W3C Technology and Society

Technology & Society Domain

Mission | Activities | Historical

Nearby: People of the T & S Domain.

Mission

Working at the intersection of Web technology and public policy, the Technology and Society Domain's goal is to augment existing Web infrastructure with building blocks that assist in addressing critical public policy issues affecting the Web. Our expectation is not to solve policy problems entirely with technology, but we do believe that well-designed technical tools can lead to policy approaches that are more consistent with the way the Web should operate. The Semantic Web is an important component in this endeavor, as it provides the means for various entities to instrument their interactions through formal specifications of vocabularies describing relevant policies, rules and resources. Semantic Web technologies will enable our machines to assist users in exercising more control over their online environment and interactions.

Activities

eGovernment Activity

From the introduction of the eGovernment Activity Statement:

eGovernment refers to the use of the Web or other information technologies by governing bodies to interact with their citizenry, between departments and divisions, and between governments themselves.

The eGovernment Interest Group is chartered to explore how to improve access to government through better use of the Web and achieve better government transparency using open Web standards at any government level (local, state, national and multi-national).

Read more on the eGovernment Activity home page.

José Manuel Alonso is the Activity Lead.

The Activity includes this group:

Patent Policy Activity

From the introduction of the Patent Policy Activity Statement:

The Patent Policy Activity's goal is to enable W3C to implement and successfully operate the W3C Patent Policy. The policy was put into place in February 2004, and the work of developing and implementing it is complete. It is important that the W3C community have an organized way to monitor application of the policy as well as remain informed about relevant developments in the legal and standards environment.

Read more on the Patent Policy Activity home page.

Daniel J. Weitzner is the Activity Lead.

The Activity includes this group:

Privacy Activity

From the introduction of the Privacy Activity Statement:

For the past 9 years, the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) was the very center of the W3C Privacy Activity. The P3P Specification Working Group has now completed its work on P3P 1.1 by delivering a Last Call Working Draft. Following the change in the privacy landscape following the 9/11 events, the group found there is insufficient momentum for implementations at this point in time. Although the group believes that P3P 1.1 is ready for implementation, it decided not to enter Candidate Recommendation, published the current specification as a Working Group Note, and have thus completed their last deliverable. The P3P Specification Working Group was closed on 21 November 2006.

The P3P Specification Working Group delivered multiple important milestones for the Web. The most important documents are listed here:

It is important to note that the P3P Specification Working Group always looked further ahead. This is demonstrated by the three Workshops organized after the P3P 1.0 Recommendation:

From the workshops one can already flair the evolution. P3P was developed in a context of the Web facing a human end-user using the Web to browse information. Nowadays, the world has become more complicated. Information offers and services facing the user are often assembled ad-hoc in the backend using web services of different providers in a social network made of contracts and now being mirrored into our ICT network infrastructure. In the early P3P days, companies wrestled with the policy to show to their consumers. They looked at their current practices and things where changed and streamlined to accommodate the privacy challenge inside enterprises.

In order to be able to handle the increased complexity inherent to the management of privacy inside enterprises, those challenges where discussed and proposals where made. Enterprises are confronted with a wide range of privacy expectations from promises (policies) they made to the user, from regulators and competitors. In order to respond to all those challenges, enterprises adapted their IT infrastructure to also handle privacy. As long as this remains within one company, this is not an issue. But our economy is based on massive exchange and use of personal data. This means the internal handling of privacy metadata has to be interoperable if it comes to a data transfer over enterprise borders.

Read more on the Privacy Activity home page.

Rigo Wenning is the Activity Lead.

The Activity includes this group:

Security Activity

From the introduction of the Security Activity Statement:

The work of the Security Activity follows two main directions. The Web Security Context Working Group focuses on the challenges that arise when users encounter currently deployed security technology, such as TLS: While this technology achieves its goals on a technical level, attackers' strategies shift towards bypassing the security technology instead of breaking it. When users do not understand the security context in which they operate, then it becomes easy to deceive and defraud them. The second direction of the work concerns XML security technologies, first in the XML Security Specifications Maintenance WG, now in the more broadly scoped XML Security WG".

The Web Security Context Working Group follows up on the W3C Workshop on Transparency and Usability of Web Authentication (Workshop report), held in New York City on 15 and 16 March 2006. The Group is currently working through Last Call comments on Web Security Context: User Interface Guidelines.

The XML Security Specifications Maintenance Working Group concluded its work by performing interoperability testing, assisting the XML Core Working Group in moving Canonical XML 1.1 to Recommendation, and successfully publishing XML Signature 2nd Edition. Most participants transitioned into the new XML Security WG, which is taking up the results from the 2007 Workshop on Next Steps with XML Signature and Encryption.

Read more on the Security Activity home page.

Thomas Roessler is the Activity Lead.

The Activity includes these groups:

Semantic Web Activity

From the introduction of the Semantic Web Activity Statement:

The goal of the Semantic Web initiative is as broad as that of the Web: to create a universal medium for the exchange of data. It is envisaged to smoothly interconnect personal information management, enterprise application integration, and the global sharing of commercial, scientific and cultural data. Facilities to put machine-understandable data on the Web are quickly becoming a high priority for many organizations, individuals and communities.

The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web Activity is an initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) designed to provide a leadership role in defining this Web. The Activity develops open specifications for those technologies that are ready for large scale deployment, and identifies, through open source advanced development, the infrastructure components that will be necessary to scale in the Web in the future.

The principal technologies of the Semantic Web fit into a set of layered specifications. The current components are the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Core Model, the RDF Schema language and the Web Ontology language (OWL). Building on these core components is a standardized query language, SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle"), for RDF enabling the 'joining' of decentralized collections of RDF data. The GRDDL Recommendation and the work on RDFa aims at creating bridges between the RDF model and various XML formats, like XHTML. The POWDER Working group develops technologies to find resource descriptions for specific resources on the Web; descriptions which can be ‘joined’ to other RDF data. Finally, SKOS is a model and an RDF vocabulary for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, 'folksonomies', other types of controlled vocabulary, and also concept schemes embedded in glossaries and terminologies.

Read more on the Semantic Web Activity home page.

Ivan Herman is the Activity Lead.

The Activity includes these groups:

Web Services Activity

From the introduction of the Web Services Activity Statement:

Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. Web services are characterized by their great interoperability and extensibility, as well as their machine-processable descriptions thanks to the use of XML. They can be combined in a loosely coupled way in order to achieve complex operations. Programs providing simple services can interact with each other in order to deliver sophisticated added-value services.

The W3C Web Services Activity is designing the infrastructure, defining the architecture and creating the core technologies for Web services. The SOAP 1.2 XML-based messaging framework became a W3C Recommendation in June 2003 and the SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) in January 2005.

Here is a comprehensive list of Recommendations pertaining to the W3C Web Services Activity:

XML Protocol Working Group:
SOAP Version 1.2 Part 0: Primer (Second Edition)
SOAP Version 1.2 Part 1: Messaging Framework (Second Edition)
SOAP Version 1.2 Part 2: Adjuncts (Second Edition)
SOAP Version 1.2 Specification Assertions and Test Collection (Second Edition)
XML-binary Optimized Packaging
SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism
Resource Representation SOAP Header Block
Web Services Description Working Group:
Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 0: Primer
Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 1: Core Language
Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 2: Adjuncts
Web Services Addressing Working Group:
Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Core
Web Services Addressing 1.0 - SOAP Binding
Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Metadata
Semantic Annotations for WSDL Working Group:
Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema
Web Services Policy Working Group:
Web Services Policy 1.5 - Framework
Web Services Policy 1.5 - Attachment

Read more on the Web Services Activity home page.

Yves Lafon is the Activity Lead.

The Activity includes these groups:

Historical News Items

1999 Overview of T&S Activities, an earlier version of this page.

Ralph Swick, Technology and Society Domain Lead

Last modified by $Author: ijacobs $ on $Date: 2007/06/26 03:28:02 $

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