MIT and INRIA will jointly host the International World Wide Web Consortium

The Consortium will provide the infrastructure for a global interoperable World-Wide Web.

Consortium membership is world-wide and open to any organization.

 

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and Paris, France, April 7th 1995 - MIT/LCS, the Laboratory of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, have joined forces to host the International World-Wide Web Consortium.

The purposes of the Consortium are:

• to support the advancement of information technology in the field of networking, graphics and user interfaces by developing the World-Wide Web into a comprehensive information infrastructure;
• to encourage the industry to adopt a common set of World-Wide Web protocols.

MIT/LCS and INRIA's role is to provide the vendor-neutral architectural, engineering and administrative leadership necessary to

• design a common World-Wide-Web protocol suite,
• develop a publicly available reference code,
• promote the common protocol suite throughout the world,
• encourage industry to create products that comply with the common protocol suite.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World-Wide Web while working at CERN (Switzerland), joined MIT/LCS, and is the Director of the Consortium. A Deputy-Director will be responsible for the team located at INRIA. An Advisory Committee is responsible for reviewing specification proposals, reviewing annual plans, assessing progress, and suggesting future directions.

Membership:

The Consortium is financially self-supporting through membership fees. Membership in the Consortium is open to any operating organization. There are two membership categories: Full Member and Affiliate Member. The membership fee for a Full Member is One Hundred Fifty Thousand ($150,000.00) dollars, and for an Affiliate Member is Fifteen Thousand ($15,000.00) dollars. Organizations with gross sales in excess of $50 million per year must join as a Full Member. Other organizations, including educational institutions, may join as Full Members or Affiliate Members. Membership fees cover the first three years of the Consortium and are payable in equal annual installments.

The Consortium will be in operation through 1997. An extension of the Consortium will be decided by the members at the end of this period. Each member organization is entitled to place one individual on the Advisory Committee.

Activities:

A variety of topics will be addressed by the Consortium. Areas to be investigated include:

• Protocols for security for two-party secure communication and for n-party payment systems;
• Protocols for replication and caching;
• Protocols for low bandwidth and mobile operation;
• Integration of real time channels;
• Collaboration, Knowledge Representation, and Automatability;
• HTML levels 3 and 4;
• The use of the Web for general SGML applications;
• Style sheet definition;
• Content labelling and intellectual property issues;
• Internationalization.

The Consortium staff will maintain and distribute a collection of software and documentation. This collection will consist of specifications and sample implementations of approved standards, sample applications and other relevant software, and associated documentation.

Any organization will be allowed to incorporate the reference software and documentation produced by the Consortium into products at any time after the materials have been released. The Consortium will also collect and distribute software contributed by other individuals and organizations as well as by member organizations. The contents and release schedule for the contributed software collection will be determined by the Consortium's Director.

The Consortium will sponsor an annual conference, open to the public, to promote the exchange of technical information about the World-Wide-Web. Workshops will also be given by experts from the international technical community.

About the World-Wide Web...

The World-Wide Web networked information system is now driving the Internet expansion throughout the world. The World-Wide-Web was originally developed at CERN, Center for European Nuclear Research, Switzerland, by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 for high-energy physicists and since then has developed into millions of users from a wide variety of application domains. It is recognised as being of strategic importance for the future development of the global information society.

About MIT...

MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a major US research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its Laboratory for Computer Science conducts a broad research program in information science, from the development of Information Infrastructures like the World Wide Web to understanding the theories that underlie computer science.

About INRIA...

INRIA, the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control is a French public-sector scientific institute. INRIA is made up of five Research Units located at Rocquencourt (near Paris), Rennes, Sophia Antipolis, Nancy and Grenoble. The transfer of research results is one of INRIA's main assignments, in addition to its fundamental and applied research in information processing, control and scientific computation.

For more information:

contact:

Jean-François Abramatic
Director of Development, INRIA
telephone:  +33 1 39 63 54 63
fax:  +33 1 39 54 38 50
email:  Jean-Francois.Abramatic@inria.fr
URL:  http://www.inria.fr

contact:

Albert Vezza
Associate Director, MIT/LCS
telephone:  617 253-0531
fax:  617 258-8682
email:  av@lcs.mit.edu
URL:  http://www.lcs.mit.edu