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Open for Business 07.12.2005: yourname.eu

e-Business Interoperability and Standards

W3C announces the advancement of the Web Services Choreography Description Language Version 1.0 (WS-CDL) to Candidate Recommendation. This XML-based language describes peer-to-peer collaborations between Web service participants by defining their behavior from a global viewpoint. Ordered message exchanges thus accomplish a common business goal. Comments are welcome through 31 March.

© W3C: Nickolas Kavantzas, David Burdett, Gregory Ritzinger, Tony Fletcher, Yves Lafon, Charlton Barreto

W3C announces the launch of the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group. "After years of industry and research work in rules languages, I'm pleased to see W3C Members working to develop a web-based rules standard," said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. Chaired by Christian de Sainte Marie (ILOG) and Sandro Hawke (temporary co-Chair, W3C), the group is chartered through November 2007 to produce a language for the exchange of rules and their transfer between rule systems. Rules are executable pieces of declarative knowledge, important in managing complex and dynamic operations.

© W3C: Christian de Sainte Marie, Sandro Hawke

The Web Services Description Working Group has released the First Public Working Draft of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0: RDF Mapping. The draft describes the WSDL 2.0 components in the Resource Description Language (RDF) and in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) so that all WSDL 2 documents can be merged with other Semantic Web data.

© W3C: Jacek Kopecký, Bijan Parsia

The Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group released updated Working Drafts of the SKOS Core Guide and SKOS Core Vocabulary Specification. The drafts explain how to express classification schemes, thesauruses, subject heading lists, taxonomies, terminologies, glossaries and other types of controlled vocabulary in RDF. Previous SKOS work was supported by the European project SWAD-Europe.

© W3C: Alistair Miles, Dan Brickley

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of Scope of Mobile Web Best Practices. This document outlines deliverables such as guidelines for content delivery and display on mobile and small-screen devices, and identifies the goal of one Web. Read about the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, a joint effort by authoring tool vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and mobile operators.

© W3C: Phil Archer, Ed Mitukiewicz

W3C announces eight Candidate Recommendations for XSLT, XML Query and XPath. Comments are welcome through 28 February. XSLT transforms documents into different markup or formats. Important for databases, search engines and object repositories, XML Query can perform searches, queries and joins over collections of documents. Both XSLT 2 and XQuery use XPath expressions and operate on XPath Data Model instances.

© W3C: Janet Daly, Marie-Claire Forgue, Yasuyuki Hirakawa

W3C launches the W3C Supporters Program. W3C welcomes payments and goods such as hardware and software to support W3C's operations. Premier, Major, and Contributing Supporters are acknowledged on the W3C web site, and may use logos on their own sites as emblems of their support for W3C.

© W3C: Ian Jacobs

W3C holds the Workshop on Internationalizing the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) on 2-3 November hosted by IBM at the IBM China Research Lab in Beijing, China. Attendees will discuss ways to improve rendering of non-English natural languages using the SSML W3C Recommendation which generates synthetic speech and controls pronunciation, volume, pitch and rate.

© W3C: Jim Larson, Kazauyuki Ashimura, Max Froumentin

The Internationalization Core Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Normalization to improve text manipulation on the web. Based on the character model Fundamentals W3C Recommendation, the draft provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for text normalization and string identity matching.

© W3C: François Yergeau, Martin J. Dürst, Richard Ishida, Addison Phillips, Misha Wolf, Tex Texin

W3C announces the launch of the XML Processing Model Working Group. Chartered through October 2007 and chaired by Norman Walsh (Sun Microsystems), the group will create a language for users to specify the order in which technologies process XML documents. The XML Pipeline Language and Pipeline Member Submissions and the XML Processing Model Workshop serve as input for this work. Participation is open to W3C Members.

© W3C: Norman Walsh, Henry Thompson, Michael Sperberg-McQueen