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Proposed Group: Semantic HTML-vocabulary Community Group

The Semantic HTML-vocabulary Community Group has been proposed by Flores Bakker:


The mission of this community group is to establish a draft standard for a RDF-based representation of the HTML-vocabulary. With the HTML-vocabulary in RDF, any type of an HTML-document can be meaningfully represented, generated and validated using nothing but standard semantic technologies, without any vendor lock-in. In addition, full provenance can be provided for a generated HTML-document, as every atom of the document can be described and semantically enriched, ex ante (RDF) and ex post (Rdfa). For instance, the originating algorithm that calculates a certain budget amount in a governmental HTML-document can be linked to the table cell containing the very value. HTML-documents have a wide variety of use and so has the HTML vocabulary. The HTML-vocabulary can be used to generate 100% correct HTML or xHTML and to validate this. The HTML vocabulary can be used to model the front end of a website or application, whereas the logic behind the front end can be captured in SHACL Advanced Features, making for a full semantic representation and execution of digital infrastructure, without any vendor lock-in. An HTML-document can be generated with full compliance to laws and regulations, as these norms can be linked and applied while using the HTML-vocabulary. With full provenance, an HTML-document can battle fake news and show realtime how certain sensitive data in the document (privacy, security) was derived.

The community group will come up with a 0.1 draft specification. This will be input for a future working group within W3C. The community group can make use of the currently available draft specification as developed by the Dutch Ministry of Finance in a working prototype for the Dutch governmental budget cycle. By starting this community group, the Dutch Ministry wants to contribute to an open source based digital infrastructure.


You are invited to support the creation of this group. Once the group has a total of five supporters, it will be launched and people can join to begin work. In order to support the group, you will need a W3C account.

Once launched, the group will no longer be listed as “proposed”; it will be in the list of current groups.

If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please send us email on site-comments@w3.org

Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team

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