The future of Web standards

Ivan Herman and Michael Smith (W3C)

CSIRO ICT

DATE: 2009-05-15
TIME: 10:00:00 - 12:30:00
LOCATION: S206 CSIRO Seminar Room Bld 108
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ABSTRACT:
The presentation gives an overview of the current state of Semantic Web and concentrates on the latest developments in the field, as well as on some of the challenges that still remain.

Among the goals of the HTML5 effort are to promote development of common, interoperable HTML parsing libraries and conformance-checking tools. This talk presents details about the validator.nu project, which is an effort to produce both an interoperable HTML5 parsing library and a state-of-the art validator to test conformance of HTML document instances against the constraints given in the HTML5 specification.
BIO:
Herman: I graduated as mathematician at the Eotvos Lorand University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Universite Paris VI I joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where I worked for 6 years. I left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry in Munich, Germany, I joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where I have a tenure position since 1988. I received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. I joined the W3C Team as Head of W3C Offices in January 2001 while maintaining my position atCWI. I served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when I was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position, which is now my principal work at W3C.

Before joining W3C I worked in quite different areas (distributed and dataflow programming, language design, system programming), but I spend most of my research years in computer graphics and information visualization. I also participated in various graphics related ISO standardization activities and software developments.

I was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, May 2000; since then, I have also been member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series. Since autumn 2007 I am also member of SWSA (Semantic Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic Web Conferences series.

Smith: Smith joined the W3C in 2007 as part the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. He's now involved with work on standards closely related to browsing technologies; in particular, the phenomenon known as HTML5, as well as other standards related to APIs for Web applications. He's been based in Tokyo since 2001. Prior to joining the W3C, he worked for Opera Software, and prior to that, for Openwave Systems -- most of that time involved with design, development, testing, and deployment of software for mobile operators.