W3C

W3C is pleased to announce that the German Research Center for Artifical Intelligence (DFKI), a long-term W3C Member and the leading German research institute in the field of innovative software technology, is the new W3C Office for Germany and Austria. To celebrate this new relationship, W3C and DFKI invite people to an opening event in Berlin, Germany on 10 February 2011. The event will be a great opportunity for people to learn how European research and various industries can contribute to and benefit from W3C's open Web platform. Participation is free, but registration is required. The event follows a W3C Web and TV Workshop. W3C Offices promote adoption of W3C work among developers, application builders, and standards setters, and encourage inclusion of stakeholder organizations in the creation of future recommendations by joining W3C. Learn about the W3C Offices Program.

The XML Query Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of the XQuery Update Facility 1.0; this defines extensions to XQuery to support changing documents in place in an efficient and declarative manner. Comments are welcome through 22 February. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

The XSL Working Group and the XML Query Working Group have jointly published a Proposed Recommendation of the XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0 facility. This extends the XPath and XQuery languages to give support for full-text searches against XML Documents or other data model instances. Comments are welcome through 22 February. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.

The Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published a Last Call draft of Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces. This document describes a loosely coupled architecture for multimodal user interfaces, which allows for co-resident and distributed implementations, and focuses on the role of markup and scripting, and the use of well defined interfaces between its constituents.The Last Call period ends on 15 February 2011. Learn more about the Multimodal Interaction Activity.

W3C today launches the RDF Working Group, whose mission is to update the cornerstone standard for the Semantic Web: the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The scope of work is to extend RDF to include some of the features that the community has identified as both desirable and important for interoperability based on experience with the 2004 version of the standard, but without having a negative effect on existing deployment. Some of the anticipated features include JSON and Turtle serializations, and a standard model and semantics for multiple graphs and graphs stores. Learn more about the Semantic Web.

The Efficient XML Interchange Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0. EXI is a very compact, high performance XML representation that was designed to work well for a broad range of applications. It simultaneously improves performance and significantly reduces bandwidth requirements without compromising efficient use of other resources such as battery life, code size, processing power, and memory. Comments are welcome through 17 February. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.