented reality, such as the discovery of price information transmitted by RFID in a store. However, such an endeavor would require a number of skill-sets, ranging from detailed expertise in existing augmented reality standards such as ARML and the ability to interface XML with mobile devices in an efficient manner. Furthermore, some of the skill-sets, such as the ability to edit large documents and knowledge of concensus-based practice in W3C groups.

One of the company representatives in the group creates a SNAP query “I want to start a new standardisation effort on mobile sensor networks at W3C”. Using the decentralized and interconnected network of experts in various local and regional SNAP-enabled deployments, a number of new connections can be discovered.

An example of these connections could be:

The W3C can show that it has two available staff contacts that have expertise in mobile networking. It can identify world-class researchers in EU-funded sensor network projects to the standardisation effort, even though they may have never been involved in W3C before. As the W3C requires at least three members to be involved, it can find three EU-based members (such as Telecom Italia, DERI, and BT) that already have an interest in the area. It can alert the effort to related standardisation efforts like the Points-of-Interest Working Group at the W3C and the ARML effort outside the W3C. @@@Connections to an unemployed consultant in Paris who has previously successfully chaired many W3C standardisation efforts. ***purpose?? i would edit this out@@@

The SNAP platform will then dynamically assemble this group of experts by asking them if they want to participate in the standardisation process and then putting them in touch with the W3C. With the experts assembled, the W3C staff contact in order to work to create the charter, put the list-members on the same list-serv, and then enable their own social networking devices to take advantage of the new group they have created through their current SNAP connections.

The SNAP platform can then be used over the entire lifetime of the standardisation process. Forming a W3C Working Group is the first step of the standardisation process. The rest of the steps consist in creating a document that will become, after adequate review by experts, a Candidate Recommendation and then eventually full W3C Recommendation. This final step also requires patent non-assertion agreements by W3C members, three independent implementations, and a vote by the W3C Advisory Committee. For each of these steps, the W3C Working Group can use the SNAP platform to discover more experts, both from W3C Members and outside, who while perhaps too busy to join the Working Group can provide the adequate and comprehensive review of the draft specification. In general, it has been thought that the he wider review a standard receives, the more likely a standard is to be a success, and so SNAP will provide the technical infrastructure necessary to assure the widest possible review of W3C specifications, replacing the current infrastructure of having experts subscribe to list-servs.

In order to assure even wider, using SNAP the W3C can then integrate conversations about recommendations and related queries on other SNAP-enabled systems into its commentary process. As the Web becomes more and more global, it is unlikely that all of the important conversations about standards will even happen within the W3C. However, by combining SNAP's ability to crawl the Web looking for expertise, W3C Working Groups can discover conversations in blogs, social networks, forums, and then incorporate these back into the work of the W3C Working Group by bringing these conversations to their attention. It is easy to measure the effect of social networking by counting the spread of commentary on a standard and how many either lead to new issues or old issues.

For example, imagine that our W3C Sensor-Driven Augmented Reality Working Group has reached the point where it decides to release its first draft W3C specification. It releases these specification, and then the specification's release is picked up by a popular news website such as Slashdot. From this site, news of the specification is transmitted to various local blogs and forums. Currently, there is no way for the W3C Working Group to have these conversations “link” back to its work or even be aware of these conversations. However, if these conversations can be detected by SNAP, it can then share these conversations back into the W3C. So, a software developer in Spain could discovers a vital security flaw in the specification and post this news to local social network, and then SNAP would retrieve and re-integrate this otherwise unnoticed social networking bug

Furthermore, this kind of feedback can go in the other direction, so that institutions in the SNAP program can use the W3C to find expertise. For example, it is possible that a SME like Pepperoni will be hoping to implement sensor-driven augmented reality in its mobile applications, and begins adding W3C work on “Points of Interest” to its application, During process of adding this, the engineers from Pepperoni are wondering how they can inter-operate with XML-based frameworks like XMPP. Luckily for the Pepperoni engineer, when asking for expertise about the interface between social networking and XMPP, he can locate the engineer Peter St. Andre, the inventor of XMPP, who is a member of Cisco, a W3C member.

Key Innovations:

• Deployment of a semantically-enhanced social-networking solution across a large number of institutional and international borders, including multi-lingual and multi-cultural issues.
• Adaptation of semantic social networking to a long-standing multi-year and multi-level process of expertise, the creation of standards, which require a number of distinct roles and a large amount of stake-holders with a complex legal and political structure. .
• Deployment of distributed social networking to gather comments from a large number of for a related to standards, such as blogs, micro-blogs, comments, list-servs, opening up the process in a more democratic manner.
• Integration of semantic social networking into a full-fledged standardisation Web-based platform with a integrated telephony and chat system, featuring reputation and test-cases for open-source development.
• Semantic social networking enabling a better two-way traffic between diverse stakeholders in a standardisation process with precise evaluation metrics.