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Linked Open Data (LOD) Camp - The year open data went worldwide , by Tim Berners-Lee - Open data deployments in electronic Government , by Sandro Hawke - Linked data: What about privacy? , by Thomas Roessler - Linked Open Data: What about Applications? , by Ivan Herman - Selection of Topics of Discussion for the afternoon sessions Afternoon lightning talks subjects: Linked Open Drug Data eGov opportunities Health Care/Life Sciences opportunities Financial and Business Data Crawling the LOD with ldspider Wiki

The W3C has today announced Service Modeling Language 1.1 and SML Interchange Format 1.1 (SML-IF) , two XMl-based standards: SML, SML-IF Enable Validation of Sets of XML Documents To illustrate what SML adds to the XML ecosystem, consider what happens when someone purchases an airline ticket. Suppose the reservation information is stored as an XML document that includes passenger information. The reservation also refers to a second XML document that stores departure time and other information about the flight. One department manages customer information, another manages flight information. Before any transaction with the customer, the airline wants to ensure that the system as a whole is valid. SML allows the airline to verify that certain constraints are satisfied across the reservation and flight data. This makes it easier to manage inconsistencies, and to do so without writing custom code. As a result, the airline lowers the cost of managing tasks such as informing passengers when...

Bill St.Arnaud made the simple point today (in addition to a number of other interesting and important points) at the ISACC (ICT Standards Advisory Council of Canada) meeting with respect to ICT and global change (which generalizes to all other industries and activities): Energy isn't the issue: carbon is the issue. If you have an energy expensive process, but all the energy comes from wind, solar, hydro (carbon neutral), that is OK. And energy efficiency doesn't really get you anywhere. I will be speaking this afternoon with the talk: " World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Standards for Industry and Governments ". Bill St Arnaud's blog .

This report - from January 2008 - examines 10 "open" standard s organizations and evaluates how "open" they are. It uses a methodology that maps directly into Krechmer's open standards requirements. The organizations reviewed are: CEN (European Committee for Standardization) Ecma (European association for standardizing information and communication systems ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) ISO (International Organization for Standardization) ITU (International Telecommunication Union) NIST (National Institute of Technology and Standards) OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) OMG (Object Management Group) W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Evaluation of Ten Standard Setting Orgizanizations with Regard to Open Standards Abstract: On 2 June 2006, the Danish parliament (the Folketing) unanimously adopted Parliamentary Resolution B103 on the use of open standard...

February 10 2008 marks the 10th anniversary of the release of XML 1.0 by the W3C (although some celebrate Nov 14 1996, the release date of the working draft while others celebrate the anniversary, August 1996, of the conference at which it was first discussed: hey, it's the Web: let a thousand flowers bloom!). XML has had an incredibly wide and deep impact across industry, science, technology: it is ubiquitous. As a technology it has disrupted the database community and industry, the publishing community and others. Many data standards groups in the sciences and in industry -- which previously spent their time developing byzantine formats for their particular information needs -- now spend their efforts on developing XML-based byzantine formats for their particular information needs. There are few science, arts, social science or humanities disciplines and industry sectors that do not have one or more Foo ML- specialized XML dialects for their needs, such as: Chemical Markup...

The W3C has published an early draft of the new HTML5 ( press release ). I have mixed feelings about this, but it is clear that to many that this is needed. There are still some major issues identified in the document in red. Hopefully HTML can move forward although some of the issues look like they may be hard to resolve. Browser wars again?? I hope not... Also released today: HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 digg story

I am at WWW2007 only for today (Thursday) after attending the W3C meeting on Sunday -- Tuesday. I must say that I regret not registering for the rest of the WWW2007 conference, as it has moved to what I believe to be a more relevant, robust venue for web research and activities. This morning I attended the panel session " Building a Semantic Web in Which Our Data Can Participate " session, moderated by Paul Miller of Talis, with panelists Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap) Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge) Rob Styles (Talis) Jamie Taylor (Metaweb) It was a very good panel, although the discussion revolved more around getting access to data as opposed the the Semantic Web aspect.

W3C AC Meeting I've made my way to Banff, Alberta for the May 2007 W3C advisory committee (AC) meeting (I am the NRC's W3C AC rep). I will be reporting on various aspects of the meeting.