Community Groups
W3C has created Community and Business Groups to meet the needs of a growing community of Web stakeholders. Community Groups enable anyone to socialize their ideas for the Web at the W3C for possible future standardization. Business Groups provide companies anywhere in the world with access to the expertise and community needed to develop open Web technology. New W3C Working Groups can then build mature Web standards on top of best of the experimental work, and businesses and other organizations can make the most out of W3C's Open Web Platform in their domain of interest.
Learn more about Community and Business Groups.
Accessibility at the Edge Community Group
The mission of the Accessibility at the Edge Community Group is to examine improvements to internet accessibility via "edge computing", a relatively new paradigm that focuses on performing tasks at the edge of the network. Unlike cloud computing, edge computing emphasizes activities that occur closer to the user; these could include accessibility oriented user-agent extensions, applications on content delivery networks, JavaScript-enabled capabilities, AI or ML. The group is a forum for discussing both currently available products, potentially new applications not yet commercially available, as well as objective measures of the quality of any one of these. Our tasks can include inventorying both opportunities and challenges, drafting and incubating Internet specifications for further assessment, standardization, prototyping and testing of reference implementations. A11Y-EDGE CG meetings work and operate under the W3C Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.
Accessibility Discoverability Vocabulary for Schema.org Community Group
The primary objective of this group is to maintain and develop the vocabularies for the accessibility discoverability properties in schema.org, that enable discovery of accessible content. This community group is a successor to the Accessibility Metadata Project that first proposed the properties, which were based on the Access for All metadata. The group may also propose additional properties in the future, if needed.
- Ecosystem
- Publishing
Accessibility for Children Community Group
The mission of this group is to discuss accessibility adapted for children (age appropriate, literacy relevant).
The Community Group welcomes meeting accommodation sponsorship through funding or complimentary services. Many thanks to Patricia Lessard, Things Entertainment, LLC and Deaf Services of Palo Alto for your donations.
Accessibility Internationalization Community Group
The mission of the Accessibility Internationalization Community Group is to improve the internationalization of:
- The Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility (COGA) Task Force
- The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG)
Scope The Accessibility Internationalization Community Group will include the following efforts:
- Improve the internationalization of COGA and AG publications.
- Develop criteria and tests for easy-to-understand language in different languages.
- Develop criteria and tests for text appearance and semantics in different writing systems
- Develop criteria and tests for additional guidance that changes based on additional language, writing system, or culture.
The community group’s initial focus is to help internationalize two accessibility resources that are currently in development:
- The next version of Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities
- WCAG 3.0, with two guidelines as the top priorities: “Clear Language” and “Text Appearance and Semantics,” which will have tests and criteria in different languages.
ACT Rules Community Group
The ACT Rules Community Group (previously known as Auto-WCAG), is an open forum set up to document and harmonise the interpretation of W3C accessibility standards, such as WCAG and WAI-ARIA, for testing purposes.
The ACT Rules Community Group (ACT-R) achieves this by bringing together the people developing, implementing and using various accessibility testing tools and methodologies to document interpretations as test rules. Test rules are defined using the ACT Rules Format, and reviewed by the community. The process of researching, documenting, and sharing knowledge from different perspectives within the group, builds towards a common understanding. Publishing rules is not an end point for harmonization, it's a starting point. By publishing such test rules, ACT-R hopes to motivate organisations to share their own insights, and encourage adoption of commonly agreed test rules.
ACT-R is not set up to remove differences or impose changes on accessibility testing tools and methodologies. There is value in innovation and diverse approaches. Rather it aims to contribute to more consistent results, regardless of how the testing is done. Knowing when something meets a requirement, and when it does not, should be clear and consistent.
This group will not publish specifications.
Advancing Accessibility Resources Community Group
Our goal is to engage and empower accessibility professionals to advance the W3C WAI mission through community driven initiatives. This work could include:
- Creating and maintaining a repository of community-built resources that complement WAI
- Being a group of active participants that are continually contributing to resources
- Vetting and highlighting external resources that relate to and support this group's resources
- Being available to W3C Working Groups and Task Forces to assist in writing specifications and resources
This group will not publish Specifications.
AI KR (Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Representation) Community Group
- Welcome post
- Group's wiki
- See also the group's pages from the right-hand side menu
The overall goal/mission of this community group is to explore the requirements, best practices and implementation options for the conceptualization and specification of domain knowledge in AI.
We plan to place particular emphasis on the identification and the representation of AI facets and various aspects (technology, legislation, ethics etc) with the purpose to facilitate knowledge exchange and reuse.
Therefore the proposed outcomes could be instrumental to research and advancement of science and inquiry, as well as to increase the level of public awareness in general to enable learning and participation.
Proposed outcomes:
- A comprehensive list of open access resources in both AI and KR (useful to teaching and research)
- A set of metadata derived from these resources
- A concept map of the domain
- A natural language vocabulary to represent various aspects of AI
- One or more encoding/implementations/ machine language version of the vocabulary, such as ChatBot Natural Language Understanding & Natural Language Generation
- Methods for KR management, especially Natural Language Learning / Semantic Memory
WHO SHOULD JOIN: researchers and practitioners with an interest in developing AI KR artifacts (ontology, machine learning, markup languages)
Anti-Fraud Community Group
The mission of the Anti Fraud Community Group is to identify and define scenarios involving fraud and unwanted traffic, as well as to incubate and develop web features and APIs to address those scenarios while improving user security, privacy, and accessibility. Fraud and unwanted traffic can include web activity perpetrated by botnets, attackers impersonating users, and other activity that intends to harm users or compromise web services.
The group welcomes participation from anti-fraud service providers, common targets of unwanted traffic, browser vendors, web privacy advocates, web application developers, web hosting and cloud service providers, and other interested parties.
The Community Group will discuss issues that server operators and anti-fraud service providers face in this area and ideas for new web features and APIs intended to be implemented in browsers or similar user agents.
- Ecosystem
- E-commerce
ARIA and Assistive Technologies Community Group
How WAI-ARIA is supported by assistive technologies, such as screen readers, is highly variable. This variation in WAI-ARIA rendering adds unnecessary complexity to the development of high-quality web experiences for users of assistive technologies and places significant limitations on the types of web widgets that can be made widely accessible.
This community group is dedicated to:
1. helping assistive technology developers converge on a set of clear norms for baseline support of WAI-ARIA. 2. Helping web developers understand the current state of support for WAI-ARIA by assistive technologies.
WAI-ARIA is as important to assistive technology presentation as CSS is to visual presentation. Join us to help make WAI-ARIA as reliable as CSS.
This group will not publish Specifications.
Audio Community Group
A group to gather and incubate new features and requirements for the Web Audio API. Making it easier for the community to engage with the Audio Working Group.
Audio Description Community Group
Mission: To create an open standard file format to support audio description all the way from scripting to mixing.
Scope: To agree requirements and propose a workable open standard file format for audio description, probably a profile of TTML2, with the intention of moving to the Rec track within a Working Group.
Deliverables:
- Requirements document
- Draft specification document
- Explainer
Audiovisual Media Formats for Browsers Community Group
Over the past decade, a growing number of sound and imaging media formats have been established offering increasingly sophisticated user experiences such as High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Spatial Audio. On the imaging side, these media formats provide the technical means to facilitate increased spatial and temporal resolutions, higher bit depths, as well as varying color volumes and the mapping between them. Similarly, on the audio side, higher bit-depth, sample rates and more immersive surround sound and speech processing options are available. These experiences are facilitated through tools and technical mechanisms available to both professional and consumer content providers and are readily available for linear content types. However, options to provide such experiences through the web are still limited as potential solutions are fragmented and often insular or significantly limited in capabilities among open source as well as proprietary options. This typically results in incorrect presentation to an end user or even error messages. Therefore, there is need to consider how to support modern audiovisual formats in a W3C context. To alleviate friction in development and deployment, it seems highly beneficial to our community to synchronize open and proprietary solutions so that they can co-exist within a W3C framework. The scope of this community group is to provide a forum for those discussions.
- Ecosystem
- Media & Entertainment
Automotive Ontology Community Group
The Automotive Ontology Working Group is an informal group of individuals and corporations who want to advance the use of shared conceptual structures in the form of Web ontologies for better data interoperability in the automotive industry, and this at Web scale. In particular, we want to develop extension proposals for schema.org so that automotive information can be better understood by search engines and OWL Web ontologies for the automotive industry. Also, we want to provide a forum for bringing together researchers and practitioners who are working on advancing the field.
Automotive Privacy Principles Community Group
Vehicles are becoming increasingly connected, enabling rich data and useful services. A major obstacle to transportation's information transformation is better protection of personal privacy. The Mozilla Foundation properly called in out in their assessment It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy.
The goal of this Community Group is to create guiding principles specific to the automotive industry and to work in conjunction with COVESA in prototyping and promoting appropriate solutions.
Autonomous Agents on the Web Community Group
This community group is interested in the design of Web-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for the deployment of world-wide hybrid communities of people and artificial agents on the Web.
Our aim is to design a new class of Web-based MAS that are aligned with the Web Architecture to inherit the properties of the Web (world-wide, open, long-lived, etc.), and are also transparent and accountable to support acceptance by people.
We are especially interested in the use of Linked Data and Semantic Web standards for weaving a hypermedia fabric that enables uniform interaction among heterogeneous entities: people, artificial agents, devices, digital services, knowledge repositories, etc. We refer to this new class of Web-based MAS as Hypermedia MAS (hMAS).
This community group brings together experts actively contributing to advances in autonomous agents and MAS, the Web Architecture and the Web of Things, Semantic Web and Linked Data, and Web standards in general — as well as any other areas that could contribute to this approach for distributed intelligence on the Web.
Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data Community Group
The target for this group is to crowd-source ideas from the community regarding best practises for producing multilingual linked open data. The topics for discussion are mainly focused on naming, labelling, interlinking, and quality of multilingual linked data, among others. Use cases will be identified to motivate discussions. Participation both from academia and industry is expected. The main outcome of the group will be the documentation of patterns and best practices for the creation, linking, and use of multilingual linked data.
This group will not create specifications.
Bibframe2Schema.org Community Group
The objective of the community group is: to facilitate a consensually agreed route for the conversion and/or mapping of bibliographic data into Schema.org; building on the development, initiated by the Library of Congress, of the BIBFRAME 2.0 Linked Data vocabulary; utilising the specifications of BIBFRAME 2.0 as a stable base to develop upon.
The initial objectives of the community are: 1. The creation of a reference metadata mapping from BIBFRAME 2.0 to Schema.org. 2. To facilitate agreed development and open sharing of reference software implementation(s) to: Enrich BIBFRAME data with Schema.org Terms and/or Create Schema.org terms from BIBFRAME 2.0 data.
Bioschemas for lifesciences Community Group
Bioschemas aims to improve data interoperability in life sciences. It does this by encouraging people in the life sciences to use schema.org markup, so that their websites and services contain consistently structured information. This structured information then makes it easier to discover, collate and analyse distributed data. The main outcome of the Bioschemas community group will be a collection of specifications that provide guidelines to facilitate a more consistent adoption of schema.org markup within the life sciences.
Blockchain2 Community Group
The group will incubate specifications for decentralized web applications, with a goal of enhancing security, privacy, and efficiency through the use of blockchain technologies. Our first deliverable will comprise a list of value-adds and benefits that blockchain technology may be able to provide for the World Wide Web community. Subsequently, based on our findings, we aim to agree on a set of general, high-level requirements and capabilities that blockchain-based application architectures would need to fulfill in order to deliver value. Finally, we aim to explore the potential impacts of these architectures on the privacy, resiliency, incentives, and accessibility of the web, and to establish relationships with other groups to ensure alignment as these solutions are developed.
Building Device Naming Standards Community Group
Being able to efficiently collect, analyse and leverage data insights from buildings is a catalyst for optimising building performance, improving the use of resources and moving towards predictive maintenance and buildings that can respond to the climate emergency.
The lack of standardised naming and labelling for connected devices in the built environment means we are failing to leverage the value of data to allow interoperability, improve building efficiency and increase occupant productivity.
A naming and labelling standard (complementing other industry initiatives) will simplify and drive consistency thus increasing value by unlocking the application of technologies such as machine learning.
The work of this community group will align with and complement other initiatives in the industry such as BRICK, Haystack, Omniclass, Uniclass, IFC etc.
In scope for this work are:
- A simple specification for naming syntax
- A register of building device names and labels
Chemistry for the Web and Publishing Community Group
the "Chemistry for the Web and Publishing" Community Group will focus on moving beyond simply providing images of Chemistry content on the web and in published materials to a semantically rich form that will work for everybody, including persons with disabilities.
Chinese DID & VC Community Group
The Chinese DID & VC Community Group provides a forum to identify and discuss the technical, use cases and best practices of DID and VC technologies, with the goal to bring better user experience and collect requirements for future DID and VC related specifications.
Civic Technology Community Group
The Civic Technology Community Group will bring together those interested in civic technology, open government, and artificial intelligence to share information, to discuss these topics, to advance the state of the art, and to ensure that the Web is well-suited for these applications.
Cognitive Accessibility Community Group
Mission
The mission of the COGA Community Group is to work with and support the Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility (COGA) Task Force to improve web accessibility for people with cognitive and learning disabilities.
This group supports the COGA Task Force by supplying user needs and feedback.
Scope
The COGA Community Group’s work will include:
- Sharing challenges when using the web and other digital displays
- Suggesting user needs
- Helping with research
- Suggesting ways to improve accessibility for the community
- Reviewing COGA’s drafts
- Outreach and collecting feedback from the community
- Helping with policy and the business cases for COGA guidance
- Having open meetings to discuss these points
Open meetings may be live video conferences or in other discussion formats
Participation
You do not need to be an expert in all topics related to cognitive accessibility to join the community group. The COGA Community Group will work in smaller groups for specific subjects, giving you the opportunity to participate on the topics you choose.
The COGA Community Group will also work together on some topics, brainstorming and building a community dedicated to improved access for all.
Anyone can join this group as long as they follow the community guidelines.
However, the community group will specifically benefit from including:
- people with learning and cognitive disabilities,
people with mental health challenges,
- caregivers, therapists and people who work with people with learning, cognitive challenges and in mental health,
- researchers,
developers, quality assurance professionals, and user interface experts,
industry, looking to share and support ideas, and
policy makers.
Additional details of participation
- Joining the COGA Community Group does not involve joining the COGA Task Force.
- If you would prefer to join this group anonymously, please send an email to ran@w3.org.
- The community group will not publish specifications, but may make suggestions to the COGA taskforce.
- For more information about community groups, please visit Community and Business Groups Frequently Asked Questions.
- Short link to this document: bit.ly/coga-community
Cognitive AI Community Group
The real world is frustratingly uncertain, incomplete and inconsistent. This is challenging for traditional approaches to information systems, and a new paradigm is needed that combines symbolic and statistical techniques, building upon decades of work in the cognitive sciences, and over 500 million years of natural selection. This will allow us to create cognitive agents that learn and reason based upon prior knowledge and past experience, and which can satisfy the need for, transparency in decision making, and continuous learning for adapting to ever changing needs. This community group will address opportunities for cognitive agents using graphs, statistics, rules and graph algorithms, starting with an amalgam of RDF and Property Graphs, together with Web architecture for cognitive databases.
More specifically, the Cognitive AI Community Group will work on use cases and requirements, demo's, open source, and scaling experiments. For more details, see:
• Cognitive AI CG GitHub Repository
• Chunks and Rules Specification
• Keynote on Cognitive AI for the 2020 Summer School on AI in Industry 4.0
• An older talk on Cognitive AI and the Sentient Web
Color on the Web Community Group
Discussion forum between CSS experts, Color Management experts, and TV/Movie/Broadcast experts to explore use cases and inform W3C specification work (such as CSS Color 4 and subsequent levels). Both SDR and HDR are in scope. Wide gamut displays and the Web is in scope. Web use of ICC (v.4 and ICCMax) is in scope.
- Ecosystem
- Media & Entertainment
Community Council
The mission of the Community Council is to promote Community and Business Groups and ensure that they function smoothly. The Council's activities include: documenting good community practices, reaching out to new communities, identifying opportunities for collaboration between groups, helping groups transition to the standards track if they so desire, and routine group maintenance. The Community Council will also discuss existing and new features and other ways to enhance the Community Group experience. Anyone may join the Community Council. In particular, W3C encourages Chairs of other Community and Business Groups to participate (e.g., in monthly meetings that will include W3C staff). This group will seek to make decisions when there is consensus and with due process.
Computational Intelligence Community Group
The Computational Intelligence Community Group's main objective is to promote engagement from members of the Computational Intelligence Research and Development community and the broader ecosystem, aiming to mold the Web's foundation for Computational Intelligence as a Service (CIaaS). The group serves as a conduit for dialogue, enabling mutual feedback between the CIaaS community and the W3C.
The group's fundamental operation revolves around nurturing the acceptance and ongoing evolution of pertinent W3C Working Groups, such as Machine Learning, Ontology, Dataset, and WoT. The primary collaboration will be creating use cases and adopting emerging technologies related to the CIaaS ecosystem.
The Community Group (CG) works closely with members, chapters to support additional operations that help guide the Web to its full potential for CIaaS Services. These operations include events, webinars, training, marketing, and promotional activities.
The CG encompasses Product R&D teams, CIaaS service providers, end-users (developers, data scientists, startups, and corporations), regulatory entities overseeing service usage and application; Platforms supplying the infrastructure and tools required to execute CIaaS; Machine learning frameworks that are essential components of the CIaaS; Specific product applications or services available through CIaaS; and the AI and Machine Learning Community.
This group aims to release W3C Community Group Reports, suggesting Use Cases and Specifications for integration into existing and forthcoming Standards.
Consent Community Group
The concept of consent plays an essential role in the use of digital technologies as an enabler of the individual’s ownership, control, and agency. Regulations such as the GDPR assert this relationship by permitting use of consent as one of the possible legal bases for the lawful practice of data processing. Through this, obtaining consent is widely practised in the digital world, and can be perceived as an essential means to enable the individual’s agency regarding the management and ownership of their personal data. While different legal frameworks specify various requirements and obligations regarding the legal validity of consent, which should be, e.g. valid, freely given, specific, informed and active; existing and ongoing research shows that the majority of people are not empowered to practice their digital right to privacy and lawful "consenting" due to various malpractices and a lack of technological means acting in the individuals' interest. This group aims to contribute towards the empowerment of humans concerning their rights of privacy and agency, by advocating interdisciplinary, pluralist, human-centric approaches to digital consent that are technologically and legally enforceable. The mission of this group is to improve the experience of digital "consenting" while ensuring it remains adherent to relevant standards and laws. For this, the group will: (i) provide a space for people and stakeholders to come together (ii) highlight and analyse concepts, issues and problems about digital consenting (iii) propose and develop solutions. Some concrete areas for the working of this group are: (a) developing interdisciplinary solutions; (b) documenting and achieving legal compliance; (c) improving the user experience; and (d) utilising existing and developing new concepts and standards for digital consent.
Consent Name System Community Group
Our mission: design and build the 3rd generation of the CNS to be deployed globally as a free commons, a sibling to the DNS. Our scope: a hyper-cube bitmap that contains 1's and 0's for ALL GLEIF (businesses/agencies), Jurisdictions, and Legal Uses of Data, set initially by jurisdictions, then businesses/agencies, and finally by data subjects. Our deliverables: essential documents and code to stand-up a working CNS as an open source server. Gen 2 docs and video: https://bit.ly/FalconCNS
Credentials Community Group
The mission of the W3C Credentials Community Group is to explore the creation, storage, presentation, verification, and user control of credentials. We focus on a verifiable credential (a set of claims) created by an issuer about a subject—a person, group, or thing—and seek solutions inclusive of approaches such as: self-sovereign identity; presentation of proofs by the bearer; data minimization; and centralized, federated, and decentralized registry and identity systems. Our tasks include drafting and incubating Internet specifications for further standardization and prototyping and testing reference implementations.
- Ecosystem
- Data and knowledge
Credible Web Community Group
The mission of the W3C Credible Web Community Group is to help shift the Web toward more trustworthy content without increasing censorship or social division. We want users to be able to tell when content is reliable, accurate, and shared in good faith, and to help them steer away from deceptive content. At the same time, we affirm the need for users to find the content they want and to interact freely in the communities they choose. To balance any conflict between these goals, we are committed to providing technologies which keep end-users in control of their Web experience.
The group's primary strategy involves data sharing on the Web, in the style of schema.org, using existing W3C data standards like JSON-LD. We believe significant progress toward our goals can be reached by properly specifying "credibility indicators", a vocabulary/schema for data about content and the surrounding ecosystem, which can help a person and/or machine decide whether a content item should be trusted.
Please see the group wiki for more details.
CSS4 Community Group
A group to debate and define CSS4.
The umbrella term "CSS3" was incredibly useful in teaching the new additions to CSS around 2010. It seems time to loosely group together more recent additions under another umbrella, to help increase adoption and make it easier to teach. This will not change how the CSSWG operates, will not affect spec numbering, and will be separate from the official CSS snapshots.
Discussion began at: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4770
This WICG group is a place to work out the details.
CSV on the Web Community Group
Discussions and mutual support for implementers, publishers and spec developers of the technologies developed by the CSV on the Web Working Group. The group is not chartered to change published W3C documents, but can record new issues, errata, and test cases for those specification. The CG may also discuss related work, e.g. R2RML or other potential extensions.
Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls Community Group
The mission of the W3C Data Privacy Vocabularies and Controls CG (DPVCG) is to develop a taxonomy of privacy and data protection related terms, which include in particular terms from the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), such as a taxonomy of personal data as well as a classification of purposes (i.e., purposes for data collection), and events of disclosures, consent, and processing such personal data.
The DPVCG was created as an outcome of the W3C Workshop on Data Privacy Controls and Vocabularies in Vienna in 2017, and started on 25th May 2018 – the date of the enforcement of GDPR. Since then, the DPVCG has worked to fulfil its aims and objectives, and produced the Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) as a deliverable.
Membership to the group is open to all interested individuals and organisations. To join the group, you need a valid W3C account – which is free to get and can be requested here. The group meets usually through online meeting calls, details of which, including past minutes, can be found here. The group also interacts through a mailing list regarding topics, discussions, sharing of agendas, actions, and other relevant items. The resources and work relevant to the group is hosted on the GitHub platform under the DPVCG name.
The group is currently chaired by:
Previously, it was chaired by:
- Bert Bos (ERCIM W3C)
- Axel Polleres (WU Wirschaftsuniversitat Wien – Vienna University of Economics and Business)
Participation in Group Activities
The working of the group is fairly open and transparent in its process, with most of the information present on the wiki. For past work, actions, issues, and records – please refer to the wiki and threads on the mailing list. Anyone can use the mailing list to ask questions, suggest topics, raise issues, and offer solutions. Non-members might receive an automated reply asking them to authenticate their email or email address for posting.
Similarly, calls are usually open to attend, with the agenda shared on the public mailing list. Call details may be shared on the internal mailing lists accessible to only members for security purposes – so it may be best to ask the chair(s) or a member for attending a call.
General questions regarding what the group considers in scope can be determined from the aims and objectives. Specific queries or propositions should be conveyed to the mailing list. For issues regarding the DPV, including addition of concepts or a query or other relevant topics – you can use the mailing list or the issues feature in a GitHub repo.
Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV)
The DPV is a vocabulary (terms) and an ontology (relationships) serialised using semantic-web standards to represent concepts associated with privacy and data protection, primarily derived from GDPR. It enables representation of which personal data categories are undergoing a what kind of processing by a specific data controller and/or transferred to some recipient for a particular purpose, based on a specific legal basis (e.g., consent, or other legal grounds such as legitimate interest, etc.), with specified technical and organisational measures and restrictions (e.g., storage locations and storage durations) in place.
The DPV is useful as a machine-readable representation of personal data processing and can be adopted in relevant use-cases such as legal compliance documentation and evaluation, policy specification, consent representation and requests, taxonomy of legal terms, and annotation of text and data.
The DPV is an evolving vocabulary – as the DPVCG continues to work on updating it with broader concepts as well as enriching its hierarchy of concepts. For this, we invite contributions of concepts, use-cases, requirements, and applications.
Dataspaces Community Group
Dataspaces gather requirements for seamless and trusted data exchange within specific domains and translate the requirements into technical specifications. The W3C already recommends standards for trust, interoperability, and data value. Our goal in this group is to collect scenarios from the dataspaces built by our members and manage best practices for implementing them with W3C specifications. Where those standards are not sufficient, we envision formulating questions to other community and working groups, and providing dataspace-specific normative text for specific scenarios. The Dataspaces Community Group aims to meet every year at the ESWC conference.
Declarative 3D for the Web Architecture Community Group
The mission of the Declarative 3D for the Web Architecture Community Group is to determine the requirements, options, and use cases for an integration of interactive 3D graphics capabilities into the W3C technology stack. This group is aimed to extract core features out of the requirements as foundation to propose feasible technical solutions. These should cover the majority of 3D use cases for the Web - but not necessarily all of them. There are upcoming open (e.g., WebGL) and proprietary (e.g., Adobe) proposals for imperative graphics APIs in the Web context but we are missing an easy way to add interactive high-level declarative 3D objects to the HTML-DOM to allow anyone to easily create, share, and experience interactive 3D graphics - with possibly wide ranging effects similar to those caused by the broad availability of video on the Web. The goal of this CG is to evaluate the necessary requirements for a successful standardization of a declarative approach to interactive 3D graphics as part of HTML documents.
Design Tokens Community Group
The Design Tokens Community Group's goal is to provide standards upon which products and design tools can rely for sharing stylistic pieces of a design system at scale.
Educational and Occupational Credentials in schema.org Community Group
The aim of this community group is to show how educational and occupational credentials may be described with schema.org, and to propose any additional terms for schema.org that may be necessary. Educational and Occupational Credentials are defined as diplomas, academic degrees, certifications, qualifications, badges, etc., that a person can obtain through learning, education and/or training. They are typically awarded on successful completion of an assessment of relevant capabilities. See also the Connecting Credentials glossary of credentialing terms.
Related work includes: the Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL) developed for the Credential Engine; IMS Global's Badge Alliance; and, the W3C Verifiable Claims Working Group. The work of this group will complement these, with a focus on integration with schema.org and on describing a credential that is being offered rather than the claim to posses one.
Entity Reconciliation Community Group
Matching entities across data sources using different identifiers and formats is a pervasive issue on the web. This group revolves around developing a web API that data providers can expose, which eases the reconciliation of third-party data to their own identifiers. OpenRefine's reconciliation API is used as a starting point. Our goals are to document this existing API, share our experiences and lessons learnt from it, propose an improved protocol in the view of promoting it as a standard, and build tooling around it. A description of the existing protocol can be found here: https://reconciliation-api.github.io/specs/latest/
EPUB 3 Community Group
The EPUB 3 Community Group is a forum for ongoing technical development of EPUB 3 and related extension specifications and ancillary deliverables. The EPUB 3 Community Group charter contains full details.
- Ecosystem
- Publishing
Equity Community Group
The Equity CG seeks to enable equity in W3C processes, specifications, and expertise. Equality is equal access, while 'equity' is equal outcomes (Antoinette Carroll, Creative Reaction Lab Founder (https://crxlab.org/)). The Equity CG will discuss approaches to creating more equitable specifications and implementations of those specifications. The group will determine whether it wants to address internal specifications (as in a self-review questionnaire before CR) or provide a tool for assessing equity (like WCAG). This will require recruiting experts in equity as well as those who reflect the diversity of the world and will take time. In time, the CG hopes to propose an Equity Horizontal Review Board (HRB).
EXPath Community Group
The mission of this group is to lead to extension of XPath and all related technologies (XSLT, XQuery, XProc, XForms, XML Schema).
Federated Identity Community Group
The purpose of the Federated Identity Community Group is to provide a forum focused on incubating web features that will both support federated identity and prevent untransparent, uncontrollable tracking of users across the web. While the community group will take privacy concerns into consideration, these concerns will be balanced against the need to explore innovative ideas around federated authentication on the web.
Federated Learning Community Group
The purpose of this community group is to establish and explore the necessary standards related with the Web for federated learning via the analysis of current implementations related with federated learning such as TensorFlow Federated. The main idea of federated learning is to build machine learning models based on data sets that are distributed across multiple clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) while preventing data leakage. Therefore, federated learning can give benefits like mitigation of privacy risks and costs.
Financial Industry Business Ontology Community Group
The mission of Financial Industry Business Ontology Community Group is to propose, discuss, create and maintain extensions to schema.org related to Financial Industries.
Games Community Group
The goal of the Games Community Group is to improve the quality of open web standards that games developers rely on to create games. To achieve its goal, the Games community group will:
- Track specifications and vendor implementations related to open web games.
- Recommend new specifications to be produced and find group homes for them.
- Refine use cases to communicate specific needs of games.
- Suggest refinements or fixes to existing specifications to better meet the needs of the game development community.
- Explore capabilities —APIs, semantics, techniques for rendering, processing, personalization, customization, interoperability, etc.— that developers can leverage to localize games and guarantee that they are accessible.
- Evangelize specifications to browser vendors.
- Document how to best use open web standards for games.
- Evangelize open web standards to game developers and game development best practices to web developers.
The Games community group will not develop any normative specification. As such, there will not be any Essential Claims under the W3C Contributor License Agreement or Final Specification Agreement.
Please see the adopted charter for details.
- Ecosystem
- Media & Entertainment
GPU for the Web Community Group
The mission of the GPU on the Web Community Group is to provide an interface between the Web Platform and modern 3D graphics and computation capabilities present in native system platforms. The goal is to design a new Web API that exposes these modern technologies in a performant, powerful and safe manner. It should work with existing platform APIs such as Direct3D 12 from Microsoft, Metal from Apple, and Vulkan from the Khronos Group. This API will also expose the generic computational facilities available in today's GPUs to the Web, and investigate shader languages to produce a cross-platform solution. Please see the draft charter. The group is inviting browser engine developers, GPU hardware vendors, 3D software engineers, as well as the broader Web community who have an interest in 3D graphics and efficient computation to participate.
Healthcare Schema Vocabulary Community Group
This community effort aims to provide medical,healthcare and life-science specialized web schemas and vocabulary through improving and extending the existing schemas, concepts, terms and definitions in schema.org vocabulary. Ultimate goal is to enable the use of schema.org not only by webmasters but also in indexing health records, healthcare documents, and as a pillar open source of medical and healthcare and life science ontology/vocabulary for formalization of healthcare information.
This will make healthcare and medical data on web easy to describe correctly (with their correct meaning and context), easy to expose /index so ready to be accessible and will highly improve to re-usability and exchanging in semantic way, with their correct meaning and context.
The intention is not to replace existing ontologies, nor making upper level ontology nor creating yet another clinical information model/standards. The aim is mainly to provide most useful and frequently used (so, demand driven) classes and properties related to the medical and healthcare domain. Within this scope all concepts are mapped as far as it's feasible to the existing terminology like SNOMED CT, ICD, LOINC, ATC, RxNorm, HL7 FHIR, etc.
Human Centric AI Community Group
The W3C Human Centric AI Groups mission is to investigate, articulate, refine, consider and respond to the various safety and human rights related implications of Web connected online systems; and to define recommendations, and useful tools, to respond to these challenges via any applicable Human Centric AI compatible system.
This group may produce technical specifications.
Hydra Community Group
Building Web APIs seems still more an art than a science. How can we build APIs such that generic clients can easily use them? And how do we build those clients? Current APIs heavily rely on out-of-band information such as human-readable documentation and API-specific SDKs. However, this only allows for very simple and brittle clients that are hardcoded against specific APIs. Hydra, in contrast, is a set of technologies that allow to design APIs in a different manner, in a way that enables smarter clients.
The foundation is laid by the Hydra Core Vocabulary. It defines a number of fundamental concepts, such as hypermedia controls and collections, which allow machines to understand how to interact with an API. Since all information about the API is available in a machine-readable form, completely generic clients become possible. The Core Vocabulary is complemented by Linked Data Fragments, a set of specifications that enable advanced yet efficient client-side querying of Web APIs.
More information about these technologies can be found on our homepage: http://www.hydra-cg.com/
Immersive Web Community Group
Our goal is to help bring high-performance Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to the open Web.
- Ecosystem
- Network & Communications
Information Architecture Community Group
The W3C Information Architecture community group is for anyone interested in Information Architecture and standards, and to participate, discuss, share, support, develop, and learn about them.
Interledger Payments Community Group
The primary goal of the Interledger Payments Community Group is connecting the many payment networks (ledgers) around the world via the Web. The group's vision is an open, universal payment scheme built on Web standards that allows any payer to pay any payee regardless of the payer’s choice of payment instrument or the payee’s account.
Invisible Markup Community Group
We choose which representations of our data to use, JSON, CSV, XML, or whatever, depending on habit, convenience, or the context we want to use that data in. On the other hand, having an interoperable generic toolchain such as that provided by XML to process data is of immense value. How do we resolve the conflicting requirements of convenience, habit, and context, and still enable a generic toolchain? Invisible XML (ixml) is a method for treating non-XML documents as if they were XML, enabling authors to write documents and data in a format they prefer while providing XML for processes that are more effective with XML content. This is an ongoing project to provide software that lets you treat any parsable format as if it were XML, without the need for markup.
JSON for Linked Data Community Group
JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linking Data) is a lightweight Linked Data format that gives your data context. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on the already successful JSON format and provides a way to help JSON data interoperate at Web-scale. If you are already familiar with JSON, writing JSON-LD is very easy. These properties make JSON-LD an ideal Linked Data interchange language for JavaScript environments, Web service, and unstructured databases such as CouchDB and MongoDB.
JSX as markup language Community Group
The proposal is that jsx be implemented as a dynamic markup language for the web since just HTML + DOM are still not enough to create applications like the ones we currently build using frameworks.
With JSX updating conventional HTML ideas to create better-designed static websites and using dynamic data structures, with repetition loops and adding event hooks more easily, the group's idea would be to bring together people who share the same idea so that together we can do tests in different scenarios and create polyfills if necessary
Knowledge Graph Construction Community Group
The overall goal of this community group is to support its participants into developing better methods for Knowledge Graphs construction. The Community Group will (i) study current Knowledge Graph construction methods and implementations, (ii) identify the corresponding requirements and issues that hinter broader Knowledge Graph construction, (iii) discuss use cases, (iv) formulate guidelines, best practices and test cases for Knowledge Graph construction, (v) develop methods, resources and tools for evaluating Knowledge Graphs construction, and in general (vi) continue the development of the W3C-recommended R2RML language beyond relational databases. The proposed Community Group could be instrumental to advance research, increase the level of education and awareness and enable learning and participation with respect to Knowledge Graph construction.
- Ecosystem
- Data and knowledge
Linked Building Data Community Group
This group brings together experts in the area of building information modelling (BIM) and Web of Data technologies to define existing and future use cases and requirements for linked data based applications across the life cycle of buildings. A list of recommended use cases will be produced by this community group.
The envisioned target beneficiaries of this group are both industrial and governmental organisations who use data from building information modelling applications and other data related to the building life cycle (sensor data, GIS data, material data, geographical data, and so forth) to achieve their business processes and whom will benefit from greater integration of data and interoperability between their data sets and the wider linked data communities. For example, benefit may be obtained by publishing and combining localised data on new cheaper building materials, energy efficient building devices and systems, along with real time data on weather patterns, energy prices and geodata. By making this data available to applications, they will be better able to support decision makers during the whole of the building life cycle, which includes design, construction, commissioning, operation, retrofitting/refurbishment/reconfiguration, demolition, and recycling of buildings.
The group will engage with these beneficiaries through surveys and events organised in conjunction with the affiliated workshop series on Linked Data for Architecture and Construction (LDAC).
Linked Data for Language Technology Community Group
This group aims to consult with current and potential users of linguistic data to assemble use cases and requirements for Language Technology Applications that use Linked Data. The results will be used to guide future interoperability, research and development activities spanning the language technology and linked data domains. Potential users are companies and public bodies involved in natural language processing, language resources, content management, the language services and localisation industry and other applications of content analytics techniques used in search, recommender systems, sentiment analysis and terminology management. The group does engage with users through surveys, international events and training activities organized in conjunction with partners from academia or industry, resp. designated research projects and networking efforts (esp., EU or other multi-national projects). We identify use case and requirements priorities, technology gaps and interoperability roadblocks. We work towards community group reports that describe our findings and/or solutions to the challenges identified in our work.
Maps For HTML Community Group
The Maps in HTML Community Group seeks to establish at least one hypermedia type which can be considered to be consumed by a (new) "map" element for HTML. Follow-on from Bar Camp at #lgd14. The objective will be to define a hypermedia type which can be linked to from a hypothetical (but prototyped in Web Components) "map" or (geo-map for Web Components) element which will provide simple mashup capabilities and user interface.
This group will publish specifications.
Media Content Metadata Japanese Community Group
The mission of this group is sharing use cases, technical challenges, best practices and possible implementations for inter-industry collaboration of media content metadata to improve the interoperability of the metadata and promote media content distribution among various industries. This group facilitates discussion with Japanese companies and organizations from different industries using Japanese language.
This group will not publish any specifications.
Metaverse Interoperability Community Group
Our mission is to bridge virtual worlds by designing and promoting protocols for identity, social graphs, inventory, and more.
MiniApps Ecosystem Community Group
A community group to incubate work on MiniApps and serve as a base for analysis and proposals of specific work items
Multi-device Timing Community Group
Timing mechanisms allow operations to be executed at the correct time. The Web already has several mechanisms supporting timed operations, including setTimeout and setInterval, as well as controllers for media frameworks and animations. However, the Web lacks support for multi-device timing. A multi-device timing mechanism would allow timed operations across Web pages hosted by different devices. Multi-device timing is particularly important for the broadcasting industry, as it is the key enabler for web-based secondary device offerings. More generally, multi-device timing has wide utility in communication, collaboration and multi-screen presentation. This Community Group aims to define a common, multi-device, timing mechanism and a practical programming model. This will improve the Web as a platform for time-sensitive, multi-device Web applications.
Charter : http://webtiming.github.io
Music Notation Community Group
The Music Notation Community Group develops and maintains format and language specifications for notated music used by web, desktop, and mobile applications. The group aims to serve a broad range of users engaging in music-related activities involving notation, and will document these use cases.
The Community Group documents, maintains and updates the MusicXML and SMuFL (Standard Music Font Layout) specifications. The goals are to evolve the specifications to handle a broader set of use cases and technologies, including use of music notation on the web, while maximizing the existing investment in implementations of the existing MusicXML and SMuFL specifications.
The group is developing a new specification to embody this broader set of use cases and technologies, under the working title of MNX. The group is proposing the development of an additional new specification to provide a standard, machine-readable source of musical instrument data.
Nordic Accessibility Community Group
The Nordic Accessibility Community Group serves as an open forum to discuss challenges, network with accessibility professionals, and promote the importance of inclusive design in the Nordic countries.
Nordic Chapter Smart City / Web of Things Community Group
A community group around smart city technologies and challenges in the nordic region
Nordic Web of Data Community Group
The mission of this group is to provide a forum for discussing challenges and establishing best practices for publishing data in the Nordic region.
The foreseen focus will be on topics like:
- Metadata profiles within data publishing
- Best practices for a national web of data infrastructure
- Best practices for domain specific data specifications
- How to utilize linked data principles to improve data quality and interoperability
Practitioners in data publishing as well as anyone interested in furthering a web of data in both private and public sector are welcome to join.
nostr Community Group
The Nostr Protocol is a new communications for the social web, based on the w3c websockets standard.
The mission of the Nostr Community group is to foster its intersection with web standards, documenting existing patterns and bridges, and proposing further integration with web standards.
This group may publish Specifications.
Notation 3 (N3) Community Group
Further development, implementation, and standardization of Notation 3 - an assertion and logic language - including the N3 Rules language.
ODRL Community Group
The ODRL Community Group supports the promotion and future development of the W3C ODRL recommendations:
Specifically, the ODRL CG will:
- Promote ODRL V2.2 to existing and new sectors/industries
- Nurture an ODRL implementors community
- Publish reports related to ODRL usage
- Support development of ODRL Profiles (and host for smaller communities)
- Register ODRL Profiles
- Collaborate with W3C on ODRL errata maintenance
- Plan for future major enhancements to ODRL (V3.0)
Ontology-Lexica Community Group
The mission of the Ontology-Lexicon community group is to: (1) Develop models for the representation of lexica (and machine readable dictionaries) relative to ontologies. These lexicon models are intended to represent lexical entries containing information about how ontology elements (classes, properties, individuals etc.) are realized in multiple languages. In addition, the lexical entries contain appropriate linguistic (syntactic, morphological, semantic and pragmatic) information that constrains the usage of the entry. (2) Demonstrate the added value of representing lexica on the Semantic Web, in particularly focusing on how the use of linked data principles can allow for the re-use of existing linguistic information from resource such as WordNet. (3) Provide best practices for the use of linguistic data categories in combination with lexica. (4) Demonstrate that the creation of such lexica in combination with the semantics contained in ontologies can improve the performance of NLP tools. (5) Bring together people working on standards for representing linguistic information (syntactic, morphological, semantic and pragmatic) building on existing initiatives, and identifying collaboration tracks for the future. (6) Cater for interoperability among existing models to represent and structure linguistic information. (7) Demonstrate the added value of applications relying on the use of the combination of lexica and ontologies.
Open Cloud Mesh Community Group
This community group is equivalent to the loose "Open Cloud Mesh" collaboration which started at individual vendors such as https://oc.owncloud.com/opencloudmesh.html, then moved to Géant https://wiki.geant.org/display/OCM/Open+Cloud+Mesh and most recently found a home within the CS3 community https://github.com/cs3org/OCM-API
As of september 2023, work on OCM is co-funded by NLnet, CERN, and individual implementers.
By creating this W3C CG we want to make our ongoing work more visible to the wider web standards community.
Open UI Community Group
The group will be researching components and controls across the web and also looking to native paradigms to bring interoperability for design systems, frameworks and the web platform.
OpenActive Community Group
This community group is part of the OpenActive initiative. Our goal is to develop technical specifications and best practices that will support the use of open and shared data relating to sports and physical activities.
Our primary focus is on standardising how to publish data about opportunities to be physically activity, defining best practices and APIs to enable booking of events and facilities, and improving interoperability of data across the sector.
To ensure that our specifications will support a variety of use cases, we welcome contributions from a range of organisations, including existing platforms and new startups.
While our work is technical, you don’t have to be a developer to contribute to our standards group. We are looking for input from product and service managers whose domain knowledge can help us to create better outputs.
OpenTrack Community Group
This group aims to develop an open standard for interchange of data in Athletics (including Track and Field), running and related disciplines. Such a standard should allow the development of better software to manage the sport, resulting in major savings of time for volunteers; more efficient management of events and federations; and more enjoyment for participants and fans.
Permanent Identifier Community Group
The Permanent Identifier Community Group maintains a secure, permanent UL re-direction service for the Web located at w3id.org. Web applications that deal with Linked Data often need to specify and use URLs that are very stable. They utilize services such as the one run by this community to ensure that applications using their URLs will always be re-directed to a working website. The concept operates much like a switchboard, connecting requests for information with the true location of the information on the Web. Entries in the switchboard can be reconfigured to point to a new location if the old location stops working.
The community is responsible for all administrative tasks associated with operating the service. The social contract between organizations involved in the community gives each of them full access to all information required to maintain and operate the website. The agreement is setup such that a number of these organizations could fail, lose interest, or become unresponsive for long periods of time without negatively affecting the operation of the site.
The service operates in HTTPS-only mode to ensure end-to-end security. This means that it may be used for Linked Data applications that require high levels of security such as those found in the financial, medical, and public infrastructure sectors.
All identifiers associated with the service are intended to be around for as long as the Web is around. This means decades, if not centuries. If the final destination for popular identifiers used by this service fail in such a way as to be a major inconvenience or danger to the Web, the community will mirror the information for the popular identifier and setup a working redirect to restore service to the rest of the Web.
You may join this community by getting a W3C account and clicking the join button. If you wish to engage the community in discussion about this service for your Web application, please send an e-mail to the public-perma-id@w3.org mailing list.
This group does not create specifications.
Positive Work Environment Community Group
W3C is a global community where participants choose to work together. In that community, we experience differences in language, location, nationality, and experience. In such a diverse environment, misunderstandings and disagreements happen, and in most cases can be resolved informally. This CG will pick up the work of the PWE Task Force (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/pwe/) focusing on the Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.
Privacy Community Group
The mission of the Privacy Community Group is to develop privacy-focused web standards and APIs to improve user privacy on the web through enhanced browser behavior.
Charter: https://privacycg.github.io/charter.html
- Ecosystem
- Web Advertising
Private Advertising Technology Community Group
The mission of the Private Advertising Technology Community Group is to incubate web features and APIs that support advertising while acting in the interests of users, in particular providing strong privacy assurances.
- Ecosystem
- Web Advertising
Publishing Community Group
Incubation zone for Publishing@W3C. Bring your experiments here.
- Ecosystem
- Publishing
RDF JavaScript Libraries Community Group
The RDF JavaScript Libraries Community Group discusses implementations of libraries for working with RDF and Linked Data in ECMAScript platforms like Web browsers and Node.js
RDF Rust Common Crates Community Group
The mission of the RDF Rust Common Crates Community Group is to develop common crates for working with RDF in Rust. The goal is to improve the interoperability of the RDF ecosystem in Rust.
RDF Stream Processing Community Group
The mission of the RDF Stream Processing Community Group (RSP) is to define a common model for producing, transmitting and continuously querying RDF Streams. This includes extensions to both RDF and SPARQL for representing streaming data, as well as their semantics. Moreover this work envisions an ecosystem of streaming and static RDF data sources whose data can be combined through standard models, languages and protocols. Complementary to related work in the area of databases, this Community Group looks at the dynamic properties of graph-based data, i.e., graphs that are produced over time and which may change their shape and data over time.
RDF Surfaces Community Group
The RDF Surfaces sets out to create a sublanguage of Notation3 in order to implement classical first-order logic with negation in RDF as envisioned by Pat Hayes in his 2009 ISWC Invited Talk: BLOGIC
RDF Test Suite Curation Community Group
The purpose of this group is to provide a home for the test suites and implementation reports of various Semantic Web/Linked Data specifications. After the end of a working group, the test suites often become frozen, and it is difficult to add new tests for issues that come to light later on. Similarly, some specs are implemented on a base technology, which eventually evolves (e.g. SPARQL 1.1 and RDF 1.1), and developers need access to updated tests.
This group will create a home for forks of the various test suites that would be appropriate to act as a redirect for existing tests. Test updates will be considered based on the consensus of those invested in the related specifications. Implementation reports can be updated as new reports are received, giving implementations visibility.
This group will not publish Specifications.
- Ecosystem
- Data and knowledge
RDF-DEV Community Group
RDF-DEV, for developments relating to W3C RDF, including collaboration around applications, schemas, and past/present/future related standards. Successor to SWIG/RDFIG.
Real Estate Community Group
The mission of the Real Estate Community Group is to provide a forum for real estate-related technical discussions to track progress of technology features on the Web within W3C groups, educate on the use of Web technologies by external organizations, and to identify use cases and requirements that existing and/or new specifications need to meet to deliver a more inclusive, robust experiences to the Real Estate ecosystem.
Rights Automation for Market Data Community Group
The aim of the Rights Automation for Market Data Community Group is to develop and publish a market-data profile for ODRL.
Market data is mostly the pricing and trading data for financial instruments (and their associated indices) generated by trading venues. The licenses controlling its use are frequently complex, and tightly segment the underlying data.
We will model these licenses using ODRL and extend the language with a profile that defines the new terms required. This group will publish Specifications.
With a standard, machine-readable way of describing market data licenses, we can look towards automating rights-management along the market data supply chain and drive efficiencies in financial markets.
The group welcomes the involvement of domain experts in licensing (especially market data) and those skilled in modeling licenses (especially using ODRL).
If you are not a group participant you can still subscribe to our list.
RUM Community Group
The mission of the RUM Community Group is to improve and expand the capabilities of developers and businesses who are using Real User Monitoring (RUM) to measure user experience on the web.
We are focused on the measurement of performance, errors, logs, tracing, activity, and any other facet that indicates user experience.
Our deliverables would include: Collaborative research projects (sharing the experimental results and any findings), and generating documents for external consumption (principles, opinions, positions, recommendations to Working Groups and others).
Schema Architypes Community Group
The mission of this group is to discuss and prepare proposal(s) for extending Schema.org schema for the improved representation of digital and physical archives and their contents.
The goal being focused upon the creation and future maintenance of an archive.schema.org extension.
Schema Bib Extend Community Group
The mission of this group is to discuss and prepare proposal(s) for extending Schema.org schemas for the improved representation of bibliographic information markup and sharing. The group will seek consensus around, and support for, proposal(s) to the W3C WebSchemas Group. This Community Group will not, itself, produce technical specifications.
Schema Course extension Community Group
This mission of this group, initiated by LRMI, is to develop an extension for schema.org concerning the discovery of any type of educational course (online/offline, long/short, scheduled/on-demand). Educational course is defined as "some sequence of events and/or creative works which aims to build the knowledge, competence or ability of learners". (Out of scope: information about students and their progression etc; information needed internally for course management rather than discovery).
Schema Extensions for IoT Community Group
This Community Group is for creating extensions to Schema.org for IoT use cases. We have been holding regular community teleconferences since 2017 and now would like to formalize our work and accept contributions from the community.
A W3C CG is the logical next step in our organization, as we already work with other W3C CG, IG, and WG entities.
Our original charter is at: https://github.com/iot-schema-collab/ws-charter/blob/master/iotschema-charter.txt
A revised charter for the CG is at: https://github.com/iot-schema-collab/intro-materials/blob/master/wg-charter.md
Schema.org Community Group
The Schema.org Community Group provides a forum for discussing all changes, additions and extensions to schema.org. In addition to providing a public setting for the day to day operation of the project, it serves as the mechanism for reviewing extensions and as a liaison point for all parties developing independent extensions to the schema.org core.
Schema.org for datasets Community Group
Focussed on improving interoperability between schema.org's DCAT-based approach to dataset description and related approaches e.g. CSVW, VoID, Data Cube, R2RML, SpatialWeb, DCAT-AP and others including liaison to any new W3C work.
Screen Capture Community Group
Background
Screen capture is useful in many contexts, such as when delivering presentations, collaborating with remote colleagues, or producing local recordings. The Web Platform offers APIs to that end, allowing Web applications to capture screens, windows or tabs, and allowing the captured media to be manipulated in various productive ways.
The popularity of these APIs, and the ubiquity of the applications that use them, are a testament to the importance of the work that has been done thus far.
Mission
We believe that there is yet more untapped potential in the realm of screen capture. It is our mission to innovate further and unblock additional novel uses of screen capture, creating new business opportunities for developers and enriching the lives of users.
Scope
As part of this charter, the Screen capture Community Group is focusing its activities on producing new screen capture APIs and extending existing ones. APIs directly involving screen capture are in scope, as are APIs that would typically be used in tandem with screen capture.
Work mode
The group will conduct all of its technical work in public, on GitHub repositories, with a supporting mailing list for logistical and administrative purposes.
Meetings will normally be public and open to anyone to join. Should the need arise, meetings may be restricted to Community Group participants and guests invited by the group chairs. In either case, a public summary or minutes will be made available publicly.
Amendments to this charter
The group chairs can amend the charter.
Second Screen Community Group
The mission of the Second Screen Community Group (CG) is to explore, incubate, and define interfaces that enable new form factors and usages for multi-display and multi-window computing user experiences on the Web.
The scope of work for this Community Group extends beyond the current scope of the Second Screen Working Group (WG). Given wider support and adequate stability, we plan to migrate the proposals generated in this Community Group to an appropriate W3C Working Group for further contributions and formal standardization.
Security Web Application Guidelines Community Group
The mission of this Community Group is to increase the overall security of web application development, thereby making the web a more secure platform for web users. It will accomplish this by writing web developers security best practices and providing a platform for stakeholder collaboration.
This group will not publish Specifications.
Semantic HTML-vocabulary Community Group
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.
SHACL Community Group
The mission of the SHACL Community Group is to continue the development of SHACL-related specifications and to support the further adoption of SHACL after the W3C Data Shapes Working Group has ended. Desirable outcomes include the development of educational material (primers, best practices), the application of SHACL to frequently used RDF vocabularies, libraries of constraint components for common constraint types, improved integration with established technologies such as JavaScript, further work on theory and practice around SHACL rules, a compact SHACL syntax, and a SHACL internet protocol. Additional work may go into delivering "de-facto standard" fixes to some gaps left in the current SHACL specifications (e.g., handling recursion, and addressing more comprehensive syntax checks).
Shape Expressions Community Group
This group serves to promote and expand ShEx – Shape Expressions. ShEx is a grammar for RDF graphs which can be used for description, validation, parsing and transformation.
The Shape Expressions (ShEx) language describes RDF nodes and graph structures. A node constraint describes an RDF node (IRI, blank node or literal) and a shape describes the triples touching nodes in RDF graphs. These descriptions identify predicates and their associated cardinalities and datatypes. ShEx shapes can be used to communicate data structures associated with some process or interface, generate or validate data, or drive user interfaces.
Spec at https://shexspec.github.io/spec/
Silver Community Group
Support the research and prototyping of the next major version of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
This group may publish Specifications.
Solid Community Group
The aims of the Solid project are in line with those of the Web itself: empowerment towards an equitable, informed and interconnected society. Solid adds to existing Web standards to realise a space where individuals can maintain their autonomy, control their data and privacy, and choose applications and services to fulfil their needs.
The mission of the Solid Community Group is to describe the interoperability between different classes of products by using Web communication protocols, global identifiers, authentication and authorization mechanisms, data formats and shapes, notifications, and query interfaces.
To contribute towards a net positive social benefit, we use the Ethical Web Principles to orient ourselves. The consensus on the technical designs are informed by common use cases, implementation experience, and use.
Solid Technical Reports lists Work Items, information on how to Participate, and the Solid of Code of Conduct (in addition to the Positive Work Environment at W3C: Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.)
- Ecosystem
- Data and knowledge
SPARQL-dev Community Group
The SPARQL-dev Community Group is a forum for discussion and refinement of SPARQL. It will document features found as extensions to available triple stores and also document common needs from the user community. The CG aims to create consensus and understanding of the impact of new features with special emphasis on features that leave existing SPARQL queries and systems unchanged. The CG will build a collection of such features leading to a CG report on use cases and requirements.
Spec Editors Community Group
The Spec Editors Community Group aims to be an inclusive space where spec editors, and those wanting to become spec editors, can learn from each other.
The Spec Ed CG focuses on the practice (the art?) of writing technical specifications across the Web ecosystem (W3C, WHATWG, ECMA, IETF, etc.). By looking across the ecosystem, we hope to improve our specification development practices at the W3C.
As part of this CG, we hope to run hands-on virtual tutorial sessions that will cover:
- spec writing: writing algorithms, types of statements.
- tooling: ReSpec and Bikeshed.
- testing: Web Platform Tests.
- How review specs: what to look for, commenting on pull requests.
- leveraging fundamental technologies: WebIDL, Infra standard, HTML, etc.
- Using GitHub effectively for spec development: labels, milestones, managing your community.
- More things! Let us know...
Sport Schema Community Group
The purpose of this group is to propose an expanded vocabulary for describing sporting information within schema.org. The goal is to create a proposal which will build on the existing vocabulary within schema.org updating or adding only where needed. The group should leverage existing work in the area of sport vocabularies, thinking globally with a focus on supporting the 'head' of sports vocabularies while keeping in mind the 'body' and 'tail'.
Sustainability Community Group
The Sustainability CG is a group for discussing all aspects of sustainability (s12y) with respect to web technologies present & future, including developing horizontal reviews of sustainability (e.g. energy use or device obsolescence impacts of technologies).
Sustainable Web Design Community Group
A community group dedicated to creating sustainable websites.
Synchronized Multimedia for Publications Community Group
This community group's goal is to propose a way to synchronize audio or video with Web Publications and other document formats being developed by the Publishing Working Group, in order to make the publications accessible to people with different types of reading requirements. The CG may recommend the best way to integrate an existing technology, or it may provide an outline for developing a new format.
- Ecosystem
- Publishing
Talent Marketplace Signaling Community Group
Much is said about the mismatch between the needs of employers for qualified employee candidates and a pool of available candidates. One major factor contributing to this mismatch is the signaling between the demand-side (i.e., employers) and supply-side (i.e., education, training and credentialing providers, students and workers) of the talent pipeline. This mismatch frequently results in neither party coming into view of the other. The goal of the Talent Marketplace Signaling (TalentSignal) Community Group is to assist Schema.org in improving workforce signaling by refining existing schema.org types serving the talent pipeline and suggesting new types and properties where improved signaling cannot otherwise be achieved. Currently, workforce signaling sits at the intersection of a number of existing schema.org types: Course, JobPosting, Occupation, Organization, Person and the proposed EducationalOccupationalCredential.
The TalentSignal Community Group will focus initially on refinement of the JobPosting Schema and related types as it survey's specifications from domain entities such as HR Open Standards and PESC as well as the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation's Job Data Exchange (JDX) and T3 Innovation Network initiatives for better means to strong, more effective supply- and demand-side signaling.
Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol Community Group
The goal of this Group is to facilitate Text and Data Mining (TDM) Reservation Protocol in Europe and elsewhere, by specifying a simple and practical machine-readable solution, capable of expressing the reservation of TDM rights - following the rules set by the new European DSM Directive / Art.4 - and the availability of machine-readable licenses for TDM actors.
The Tourism Structured Web Data Community Group
The mission of this group is to discuss and prepare proposals, examples, and best practice guidance for the sharing, via the web, structured data descriptions of resources associated with the tourism industry.
Initial focus will be on extending Schema.org schemas for the improved representation of tourism related information markup and sharing. The group will seek consensus around, and support for, proposal(s) to be made to the Schema.org community.
Threat Modeling Community Group
The group's purpose is to provide a meeting point for Security, Privacy, and Human Rights experts, along with technology domain experts, to create Threat Models together.
This group will not publish Specifications.
TREE hypermedia Community Group
The TREE hypermedia community group will discuss materializable hypermedia interfaces. Its goals are to: 1. Further evolve the TREE hypermedia specification (https://w3id.org/tree/specification) and its vocabulary (https://w3id.org/tree/) 2. Create a test suite for spec compliance of both servers and clients 3. Deliver a specification on view definitions for source selection
Unhosted Web Community Group
We propose per-user cross-origin cloud storage, much in the sense described in http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/CloudStorage.html We are a non-profit project and have so far defined a first draft of our standard for this: http://unhosted.org/spec/dav/0.1 We have researched a lot of aspects in the last few months, and are about move to version 0.2 of our standard. People are starting to implement this with significant user base sizes, and other people are starting to develop apps that rely on it, which is now would be a good time to make this into a w3c cg.
Update robots.txt standards Community Group
Robots.txt is currently based on opting out of what you do not want your website to be a part of.
This is hard to maintain (almost a full time job right now) if you do not wish for your websites content to be applied for e.g. training AI, be a part of market research (e.g. price robots), to be a part of non-search engine databases and more.
This proposal is to update what type of instructions robots.txt should support to rather be treated as an opt-in, where you can give instructions based on intent of robots rather than a wildcard or in granular detail.
Example: Agent-group: searchengines
Applies to all robots that seeks to update, process or maintain websites for search engine databases. Does not grant permission to apply scraped data for AI purposes (this should have its own Agent-group).
Also, the absence of instructions should be treated as not having opted in, and for robots working on behalf of AI, there might need to be additional instructions (e.g. max-snippet and if you require a citation if your content is applied to provide an answer).
Voice Interaction Community Group
Existing W3C voice interaction standards such as VoiceXML are based on use cases centered around telephony-based voice systems. The typical interaction style that these standards support is system-initiated directed dialog using grammars to constrain the speech recognizer. In recent years, interaction with voice applications has become much more flexible, with a user-initiated dialog style and significantly fewer constraints on spoken input.
Many of these new applications take the form of "virtual assistants". These include general-purpose assistants (for example, Siri, Cortana, Google Now and Alexa) as well as virtual assistants with specialized domain expertise. The proposed Community Group will collect new use cases for voice interaction, develop requirements for applications such as virtual assistants and explore areas for possible standardization, possibly producing specifications if appropriate. Depending on interest, this exploration could include such topics as (1) discovery of virtual assistants with specific expertise, for example a way to find a virtual assistant that can supply weather information (2) standard formats for statistical language models for speech recognizers (3) standard representations for references to common concepts such as time (4) interoperability for conversational interfaces and (5) work on dialogue management or ‘workflow' languages . New functionality for existing voice standards can also be a topic of discussion. Speech application developers and voice user interface designers should be particularly interested in this group.
W3C Process Community Group
Examine the way W3C works. Propose improvements to the formal processes. These will be given to the Advisory Board, which currently manages that process.
Web Bluetooth Community Group
Bluetooth is a standard for short-range wireless communication between devices. This group is developing a specification for Bluetooth APIs to allow websites to communicate with devices in a secure and privacy-preserving way. In particular the web Bluetooth API focuses on minimizing the device attack surface exposed to malicious websites, possibly by removing access to some existing Bluetooth features that are hard to implement securely. Further, the API takes the approach of a user interface to select and approve access to devices as opposed to using certification and installation.
Most of our activity happens in our GitHub repository, with supporting code in adjacent repositories in the WebBluetoothCG GitHub organization.
Web Components Community Group
This group is for collaboration between people working on web components libraries, tools, documentation and standards.
We will work together on projects of shared interest in order to enhance interoperability, solve common problems, build shared community resources, and ultimately continue to grow a cooperative, productive, and happy web components ecosystem.
Areas we expect to work on include gap analysis, design principles, common protocols, discoverability and quality, documentation, tooling, and more.
Web History Community Group
This group gathers people interested in the history of the World Wide Web: how it was invented, what was out there that made it possible, and what happened in its early years. Our main goal is to collect and preserve valuable information (software, documents, testimonials) before it is lost.
This group will not produce specifications.
Web Machine Learning Community Group
The mission of the Web Machine Learning Community Group (WebML CG) is to make Machine Learning a first-class web citizen by incubating and developing a dedicated low-level Web API for machine learning inference in the browser. Please see the charter for more information.
The group invites browser engine developers, hardware vendors, web application developers, and the broader web community with interest in Machine Learning to participate.
- Ecosystem
- Data and knowledge
Web Media API Community Group
Media web application developers want to deploy their content on a wide and heterogeneous range of devices and platforms, e.g. televisions, set-top boxes, and mobile devices. To ensure a smooth user experience across devices, these user agents need to support a minimum set of Web technologies that developers can rely on being supported. This Community Group plans to specify such a set of Web technologies and additionally plans to provide guidance for developers and implementers e.g. on performance constraints and portability issues.
See the CG charter for more information.
- Ecosystem
- Media & Entertainment
Web Media Text Tracks Community Group
This group will work on text tracks for video on the Web, applied to captioning, subtitling and other purposes. This group plans to work initially on:
1) Documenting a semantic model underlying the caption formats in use, notably TTML, CEA 608/708, EBU STL, and WebVTT.
2) Creating a community specification for WebVTT.
3) Defining the mappings between WebVTT and some selected formats, including at least TTML (W3C/SMPTE), and CEA 608/708.
4) Creating web developer reference and tutorial material, including worked examples.
5) Creating a test suite and/or tools.
A possible transition to REC-track for some of these document(s) is envisaged and that possibility will be used to guide the work and procedures.
The group may produce recommendations for work in other groups, such as CSS, HTML5, and TTWG.
Web NFC Community Group
The Web NFC Community Group will create a Near Field Communication API that is browser-friendly and adheres to the Web's security model. We believe that means the API will not expose full, low level NFC functionality, but rather a higher level subset that is safe for Web pages, protects user privacy, and does not annoy users with unnecessary or complex permission requests. See the Web NFC Community Group Charter and the Web NFC specification for more information.
Web of Things Community Group
The goal of Web of Things Community Group is to accelerate the community activities around the recommendations and notes published by the WoT Working Group and Interest Group.
- Ecosystem
- Web of Things
Web of Things Japanese Community Group
The mission of the Web of Things Japanese Community Group includes the following:
- to facilitate focused discussion in Japanese on the Web of Things specifications and related specifications
- to gather comments and questions in Japanese about those specifications
- to collect information about specific use cases in Japanese for technologies defined in those specifications
- to report the results of its activities as a group back to the Web of Things Working Group/Interest Group, the W3C membership and the Web community.
This group will not publish any specifications.
- Ecosystem
- Web of Things
Web Platform Incubator Community Group
The Web Platform Incubator Community Group (WICG) provides a lightweight venue for proposing and discussing new web platform features. Please see the charter for more information.
Web Thing Protocol Community Group
The mission of this group is to define a common protocol for communicating with connected devices over the web, to enable ad-hoc interoperability on the Web of Things.
Deliverables of the group may include use cases, requirements and specifications.
The group will collaborate with the W3C Web of Things Interest Group and Working Group to ensure any specifications complement or extend the “Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description” specification.
Objectives:
- Define a WebSocket sub-protocol for the Web of Things, using the W3C “Web of Things (WoT) Thing Description” data model and operations
- Define an HTTP protocol binding for the Web of Things (or support the Web of Things Working Group in defining this protocol binding and ensuring consistency with the WebSocket sub-protocol where appropriate)
- Evaluate other potential Web of Things protocol bindings (e.g. CoAP)
See the proposed Community Group Charter for more information.
- Ecosystem
- Web of Things
Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group
The Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group (wintercg) is intended to augment the work of other existing community and working groups focusing on the development of Web Platform features and APIs by focusing directly on the specific needs of non-Web Browser based implementations. Whereas existing community groups such as the Web Incubator Community Group (WICG) and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) are each explicitly scoped to features "that would be implemented in a browser or similar user agent", it will be the goal of the wintercg to focus on implementation of those same features in environments such as backend servers, serverless compute, IoT, command-line tools, and so forth -- essentially, everything that is not a browser.
WebAssembly Community Group
The mission of this group is to promote early-stage cross-browser collaboration on a new, portable, size- and load-time-efficient format suitable for compilation to the web.
WebAuthn Adoption Community Group
This group helps coordinate research and actions to help with broader adoption of the Web Authentication ecosystem.
Group participants will contribute to identifying the obstacles that slow down adoption of WebAuthn - these obstacles may be e.g. technical, business-related, linked to communication or training.
Based on this analysis, the group participants will work together in addressing these challenges.
This group will not produce specifications.
WebDX Community Group
The mission of the Web Developer Experience (WebDX) Community Group is to facilitate coordinated approaches to improve the overall experience of developing for the Web platform when such coordination provides unique opportunities for these improvements. Coordinated work includes research on developer needs to inform improvements in Web platform developers experience, and explorations of Web platform features adoptability. See the group's charter.
WebExtensions Community Group
We will specify a model, permissions, and a common core of APIs for web browser extensions. By specifying the APIs, functionality, and permissions of WebExtensions, we can make it even easier for extension developers to enhance end user experience, while moving them towards APIs that improve performance and prevent abuse.
Charter: https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/blob/main/charter.md
Webtoon Metadata Community Group
The mission of this group is to share use cases, technical challenges, best practices, and possible implementations for the interoperability of webtoon metadata in order to improve the interoperability of webtoon metadata and enable diverse uses of derivative works.
WebView Community Group
The WebViews Community Group aims to identify, understand and reduce the issues arising from the use of software components (typically referred as WebViews) that are used to render Web technology-based content outside of a Web browser (Native Apps, MiniApps, etc). See the proposed charter that scopes its first expected phase of work.
XForms Users Community Group
A group for XForms users to discuss the use of XForms and propose changes and additions to the markup.
XProc Next Community Group
Create a place for gathering requirements from existing and potential users of XProc, research in this area, and for supporting and writing the community-driven effort to define an XProc 3.0 specification (formerly 1.1) .
XQuery and XSLT Extensions Community Group
The group aims to agree extensions to the XSLT 3.0 Recommendation published on 8 June 2017, along with supporting changes to the other specifications (XPath, Functions and Operators) on which it depends.
A preliminary proposal describing requirements for such extensions can be found in Michael Kay's Proposal for XSLT 4.0 published in the Proceedings of XML Prague 2020
It is intended that the group will operate primarily by use of email and forums but may hold a face-to-face meeting to resolve issues prior to final publication of a specification.
The group may publish specifications.
Social Web Incubator Community Group
The Social Web Incubator Community Group (also known as SocialCG, or SWICG) is the successor of the Social Web Working Group, which ran from 2014 to 2017. The SocialCG provides space to collaborate and coordinate for implementors who are building on any of the specifications published by the Social Web WG, and related technologies. It is also a place to incubate new proposals which build on or complement the Social Web WG recommendations.
Discussions and meeting announcements happen on the SocialHub forum or on project-specific version control repositories.
Meetings are not always weekly, but can be requested or convened by any member of the group. If you have a specific item to discuss, please contact a chair if you need help with meeting logistics, and make a post on the SocialHub forum, ideally with two or more weeks notice.